Mothers

One of the great German Expressionist artists, Käthe Kollwitz was an activist who initially supported the Great War (World War I, 1914–18) as a step toward a stronger, less superficial German society. She convinced her husband to let their younger son Peter volunteer, only to lose him on the battlefield in October 1914. While Kollwitz did not express opposition to the war until well into the conflict, perhaps trying to convince herself that the death of her son had not been in vain, she eventually became an outspoken pacifist.

Kollwitz lived and worked in the poorest working-class neighborhoods of Berlin, where she bore witness to not only widespread disease and poverty but also to the violence of German politics during the Weimar Republic (1918–33) and the vicious Nazi rule that followed. A preoccupation with death marked her entire career, and she rendered this theme with remarkable physical references, depicting mourners in anguish or representations of death personified.

A published translation of her diary tells of a vibrant home life with her husband and sons, details her devotion toward others, and gives insight into her struggle with depression. Her ever-present anxieties about death only intensified in the last decades of her life, however, as physical pain and grief consumed her.