After the war, he was a founder of the short-lived avant-garde Dresdner Sezession art group, and then supported the post-expressionist New Objectivity movement.

Before this triptych, he completed his large anti-war painting The Trench in 1923, which caused great controversy when first exhibited, and he published a portfolio of fifty prints also entitled Der Krieg in 1924.

The central panel shows a devastated urban landscape scattered with war paraphernalia and body parts, reworking the themes in his 1923 work The Trench, and divided like the 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grünewald with a living side to the lower left and a dead side to the upper right.

A dominant greyish figure, helping a wounded comrade, is a self-portrait of Dix, in a composition similar to a descent from the cross or a pietà.

The painting uses a restricted palette of mainly dark colours, with cold greens, greys, and whites for death and decay, and warm reds and oranges for blood, destruction and shellfire.