Heinrich Zille became best known for his (often funny) drawings, catching the characteristics of people, especially "stereotypes", mainly from Berlin and many of them published in the German weekly satirical newspaper Simplicissimus.
He was the first to portray the desperate social environment of the Berlin Mietskasernen (literally tenement barracks), buildings packed with sometimes a dozen persons per room that fled from land to the rising Gründerzeit industrial metropolis only to find even deeper poverty in the developing proletarian class.