In Caspar David Friedrich’s painting „The Arctic Sea“, the viewer stands on the edge of a land once covered with vegetation. His path leads out into the solidified, in which the ice-hard opinions, attitudes and world views burst out of the ice-cold and lifeless ground like lonely ice towers, like fortresses made of bulletproof glass, and destroy all life that was too close to them.
The path of the observer leads him through a hostile wasteland of cold inhumanity. No warm heart can beat there for long. The ice there is eternal. He will perish in it and also end up as a frozen ice sculpture in which no human spark can be found. He has no choice. He will become a victim of his environment. Even turn into a rigid fortress.