Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) – New Gallery and Exhibition
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) – New Gallery at Charlottenburg Berlin, and New Exhibition in New York at Museum of Modern Art
Hari Kumar, March 2024.
In New York, a new exhibition has opened of the work of Kollwitz. It seems from reviews to have been well done, and a short video from it on Kollwitz’s manner of work, is well worth looking at. Likely the best appreciation of her work is still in Berlin. If you can ever go to Berlin, try to visit the Neue Wache on ‘Unter Den Linden’, and pay homage to a great artist. There is an enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s original ‘Pieta’ cast in 1937. A mother holds her dead son, while following Michaelangelo, it remained entirely her own. The history of that work and the Neue Wache which now houses it speaks a little to the times of Kollowitz.
She was a worker’s artist. Her central theme largely became the pointlessness of war, the intense grief of the parents of the fallen soldiers. It began for her after her first son Peter died in World War 1 – only ten days after he departed for the Front. After the late 1920s this became intense and generalised to the ever present ‘Death’ that stalks the working class.
She transcends ordinary labels and is not simply a ‘socialist realist’. Her personalisation of ‘Death’ approximates to Symbolism, while her meditations on ‘the Peasant Wars’ marks her as a socialist realist.
Berlin also houses a new Kollwitz Gallery. This collection was previously in an old house near Savigny Platz, but has moved to the Charlottenburg Palace. It is perhaps an incongruous site for this great artist. However she deserves the enlarged space it will ultimately allow, many works in the catalogue were not shown before. (‘Kathe Kollwitz”, Zeichnung, Grafik, Plastik”; Martin Fritsch; E.A. Seemann Leipzig 1999). But this new venue also reflects an increasing respect for this artist. Previously her work was perhaps side-lined as too “committed” in the West, and too redolent of the GDR where she was an honoured artist.
The works currently at Charlottenburg are mainly etchings (Scratches on a metal plate covered with a wax-like ‘ground’ exposes metal; which being placed into acid become corroded and deeper, allowing them to hold ink); and lithographs (where a special pencil draws a design on a plate which holds onto ink for a print). Although the famous “Turm die Muetter” 1937 bronze of a famous lithograph is there also. Further rooms are in preparation.
Undoubtedly Kollwitz identified with the workers movement. This began in her childhood in an avowedly socialist family. Her father, Karl Schmidt, actively supported the defeated revolution of 1848. Karl Schmidt never gave give up his socialist views, and having supported the 1948 revolution he could not practice law, and became a stone-mason. Her mother was a socialist. A family favorite reading was Freiligrath’s German translation of Thomas Hood‘s poem The “Song of the Shirt.” Her brother, Konrad, became an active member of the Communist Party Germany (KPD). She married Konrad’s socialist friend, Karl Kollowitz – then a medical student. Karl set up practice in a (then) working class Berlin district in Prenzlauer Berg.
As a child, she admired etchings by William Hogarth. Young Käthe drew pictures of the Polish dock-workers in the harbour. Her father got her to The Berlin Academy of Art, the Women’s School in 1884. By 1893, she drew lines with an almost infinite degree of shading from black to white. Later under Ernst Barlach’s influence, she started wood-cuts, achieving stark clarity. Still later she began sculpture. Such were the forms she mastered. But she had long ago found her content – working people. This never changed.
By 1897 she translated Gerhart Hauptmann’s play ‘The Weavers’ into a visual drama of six scenes, depicting the 1844 rising against mill-owners. These led the famous painter Adolph Menzel to nominate her for a Gold Medal at the 1989 Berlin Art Exhibition. She was denied this by Kaiser Wilhelm II because of the class content of her work. In 1901-1908 she created 7 etchings of Wilhelm Zimmermann’s “Allgemeine Geschichte des grossen Bauernkrieges”‚ The Peasant Wars. These are on display in the Charlottenburg gallery currently.
By 1919 she was made a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and became the first woman professor of Art in Germany.
In her married life, she saw the working class day and night – at their most vulnerable, while they confided in Karl as patients. In all this, she saw beauty in workers. Her aesthetic was different from that of the bourgeoisie:
“But my real motive for choosing my subjects almost exclusively from the life of the workers was that only such subjects gave me in a simple & unqualified way what I felt to be beautiful. For me the Koenigsberg longshoremen had beauty… the broad freedom of movement in the gestures of the common people had beauty. Middle-class people had no appeal for me at all. Bourgeois life as a whole seemed to me pedantic… I have never been able to see beauty in the upper-class educated person; he’s superficial; he’s not natural or true; he’s not honest, and he’s not (a) human being in every sense of the word.”
