Kathe Kollwitz

I was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the fifth child in my family. My father, Karl Schmidt, was a radical Social democrat who became a mason and house builder. My mother, Katherina Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was expelled from the official State Church and founded an independent congregation. My education was greatly influenced by her grandfather's lessons in religion and socialism. The tragic early death of my younger brother Benjamin, left quite an impression on me, and through out childhood I was afflicted with bouts of anxiety.
My father arranged for me to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when I was twelve. At sixteen I began making drawings of working people, the sailors and peasants I saw in my father's offices. At the age of seventeen I became engaged to Karl Kollwitz, a medical student. Wishing to continue my studies at a time when no colleges or academies were open to young women, I enrolled in an art school for woman in Berlin. There I studied with Karl Stauffer-Bern, a friend of the artist Max Klinger. The etchings of Klinger, their technique and social concerns, were a great inspiration to me. I realized my strength was not as a painter, but a draftsman. In 1890 I returned to Koenigsberg and rented my first studio. In 1891 I married Karl. By this time he was a doctor who tended to the poor in Berlin. Hunger and Death were daily visitors to our home because of Karls medical practice in the impoverished section of Berlin, the proximity of Karls practice proved inspiring to me.
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.
I gave birth to my son Hans in 1892 and then Peter in 1896. I lost my youngest son Peter on the battlefield in World War I in October of 1914.
In 1917, on my fiftieth birthday, I celebrated with an exhibition at the famous Berlin gallery owned by Paul Cassirer. He exibited a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by me(Kollwitz).In 1920 I was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, the first woman to be so honored. Membership entailed a regular income, a large studio, and a full professorship!In the years that followed, my reaction to the war found a continuous outlet. In 1922-23 I produced the cycle War in woodcut form. In 1924 I finished my three most famous posters: Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War.
In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced me to resign my place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. My work was removed from museums. I was BANNED from exhibiting, and some of my work was used by the Nazis for PROPAGANDA!
In July of 1936 my husband and I were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened us with arrest and deportation to a concentration camp; we resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable. However, we were by now figures of international note, and no further actions were taken. On my seventieth birthday I received over one hundred and fifty telegrams from leading personalities of the art world, as well as offers to house me in the United States, which I declined for fear of provoking reprisals against my family.I survived my husband Karl, he died in 1940 from an illness. I also survived my son Peter, and my grandson, Peter (the son of my oldest son Hans), who died in action during World War II (in 1942).
I eventually evacuated Berlin in 1943. Later that year my house was bombed, and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. I moved first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where I lived my final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. I died days before the end of the war hidden in that castle. I never saw the war end. I am a committed socialist and pacifist. I made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. Virtually the only portraits I made during my life were were images of myself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a life-long honest self-appraisal, I consider them to be psychological milestones.