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Writing in retrospect about his triptych The Thousand Year Reich, Dresden artist Hans Grundig noted.

“As far as possible with my abilities as an artist, I portrayed this terrible period of unspeakable barbarism.”

Grundig was an active and convicted communist. He painted this work secretly in his studio in the 1930s during the years of the Nazi regime. To prevent the massive panels from being discovered if his studio was searched, he fixed them on the ceiling with their painted sides hidden. For his triptych, Grundig developed imaginative, fantasy scenes in the tradition of an artist such as Hieronymus Bosch. He first painted the left-hand panel Carnival in 1935, describing it as:

“A parade in a vast city which, with the blood-red sky above, seems to be on fire. People and masks have gone crazy, marching through the streets, deluding themselves and others. Solely in the left-hand corner, the communists are still standing, unwavering and steadfast.”

In 1936, Hans Grundig painted the central panel Vision. It shows a burning city of ruins and bomb craters, as if he could foresee Dresden’s destruction in a devastating bombing raid.

Two years later, in 1938, he finished the third panel, Chaos. On the left, the rearing horses symbolise the victims of the Nazi regime. The pack of wolves in fiery red and poisonous yellow represent the Nazis. They are baying at the yellow pig on a pedestal. On the far right, the artist’s wife, the graphic artist Lea Grundig, turns away from the events to look out of the picture. She is also shown below in the predella scene, asleep and surrounded by doves of peace.

Under the Nazi regime, Hans Grundig was arrested numerous times for his communist beliefs, and spend some years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His wife Lea Grundig, from a Jewish background and also a communist, fled to Palestine in 1939. The couple were only reunited in Dresden in 1949.