Resurrected Young Man, 1920

About the Work

Is he afraid of the courage of his own convictions? With one leg already freed from the fetters, the young man stretches his slender body upwards - and at the same time denies the movement with the timid way in which he has placed his arms protectively around his head. With the expressive body language of her 'Resurrecting Youth', who recalls representations of Christ bearing the Cross and of the Last Judgement, Milly Steger captures the ambivalence of the mood between fear and hope that prevailed shortly after the First World War. Steger, who took over the studio of Georg Kolbe in Berlin in 1917, saw her artistic motivation in the "penetration of the spheres of the soul".