Kirchner arrived in Davos for the second time on May 8, 1917 to, as he wrote to his friend, the architect and designer Henry van de Velde, "complete my cure". During the summer, Kirchner lived with a nurse in the "Rüesch Hut" on the Stafelalp above Frauenkirch. Although he suffered from paralysis and was unable to write his own letters, he created landscapes and portraits of his new living environment that were characterized by an unbroken, elemental spirit of survival. And yet, Kirchner still had nightmarish fears and could not find peace. After a visit to the Stafelalp, Henry van de Velde persuaded Kirchner to confide in the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger. From mid-September 1917, Kirchner spent ten months at the Bellevue Sanatorium in Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance. Impressed by the nature that he saw right before his eyes, Kirchner depicted the steep alpine meadows with the "Alphütten", his view gliding across the gently rolling meadows interspersed with coarse rocks and weather-beaten wooden huts, sketching the narrow paths along the slope up to the nearby mountain plateau with more huts, giving contour to the forests and pastures. And Kirchner marked the mountain backdrop "Altein" on the other side of the valley with the omnipresent, striking Tinzenhorn, a mountain that towers over Kirchner's landscapes like a landmark. One can sense Kirchner's struggle to convey his fascination for the new mountain world in the woodcut, to 'reinvent' nature in detail. For Kirchner, the mountain dwellers he photographed became friends, whose habitat he commemorated in his early Davos landscapes. Kirchner also photographed the Stafelalp in the view from his summer hut and adopted the motifs for his view of the mountain village, as is the case with this large woodcut from 1917. Kirchner increasingly developed his Davos style and distanced himself from the original "metropolitan expressionism" of the Dresden and Berlin. [MvL]