Rising like a sandstone needle above a sea of steeply-pitched Alsatian rooftops, the single completed spire of Strasbourg's Notre-Dame Cathedral dominates this sweeping aerial-perspective view printed in the bilingual caption style — "Strassburg / Totalansicht — Vue générale" — that betrays the card's origin during the decades of German Imperial rule over Alsace, when publishers hedged their linguistic bets for a mixed French-and-German tourist market; the dramatic vignette treatment, fading the image into the cream card stock at the edges, is characteristic of Fischer's Kunstverlag (art publishing house) of Strassburg, a firm active in the first decade of the twentieth century. The undivided back, printed simply "POSTKARTE — Carte postale," confirms a pre-1905 production date.