Art: Conrad Felixmüller’s “Kind und Eisenbahn”: A Smokestack Serenade to Lost Innocence

Here we are, squinting at Kind und Eisenbahn, a grimly whimsical etching by Conrad Felixmüller, in which a puff-cheeked, wide-eyed child points dramatically at a chugging locomotive like it’s the Second Coming of the Industrial Revolution. With hands akimbo and eyebrows arched higher than a Berlin cabaret act, this miniature protagonist looks less like a child and more like an old soul who’s seen too many factory shifts and not enough playgrounds. Behind him? A world spewing soot, built of bricks and boredom, where smokestacks replace trees and trains eat up the horizon. It’s not just an image—it’s a question: what happens to childhood when the world grows up too fast and forgets to take you with it?

Felixmüller, bless his tortured soul, was the kind of artist who painted with one eye on the people and the other on the barricades. Born in 1897, he survived World War I, the Spanish Flu, and German politics—three things that will suck the optimism out of anyone. He was a committed socialist who never quite recovered from the way the world kept disappointing him. His early work was explosively Expressionist—lines as jagged as his ideals—but by the 1920s, he’d mellowed into New Objectivity, a style that said, “Fine, I’ll paint your sad, gray world, but I won’t pretend to like it.” He often etched working-class struggle into copper plates with more sincerity than any political pamphlet could muster.

Kind und Eisenbahn sits right in the middle of this moral seesaw. It’s both charming and chilling. The child is adorable until you realize he’s basically an existential traffic cop, pointing at industrial progress with all the enthusiasm of someone who’s just been told recess has been replaced with coal-shoveling. The train, a symbol of modernity’s momentum, doesn’t care. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t even slow down. The background buildings could be schools or prisons—Felixmüller leaves that part deliciously vague. And the smoke? Oh, it billows like the dreams of an empire that promised better and delivered bureaucracy.

This was Weimar Germany: an era that danced on the edge of collapse in a glittering pair of socialist boots. Felixmüller was knee-deep in it, depicting the disorientation of people trapped between two wars, two worlds, and a hundred broken ideologies. Kind und Eisenbahn is not just an etching. It’s a eulogy for the kind of innocence that gets run over when history forgets to install a crossing guard. It’s the visual equivalent of a Marxist bedtime story—with a bit of Freud tossed in for nightmares.

So, ask yourself: when the train of progress rolls by, are you the child pointing, the adult ignoring, or the smoke cloud billowing into oblivion?

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