Kollwitz, Käthe (née Schmidt) (
b Königsberg, East Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia], 8 July 1867;
d Moritzburg, nr. Dresden, 22 Apr. 1945). German graphic artist and sculptor. She came from a family of strong moral and social convictions, and after marrying a doctor of similar outlook, Karl Kollwitz, in 1891, she moved to one of the poorer quarters of Berlin, where she gained first-hand knowledge of the wretched conditions in which the urban poor lived. The two series of etchings that established her reputation were inspired by a spirit of protest against working conditions of the day, although their subjects are set in the past—
Weavers' Revolt (1893–7) and
Peasants' War (1902–8). After about 1910 lithography replaced etching as her preferred medium (she also made woodcuts), and after the First World War she turned from illustrating particular subjects to depicting abstract concepts and great timeless themes such as the Mother and Child. Her work is uncompromisingly serious and often deeply pessimistic in spirit, and many of her later drawings and prints are pacifist in intention (her son was killed in the First World War and her grandson in the Second World War). Appropriately, her best-known sculpture is a war memorial—that at Dixmuiden, Flanders, completed in 1932.
In line with her left-wing views Kollwitz visited the Soviet Union in 1927, but she subsequently became disillusioned with Soviet Communism. In 1919 she had been made the first ever woman member of the Berlin Academy, but when Hitler came to power in 1933 she was forced to resign. She suffered harassment, but she was never declared a
degenerate artist (in fact the Nazis sometimes used her images—without her name or authorization—in their propaganda), and she continued to produce outstanding work. Her masterpiece is arguably the series of eight lithographs on
Death (1934–5), memorably showing the powerful breadth of her style, in which all accidentals and inessentials are eliminated. In its poignant concern for suffering humanity, her work represents one of the highpoints of German
Expressionism and of 20th-century graphic art. ‘I should like’, she wrote in 1922, ‘to exert influences in these times when human beings are so perplexed and in need of help.’
