Käthe Kollwitz

Few artists belong to a Berlin neighbourhood as completely as Käthe Kollwitz. For more than fifty years she lived and worked in Prenzlauer Berg, and from her studio there came etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and bronzes that still stop you in your tracks: mothers, workers, the grieving and the brave, drawn with a directness that needs no explanation.

From Königsberg to Berlin

She was born Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg on 8 July 1867. Her father arranged her first drawing lessons when she was twelve, and in 1885–86 she studied under Karl Stauffer-Bern at the School for Women Artists in Berlin, then painting with Ludwig Herterich in Munich, where she came to see that her strength lay in drawing rather than paint.

In 1891 she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor who cared for the poor of Berlin, and the couple moved into the large flat that would be her home until it was destroyed in the Second World War. The lives of his patients, and of the working families around them, became her great subject.

Line, shadow and the printed sheet

Kollwitz worked in painting, printmaking and sculpture, but the print was her voice: etching first, then lithography, and from the 1920s the woodcut, whose bold black and white suited the force of what she wanted to say. In 1904 she studied sculpture at the Académie Julian in Paris, and in 1907 the Villa Romana Prize took her to Florence for a year.

Her first great cycle, The Weavers, shown in 1898, told a story of hunger and revolt in three lithographs and three etchings. The Peasant War followed between 1902 and 1908 in seven etchings, among them the unforgettable Sharpening the Scythe and Battlefield.

War, loss and the Neue Wache

In October 1914 her younger son Peter was killed in the first months of the First World War. The loss shaped the rest of her work: the woodcut cycle War of 1922–23, and the granite figures of The Grieving Parents, placed in a Belgian war cemetery in 1932 and now at Vladslo.

“There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!” Käthe Kollwitz

In 1919 she became the first woman appointed professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts, a position she was forced to give up in 1933. Her last great print cycle, Death, followed in the mid-1930s. Bombed out in 1943, she left Berlin and died at Moritzburg near Dresden on 22 April 1945, sixteen days before the war ended.

Since 1993 an enlarged version of her sculpture Mother with her Dead Son has stood alone in Schinkel’s Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, Germany’s central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny. It sits beneath an open oculus, so rain and snow fall on the figures: one of the most moving sights in the city.

Kollwitz’s Berlin

Prenzlauer Berg keeps her close. On Kollwitzplatz, Gustav Seitz’s seated bronze of the artist has watched over the square since 1960. She is buried in an honorary grave at Friedrichsfelde cemetery.

The Käthe Kollwitz Museum, founded in 1986 from the collection of Hans Pels-Leusden, moved in 2022 from Fasanenstraße to the Theaterbau beside Schloss Charlottenburg at Spandauer Damm 10. It shows her prints, drawings and sculpture in a permanent display, with special exhibitions alongside, and is open daily from 11.00 to 18.00.

Our advice: start at the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, then give the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Charlottenburg an unhurried morning, and finish on Kollwitzplatz in Prenzlauer Berg, where her statue sits among the cafés. Check the museum’s website for current exhibitions before you go.