Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling were, as members of the November Group, interested in a new understanding of art and a socially integrated role for the artist. After the experiences of the First World War, they, like many other artists of their time, were looking for a new regularity and absolute values in art. In two manifesto-like essays on the Art of Movement that were published at the start of the 1920s, one by Eggeling and one by Richter, the concept of a universal language appears in connection with a culture seen as the sum of all creative powers. In analogy to music, an abstract, new, universally comprehensible language was to be developed, based on the principle of counterpoint. This universal alphabet was expressed in many different ways in films, sketches and scroll paintings (Rollenbilder).