The portrait on the photo from 1912 shows a serious looking young man with a mustache. In fact, Hans Baluschek (1870-1935) was in the midst of the German upheavals and radical changes: Railroad fever and rapid economic upswing from the middle of the 19th century, 1870/71 Reich founding euphoria, 1873 Gründerkrach and subsequent economic crisis, layoffs, social tensions, the railroad industry in distress. Baluschek's father, a railroad engineer, struggles to make ends meet for the family. Hans Baluschek becomes an artist and painter and studies at the Royal Academy of Arts. His gaze remained fixed on the gray everyday life of Berlin: Gray air, gray walls, gray people. His paintings socially critical.

Art is in the midst of the German fractures and upheavals: The Great Berlin Art Exhibition was an institution in Germany at the end of the 19th century, figuratively but also literally an imperial institution. Things had been simmering for some time between the "official" artists' association by Wilhelm's grace and a number of up-and-coming young artists, including Max Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz. Then the Edvard Munch exhibition was closed because the public and established artists felt provoked by Munch's pictures. The young artists then founded their own association, the "Berliner Secession," the Berlin spin-off. The association became a magnet for artists such as Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Wassily Kandinsky - and Hans Baluschek. He became involved in the artistic community, was on the board of the Berlin Secession for a number of years, and later became the director of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition - the same yet very different official institution that had been considered reactionary in the 1890s and which the Secession opposed. Now, 1929 to 1933, a different time: Wilhelm II and with him an entire epoch had abdicated. Weimar Republic, democracy.

Hans Baluschek did not find this upheaval easy. He was a supporter of the monarchy and German patriot and volunteered for the army in the First World War. Baluschek's paintings are Berlin realism, austere like Grosz and Beckmann and Kollwitz and Dix. Baluschek painted mainly in Berlin's petty bourgeois and working-class milieu. His people often walk sullenly and coarsely through the mostly gloomy picture. His style has something of the New Objectivity, Impressionism, Naive painting. He portrays prostitutes and with them the garish, the attractive, the repulsive and at the same time the social context behind it. Drinking coffee in the park is not a merry circle: "I was never so free that I could later muster any humor other than "bitter"," he wrote himself. The old ladies sitting together there, their mouths pressed together, seem anything but cheerful company, their implied smiles nothing but forced, their expressions bitter and resentful of life. Baluschek's illustrations are quite different, "Peterchens Mondfahrt" with its pictures of Peterchen, Anneliese and Herr Sumsemann accompany childhood generations. Hans Baluschek became a successful artist in the Weimar Republic, politically and committed to his own association. From 1933 he was considered a "Marxist artist" and his works degenerate. In 1935 he died, in hospital.