It was as if the maar was waiting for him. He stood on the eroded shore, looking at the barely perceptible ripples on the water's surface, whose swirling funnels reflected not the blue of the sky, but a distant violet that seemed to come from the depths of the lake. The wind created fine waves that flowed westward, as if the water were moving in that direction. A dark shape made of branches spun in one of the whirlpools, surfacing and submerging again. Far out, washerwomen leaned over the edge of a barge, pulling sheets through the water. Laughing, they lifted the pieces out, wrung them into sausages, and tossed them into a basket. When the painter Pitt Kreuzberg settled in the Eifel in 1913, he found no idyll. The area is backward and poor, the inhabitants are inaccessible and foreign. But he discovers a primal landscape that embodies the essence of the world.