In 1891 Kollwitz married Karl, by this time a doctor who tended to the poor in Berlin, where the couple moved into the large apartment that would be Kollwitz' home until it was destroyed in World War II.[8] The proximity of her husband's practice proved valuable:The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.... People from the bourgeois sphere were altogether without appeal or interest. All middle-class life seemed pedantic to me. On the other hand, I felt the proletariat had guts. It was not until much later....when I got to know the women who would come to my husband for help, and incidentally also to me, that I was powerfully moved by the fate of the proletariat and everything connected with its way of life....But what I would like to emphasize once more is that compassion and commiseration were at first of very little importance in attracting me to the representation of proletarian life; what mattered was simply that I found it beautiful.[9]Between the births of her son Hans in 1892 and Peter in 1896, Kollwitz saw a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann's "The Weavers", which dramatized the oppression of the Silesian weavers in Langembielau and their failed revolt in 1842.[10] Inspired, the artist ceased work on a series of etchings she had intended to illustrate Emile Zola's Germinal, and produced a cycle of six works on the weavers theme, three lithographs (Poverty, Death, and Conspiracy) and three etchings with aquatint and sandpaper (March of the Weavers, Riot, and The End). Not a literal illustration of the drama, the works were a free and naturalistic expression of the workers' misery, hope, courage, and, eventually, doom. The cycle was exhibited publicly in 1898 to wide acclaim. But when Adolf Menzel nominated her work for the gold medal of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II withheld his approval. The Weavers became Kollwitz' most widely acclaimed production.[11]Kollwitz' second major cycle of works was the Peasant War, which, subject to many preliminary drawings and discarded ideas in lithography, occupied her from 1902 to 1908. The Peasant War was a violent revolution which took place in Southern Germany in the early years of the Reformation, beginning in 1525; peasants who had been treated as slaves took arms against feudal lords and the church. As was The Weavers, this subject, too, might have been suggested by a Hauptmann drama, Florian Geyer. However, the initial source of Kollwitz' interest dated to her youth, when she and her brother Konrad playfully imagined themselves as barricade fighters in a revolution.[12] The artist identified with the character of Black Anna, a woman cited as a protagonist in the uprising.[13] When completed, the Peasant War consisted of pieces in etching, acquatint, and soft ground: Plowing, Raped, Sharpening the Scythe, Arming in the Vault, Outbreak, After the Battle (which, eerily premonitory, features a mother searching through corpses in the night, looking for her son), and The Prisoners. In all, the works were technically more impressive than those of The Weavers, owing to their greater size and dramatic command of light and shadow. They are Kollwitz' highest achievements as an etcher.[14]While working on Peasant War, Kollwitz twice visited Paris, and enrolled in classes at the Académie Julian in order to learn how to sculpt.[15] The etching Outbreak was awarded the Villa Romana prize, which provided for a year's stay, in 1907, in a studio in Florence. Although Kollwitz did no work, she later recalled the impact of early Renaissance art.[16] The Grieving Parents, a memorial to Kollwitz' son Peter, now in Vladslo. The Grieving Parents, a memorial to Kollwitz' son Peter, now in Vladslo.After her return Kollwitz continued to exhibit her work, but was impressed by the work of younger compatriots--the Expressionists and Bauhaus--and resolved to simplify her means of expression.[17] Subsequent works such as Runover, 1910, and Self-Portrait, 1912, show this new direction. She also continued to work on sculpture.Kollwitz lost her youngest son Peter on the battlefield in World War I in October of 1914, prompting a prolonged depression. By the end of the year she had made drawings for a monument to Peter and his fallen comrades; she destroyed the monument in 1919, and began again in 1925.[18] The memorial, entitled The Grieving Parents, was finally completed and placed in the Belgian cemetery of Roggevelde in 1932.[19] Later, when Peter's grave was moved to the nearby Vladslo, the statues were also moved.In 1917, on her fiftieth birthday, the galleries of Paul Cassirer provided a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by Kollwitz.[20]