Few artists observed the everyday life of Berlin with greater tenderness and precision than Heinrich Zille. He turned away from imperial grandeur towards the city's courtyards, workers' districts and tenement houses, where the rhythms of ordinary existence unfolded into the forms beyond the attention of official culture.

The Berlin dialect word Milljöh ("Milieu") hints at the figure shaping his art. Children playing in cramped courtyards, laundresses, workers, prostitutes, widows and old men all enter his visual world without sentimentality or moral judgement.

A countless anonymous figures through whom urban life acquires its texture.