Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz, born in 1867 in East Prussia, became one of Germany’s most powerful and unflinching visual artists. She was an etcher, printmaker, and sculptor who gave voice to those history tried to silence. Rooted in socialist ideals and firsthand experience with poverty, Kollwitz chronicled the lives of the working class with stark honesty, capturing the quiet anguish and enduring strength of mothers, laborers, and children. Her art didn’t celebrate glory, it mourned the cost of survival.

Kollwitz’s early breakthrough came with 'The Weavers' (1893–1897), a print series documenting a workers' revolt against industrial exploitation. Influenced by naturalist writers like Gerhart Hauptmann and Ibsen, her work focused on women’s roles within systems of resistance. Using dense blacks, scraped textures, and bare compositions, she brought the raw emotional and political weight of poverty, loss, and uprising to the foreground of German art.

Her personal tragedy deepened her political vision. After her son Peter was killed in World War I, Kollwitz channeled her grief into public mourning and anti-war resistance. She created works like 'The Grieving Parents' (1932) and 'Never Again War!' (1924), transforming maternal grief into a universal protest. She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts — until the Nazis expelled her, labeling her work ‘degenerate’ for its pacifism and socialist ideals.

Even under censorship and surveillance, Kollwitz never stopped drawing. Her final years were marked by quiet defiance as she continued sketching from her Berlin home during World War II. She died just two weeks before Germany’s surrender in 1945, but her legacy endures. Through charcoal, lithograph, and bronze, Kollwitz taught us that art can be mourning, memory, and a refusal to forget. She didn’t glorify war, she humanized its cost.