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Käthe Kollwitz



German stamp issued in 1991 in the Women in German history series
German stamp issued in 1991 in the Women in German history series

In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, some of her work was used by the Nazis for propaganda.

Working now in a smaller studio, in the mid 1930s she completed her last major cycle of lithographs, Death, which consisted of eight stones: Woman Welcoming Death, Death with Girl in Lap, Death Reaches for a Group of Children, Death Struggles with a Woman, Death on the Highway, Death as a Friend, Death in the Water, and The Call of Death.

In July of 1936 she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a concentration camp; they resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable.[26] However, Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further actions were taken. On her seventieth birthday she "received over one hundred and fifty telegrams from leading personalities of the art world", as well as offers to house her in the United States, which she declined for fear of provoking reprisals against her family.[27]

She survived her husband (who died in 1940 from an illness), and her grandson, Peter (the son of her oldest son Hans), who died in action during World War II (in 1942).

She evacuated Berlin in 1943. Later that year her house was bombed, and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. She moved first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony.[28] Kollwitz died just before the end of the war.

Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a life-long honest self-appraisal; "they are psychological milestones".[29]

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Legacy

Woman with Dead Child, 1903 etching
Woman with Dead Child, 1903 etching

Her silent lines penetrate the marrow like a cry of pain; such a cry was never heard among the Greeks and Romans.[30]

Käthe Kollwitz is a subject within William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, a 2005 National Book Award winner for fiction. In the book, Vollmann describes the lives of those touched by the fighting and events surrounding World War II in Germany and the Soviet Union. Her chapter is entitled "Woman with Dead Child", after her sculpture of the same name.

An enlarged version of a similar Kollwitz sculpture, Mother with her Dead Son, was placed in 1993 at the center of Neue Wache in Berlin, which serves as a monument to "the Victims of War and Tyranny".

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References

  1. ^ Bittner, Herbert, Kaethe Kollwitz; Drawings, page 1. Thomas Yoseloff, 1959.
  2. ^ Fritsch, Matrin (ed.), Homage to Käthe Kollwitz. Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 2005.
  3. ^ "The aim of realism to capture the particular and accidental with minute exactness was abandoned for a more abstract and universal conception and a more summary execution". Zigrosser, Carl: Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz, page XIII. Dover, 1969.
  4. ^ Bittner, page 1-2.
  5. ^ Bittner, page 2.
  6. ^ Kurth, Willy: Kaethe Kollwitz, Geleitwort zum Katalog der Ausstellung in der Deutschen Akademie der Kuenste, 1951.
  7. ^ Bittner, page 3.
  8. ^ Bittner, page 4.
  9. ^ Bittner, page 4.
  10. ^ Fecht, Tom: Käthe Kollwitz: Works in Color, page 6. Random House, Inc., 1988.
  11. ^ Bittner, page 4.
  12. ^ Bittner, pages 4-5.
  13. ^ Bittner, page 6.
  14. ^ Bittner, page 6.
  15. ^ Bittner, page 6.
  16. ^ Bittner, pages 6-7. During this time she also visited Rodin twice.
  17. ^ "But there, for the first time, I began to understand Florentine art." Kollwitz, Kaethe: The Diaries and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, page 45. Henry Regnery Company, 1955.
  18. ^ "Nevertheless I am no longer satisfied. There are too many good things that seem fresher than mine...I should like to do the new etchings so that all the essentials are strongly stressed and the inessentials almost omitted." Kollwitz, page 52.
  19. ^ Bittner, page 9.
  20. ^ "I stood before the woman, looked at her--my own face--and wept and stroked her cheeks." Kollwitz, page 122.
  21. ^ "The elements of her nature and her art can often be felt more immediately in the drawings than in the prints, even much that in the latter has scarcely found a fulfillment." Kurth, Willy: Kunstchronik, N.F., Vol. XXXVII, 1917.
  22. ^ Kollwitz, page 89.
  23. ^ Bittner, page 10.
  24. ^ Bittner, page 10.
  25. ^ Bittner, page 11.
  26. ^ Bittner, page 13.
  27. ^ Bittner, page 15.
  28. ^ Bittner, page 15.
  29. ^ Zigrosser, page XXII, 1969.
  30. ^ Gerhart Hauptmann, quoted by Zigrosser, page XIII, 1969.

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