“ Käthe Kollwitz; „Tagebuchblatter und Briefe [Diary & Letters]”; Ed Hans Kollwitz; Berlin; 1948; p. 43.
But surprisingly to the standard portrayal of her, she never considered herself a politically committed “communist”. By 1921 she was writing:
“In the meantime I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dream of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they are like in reality. And so I know now what an illusion I lived in for so many years. I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary. Yes sometimes I do not know whether I am a socialist at all, whether I am not rather a democrat instead.” June 28th, 1921; “Diary & Letters”; Ibid; p.100
Kollwitz depicted the life of the workers, with its human pleasures – enjoying companionship and children – but she also saw its bitternesses and misery. It is such double-edged tones of Kollwitz that positively touched some communists, but it alarmed others. It was not necessarily brimming with hope. Likely this was one reason the German KPD criticized her work, and even objected to her doing the Memorial of Karl Liebnitz. The Liebnitz parents had requested this of her. The KPD’s extraordinary argument was that she was not a member of the KPD. Regrettably, such sectarianism was a characteristic strand in KPD. Kollwitz complained in her diary of this rebuke:
“I simply should have been left alone, in tranquillity. An artist.. cannot be expected to unravel these crazily complicated relationships. As an artist I have the right to extract the emotional content out of everything, to let things work upon me and then give them outward form. And so I have the right to portray the working class’s farewell to Liebnicht, and even dedicate it to the workers, without following Liebnicht politically. Or isn’t that so? ” Diary & Letters”; Ibid; p. 98
In contrast to the then KPD were the non-sectarian attitudes of Marx and Engels towards the non-party poet Heinrich Heine whose art they admired and published, and Lenin’s view of the non-party writer Tolstoy, should be recalled.
Her two sons Hans and Peter, both volunteered in WW1. Her eldest, Peter, despite father Karl’s beliefs, had illusions about the “concept of death for the Fatherland’ and “sacrifice”. Some extrapolate from Kollwitz’s diary that Kathe shared such illusions. (Regina Schulte and Pamela Selwyn; History Workshop Journal, Spring, 1996, No. 41; pp. 193-221). However she transformed any prior illusions in the cycle of “War’ lithographs between 1920-9121. These warned youth not to ‘volunteer’ and urged ”Nie wieder!” [Never again!] Increasingly however her kernel works became more grimly focused on death.
The experience with the KPD and Peter’s death led her repetitively to one theme. Death was a terroriser and reaper, but at times it was a relief. The relief of an old poverty stricken mother who hears the call of death as a friend. Or the desperate relief of the old man who prepares his own noose in the “Last Resort”. This was a recognition of the grim reality of everyday life – and death – of the workers. (Two of her prints-drawings depicting death are at this web-site http://www.uwrf.edu/history/prints/women/kollwitz.html )
Kollwitz’s personal tragedy was transmuted into art under a slogan from Goethe – “Saatfruchte sollen nicht vermahlen werden.” [“Seed for the planting must not be ground”].
The “seed”, were the children of course. Perhaps her greatest sculptures are those at the cemetery at Roggevelde Belgium, where her son Peter lay with so many others after the inter-imperialist war of 1914-18. Two figures show herself and her husband Karl grieving.
Up to 1928 she drew her famous posters for aid to Russia, and against poverty in Germany. Many were requested by the international “Workers International Relief “. On 5 February 1933 – now the first woman director of Graphic Arts at the Prussian Academy, she and Karl took a stand against Hitler, with 33 prominent co-signators (including Albert Einstein, Henirich Mann and Arnold Zweig) of the “Urgent Call for Unity (Dringender Appell für die Einheit) from the International Sozilaistischer Kampfbund (ISK) against the Nazis. We know this failed. When the Nazis came to power she was sacked and harassed with Karl. She died in Moritzburg near Dresden on April 22, 1945.
When she died, she had not given up on a better world. In February 21, 1944 she told her daughter-in-law Ottolie, that:
“Germany’s cities have become rubble heaps… every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything is smashed. The devil only knows what the world, what Germany will look like then. That is why I am whole-heartedly for a radical end to this madness, and why my only hope is in a world socialism… Pacifism simply is not a matter of calmly looking on: it is work, hard work.” Ibid; p.184
Kollwitz defies the simple category of Socialist Realist, and she stands of herself. A great artist for humanity, and for workers the world over. The Charlottenburg Galleries deserve to be visited by any socialist who finds themselves in Berlin.
An earlier version of this was first published by ‘Berlin Left’ at https://www.theleftberlin.com/at-the-gallery-kathe-kollwitz-1867-1945-spandauer-damm/ on 20/11/2023
Hari Kumar wrote a more detailed piece on Kollwitz in December 2000 for Alliance Marxist-Leninist.
