He had fallen on 22.10.14, in Flanders, ten days after his war began. He was the first of his regiment to die.
Peter was the volunteer. The other son Hans, the one she hardly knew, of course survived. Hans saw through the war to its skeleton of politics. He later became a doctor like Karl. He was always realistic.
Karl had refused Peter permission to go, so he had turned to his mother. She never knew exactly how he succeeded in getting her to overcome her fear, but he did, after which the father, as usual, obeyed the mother.
Then came the telegram: IHR SOHN IST GEFALLEN.
Her friend Liebermann gave her this advice: Work.
Having been raised by a perfect, untouchable mother, she was fated—indeed, she had been brought into the world—to be the same, all the while exuding a secret lavish maternality. And then, from a jet-black cloud, death’s long grey arms reached to pick her child from amidst a harvest of wide-eyed children. How many women have we all seen wilting away, because they were prevented from fully giving the love which was in them to give? The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which criticizes her favorably, explains that she perceived World War I through the prism of personal tragedy, which imparted a gloomy, sacrificial tone to her creative work. Hence her crazed figures dancing open-mouthed around the guillotine; hence those elongated, muscle-striated arms reaching up at the sky in grief and anger.
Throughout most of the following decade she created posters for the German Communist Party. Meanwhile she continued her mournful, simian self-portraits; she woodblock-printed her hundredth screaming mother bearing her dead child in her arms, other mothers crowding around her in the procession to the grave.
The myth that her son’s death was the inspiration for this work is easily exploded. For instance, “Death, Mother and Child” dates from 1910, when Peter still had four years left to live. It formally resembles the previous year’s chalk sketch, entitled “Goodbye”: the child’s face, lovely, stark-white and realistic, clutched by the mother against her own larger, greyer face, which seemed in its grief to be decaying into the black, black smudge beneath it. In 1903, in both her “Pietà” and her “Mother with Dead Child,” the positions had been reversed, the mother clutching the little corpse from above, resting her head on the breast while the child’s head dangled in space, the lips slightly parted in the white face. There had been another “Mother with Dead Child” in that same year, this one almost Blakean in the foregrounding of the leg, foot and toes; the mother was sitting cross-legged with one knee up, bowing her head down against the child, whose form, shrouded into a phallic blur, blended into hers; her ear, wrinkled forehead and one sunken eye were there, but only in that furred, decomposed fashion common to embryos and unfinished art; the Kaiser would not have seen any virtue in this.
In 1911, Peter was growing rapidly but remained underweight; he read his New Testament in Greek and ran to see zeppelins; meanwhile, his mother completed her “Mother in the Bed of a Dead Child,” again the white, white face, this time almost resembling a skull, the crudely cross-hatched sheets, and then the mother’s face, dark-hatched against the black hinterground, with a single candle-flame shining forlornly behind her; her dark heavy fingers reach forward to caress the white cheek; her deep dark eye-sockets seem to contain fibers of muscle, like those of a thoroughly anatomized cadaver. The slow love and grief, upon which Kollwitz has superimposed the living body’s almost reptilian grossness, combine into something quite simply horrifying. Soon enough she etched another version of “Mother and Dead Child,” this time entitled “Tod und Frau um das Kind ringend” (1911), the child’s mouth blackly gaping in a face gone slightly darker, the mother’s correspondingly lighter so that the two black slits of her clenched mouth and eye leap out at us; here too is death, a white skeleton whose round eye-socket gazes at the pair with something between curiosity and glee; shreds of flesh, perhaps hiding ribs, join it to the two forms which it has now begun to sever. We’ll ignore such variations as “Death and Woman,” in which the little child fights with all its feeble strength to save Mother from being raped away by death; I suppose you get the picture.
Four years before the World War and two years before the Kaiser ordered the removal of her poster demanding playgrounds in tenement housing (a sad girl stands by a wall, clasping a sick baby; behind them, the sign reads PLAYING FORBIDDEN) we find her writing in her daybook: Today started work on the sculpture “Woman with Dead Child.”
For years she looked out her window at the same gaunt man who grimaced under his tophat. She never learned his name, but she learned to recognize his footsteps on the cobblestones. For awhile he used to be accompanied by a little blond boy with sunken eyes, but the blond boy died of tuberculosis, and then the man came down with it, too; he was one of Karl’s patients, but he wouldn’t give his name; he felt very ashamed because he couldn’t pay. No doubt that was why he then stopped being Karl’s patient. Perhaps Karl had saved him; he lived on year after year. Käthe, newly a mother, was still at work on her Weavers’ Series when she first came to know him; she was still scratching the dark fine lines of anguish on brown paper, bringing to life the pale children, the weak figures in black, the death. Once, in about 1895 it must have been, the gaunt man removed his tophat to scratch at his hair, and then, right then, when his eyes almost met hers, she caught him, sketching his head for three or four seconds of passionate struggle; yes, she’d possessed him; now he was hers; his agony wasn’t in vain anymore; he became one of her weavers.
In 1921 she drew a poster for the Russenhilfe; she wanted to do what she could to help the Communists fight that terrible hunger in their country. But she didn’t care to join the Party, because their tactics didn’t suit her. She made two pairs of hands respectfully reaching to support the swaying head of someone Slavic, someone with dark hair whose eyes were closed in extreme weakness. All the sick proletarians Karl treated, whose stories were so sad and who all too often lived and died beyond anyone’s power to help, she remembered them when she made that Russian face.—No, not all of them. That man in the tophat, when he passed beneath her window he conveyed so dramatic an impression that she took up her graphite stick, but there was too much anger and not enough weakness in him. Frau Becker’s son, the dark one who’d died last year, she remembered his drooping eyes when he was dying. She worked him into the Slavic face. She looked it over and said to herself: It’s good, thank God.—Karl agreed, as he always did.
She sat herself down in Peter’s room and considered doing a series of very straightforward posters about Lenin. But when she and Hans came by some accident to be discussing politics, she said: There are other problems that interest me now, essential human problems like death.
But your woodcut about Liebknecht—
A little sternly, she said to him: I’m not the old hating, fighting Käthe Kollwitz.
In fact, she remained as unchanging as Berlin’s pale green summer weeds and trees along the water, because her anguish was as dependable as the ocherish brownstones.
In 1922 she rendered death’s skull-moon in the darkness above bowed children who spasm in concert with our century’s millions of enchained volunteers; the title is “Hunger,” and I’ve read that this image, badly reproduced in a secondhand monograph, lay in wait for decades like an antipersonnel mine for the specific purpose of horrifying Shostakovich’s daughter Galina; one day when she, still unmarried and presumably in Leningrad to attend the premiere of her father’s Eleventh Symphony, was browsing the book-kiosks along the Nevsky, the mine exploded: Galina, who was actually trying to find a present for her brother’s name day, opened the volume by accident—well, isn’t that a tautology? Isn’t every accident an accident? I won’t exaggerate; I won’t claim that the young woman screamed; after all, she’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, even if she couldn’t remember all of it; she’d seen real skulls enough! All the same, such was the power of this image that she had a nightmare, and in the morning her famous father, who was himself feeling a bit anxious just then, saw some peculiar wretchedness in her face which he experienced like a punch in his stomach; this sensation, suitably translated into the chord D-D-Sch, later found its way into both his Fifteenth Symphony and the unholy Opus 110.