Käthe Kollwitz

Independent activity Germany Germany 1867–1945 ○ Died

German socialist artist who carved workers’ poverty and the grief of war into prints and sculpture

In 1924 she drew the KPD poster “Down with the abortion paragraphs!”, and in 1933 she was forced out of the Prussian Academy of Arts for signing an appeal for a united workers’ front against Nazism.

A German draughtswoman, printmaker and sculptor born in Königsberg. Married in 1891 to the physician Karl Kollwitz, she lived in a Berlin working-class district and made her name with the print cycles A Weavers’ Revolt and Peasants’ War. The death of her son Peter in 1914 drew her to pacifism and socialism; she made a woodcut in memory of Karl Liebknecht and posters for the SPD, the KPD and Workers International Relief. In 1919 she became the first woman member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. Never a party member but a self-described socialist, she was forced out of the academy by the Nazis in 1933 and barred from exhibiting. She died at Moritzburg in April 1945.

Also known as: Käthe Schmidt

Activities and affiliations

Related historical events

An artist of the working-class district

The fifth child of Karl Schmidt, a mason turned builder, and Katharina, daughter of a free-church preacher, she was born in Königsberg. Encouraged by her father, she took lessons from 1881, and since women could not enter an art academy she attended the Women’s Academy of the Association of Berlin Women Artists in 1886–1887 and studied in Munich until 1890. In June 1891 she married the physician Karl Kollwitz and settled in Prenzlauer Berg, a Berlin working-class district. Her print cycle A Weavers’ Revolt, inspired by Hauptmann’s The Weavers, drew attention at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1898, but Wilhelm II, who called modern art “gutter art”, rejected a proposal to award her a medal. Her second cycle, Peasants’ War (1901–1908), won her the Villa Romana Prize, Germany’s first art prize. After her son Peter fell in Flanders in 1914 she drew close to pacifists and socialists, and worked on the sculpture Grieving Parents for him until 1932. When Karl Liebknecht was murdered in 1919 she made a woodcut in his memory, and that year she became the first woman member of the Prussian Academy of Arts. Between 1919 and 1926 she made posters for the SPD, the KPD, Workers International Relief and others, among them “Never Again War” for the Central German Youth Day in Leipzig and the KPD’s “Down with the abortion paragraphs!”, both of 1924. When the struggle over Paragraph 218 came to a head in 1929 she was among the artists who took it up, and that year she became the first woman to receive the order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts. Never a member of any party, she considered herself a socialist and supported the International Socialist Militant League’s appeal for cooperation between the KPD and SPD. In 1933, for signing the Urgent Appeal for a united workers’ front against National Socialism, she was forced to leave the Prussian Academy and dismissed as head of its master class in printmaking. In 1936 her works were removed from an exhibition, amounting to a ban, and in the 1937 “degenerate art” seizures at least 36 of her prints and drawings were confiscated. She lost her husband in 1940, and her grandson Peter, son of the socialist doctor Hans Kollwitz, also fell in the Second World War. Her last lithograph, Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground (1941), was her testament against war. Fleeing the bombing to Nordhausen in 1943 and to Moritzburg in 1944, she died there on 22 April 1945, a few days before the end of the war.