In her 77th year, Kathe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945) stated in her diary that it was her deepest desire to no longer live. She believed that she was old enough to have the right to complete rest. One of her friends claimed that she had a dialogue with death for most of her life.
Woman With A Dead Child, 1903, etching dry point
She was the fifth child of seven. She was a shy and anxious child and the deaths of three of her siblings, one prior to Käthe's own birth, exposed her at an early age to the quiet, eternal suffering of parental grief. Her mother’s stoicism, her concealed "deep sorrow" and emotional strength in the face of such loss had a powerful effect on Kathe and she would later incorporate these childhood observations into her own aesthetic depictions of mourning.
Unemployment, 1909 etching and aquatint
In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz who was trained as a doctor with a social conscience, they moved into their home in a disadvantaged area of Berlin where they were to remain for the next 50 years. Kathe’s work has to be seen against the rapid industrialization that occurred in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and the toll it was taking on the working class. In 50 years Berlin’s population had swelled from 400,000 to 2 million. The city had trouble coping and for many poverty became a way of life in a city containing slum tenements, housing thousands of textile workers who had flooded into the city in search of work.
The quiet, hard working life they led was undoubtedly good for her art. Early in her career she was influenced by the 1892 play The Weavers by Gerhart Hauptmann, which portrayed a group of Salesian weavers who staged an uprising in the 1840’s over concerns about the industrial revolution.
Kathe began a series of prints based on the weavers. Shortly after, her etchings won a gold medal at an academy show, but Kaiser Wilhelm II vetoed the award, describing her work as “gutter art” and a sin against the German people. State approved art featured images of German power, but her career was established. Another influence was the peasant’s war of the early 16th century. She claimed that all her work was the distillation of her life and she acknowledges that she is a socialist artist. This was due to the influences of her brother, father and literature of the period, but the real motive for choosing as a subject for her art the life of the workers “was that such subjects gave me in a simple and unqualified way what I considered to be beautiful.”
The Volunteers, 1923 woodcut
She got involved with the difficulties and challenges of proletarian life due to the women who came to her husband for help, unsolved problems of prostitution and unemployment grieved her and she determined to “keep on” with her studies of the working class.
She lost her youngest son Peter in World War 1, “everywhere beneath the surface are tears and bleeding wounds and yet the war goes on and follows other laws”. In her youth she wanted to mount the barricades of revolution, but in the wake of WW1 she wrote “I am and sick and tired of all the hatred in the world, I long for a socialism that lets men live free from murdering, from lying, from destroying and disfiguring, from all the devil’s work that the world has seen enough of.”
The Mothers, 1923 woodcut
During the years 1912 to 1920, Kollwitz produced very little finished work, labouring under depression she made many etchings but none were completed. Having “come to a clear sense of her own past” she began to investigate the possibilities of sculpture and finally gave etching up.
Then she wanted to explore the possibilities of line work so she switched to woodcuts. “It’s like a photographic plate that lies in the developer, the picture gradually becomes recognisable and emerges more and more from the mist. Simplicity in feeling but expressing the totality of grief”, the war was still impacting on her art.
Memorial For Karl Liebknecht, 1919 a co-founder of the Marxist anti war Spartacus League who was executed in 1919 - woodcut
“It is my duty to voice the sufferings of man. I want my art to have a purpose beyond itself and to wield influence. Strength is what I need, it’s the one thing I need that seems worthy of succeeding Peter. Strength to take life as it is and unbroken by life and without complaining and much weeping to do one’s work powerfully.”
For 14 years Kollwitz was a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, but was forced to resign following Adolf Hitler’s election victory in 1933 - her left leaning politics saw to that. She gave consideration to returning to an old plan of producing a series of prints that focussed on the theme of death. “I thought that now that I am really old, I might be able to handle this theme that would allow me to plumb the depths. But that is not the case, at the very time when death becomes visible behind everything it disrupts the imaginative process”. Images of the protective mother began to appear in her work during World War 2 and her home was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin.
The Grieving Parents, 1932 - a memorial to her son Peter, granite
At the end of her life she was hopeful that “other comrades can carry the banner forward”. She died just a few weeks prior to war’s end.
Käthe Kollwitz - Portrait of the German artist of expressionism, Arts Council of Great Britain production 1981.
Art Of Germany – BBCTV 2010
The Art Story