Meanwhile, the man in the tophat promenaded sadly under Käthe Kollwitz’s window.
In 1926, A. Lunacharsky, who was then our People’s Commissar of Culture, paid her this compliment: She aims at an immediate effect, so that at the very first glance one’s heart is wrung. She is a great agitator. That was the year she went to Roggevelde with Karl, to visit Peter’s grave for the first time.
In 1927, she stood amidst the jury of the Prussian Academy, those shorthaired, dark-suited old men with canes and tophats, with both hands gripping the mat of one of her woodcuts as the man beside her, resting his hat against his large belly, gazed respectfully down at Art. Perhaps they regretted that the Kaiser had not permitted them to give her the gold medal twenty-nine years ago. They reminded her of Hans and Peter when they were little, the two pairs of eyes staring at her above the white collars they hated. Their hall glowed with the light of heavenly privilege. They presented her with a prize.
After the ceremony, a gentleman from the National Front tried to talk to her about the mystical role of motherhood, and Professor Moholy-Nagy, fresh from the Bauhaus, scolded her that her latest composition, another white-on-black woodcut of a woman and child going into death, was both too static and too dark.
After all, she said wearily, it’s a representation of death.
It is an elementary biological necessity, Moholy-Nagy sternly said, for human beings to absorb color, to extract color.
What do you mean, a biological necessity?
We live in a colorless age.
So you’re sad, like me.
Don’t say that! I reject emotion unconditionally.
As gently as she could (there were many people in the room), she said to him: We’ve all been injured by the war years. In your case, perhaps you’re afraid to feel, because—
Professor Moholy-Nagy vindictively interrupted: The traditional painting has become a historical relic and is finished with.
She smiled at him. Then slowly she turned away to receive more congratulations from elitists and militarists, the ones who had killed Peter, and not just Peter, but all the brave young men in helmets who toiled white-faced through zigzag trenches and marched through hellscapes, falling a dozen at a time, the smokeskinned young men with daggers who crept through tunnels to murder one another, the brave young men who rushed against barbed wire, got impaled, and hung there until the bullet-wind blew through them; or else if they were lucky they became squinting prisoners, marched away between lines of Frenchmen on horseback; then they could look forward to coming home years later, bitter, poor and hateful, ripe for the next war. When she couldn’t bear any more of it, she caught the tram for Weissenbürgerstrasse. She went home to her nervously overworked husband whose patients had so often modeled poverty’s face to her.
The man in the tophat stood outside. This time she spied him in conversation with that tubercular young grocer’s apprentice who was in ecstasies about Hitler; Karl said that little could be done for him; he’d be in the grave in six months. Käthe had once asked the boy why, what he had against Jews, how he could possibly wish on Germany more hate and war. He replied: Excuse me, Frau Kollwitz, but I would like to stand for something. I would like to be there for something.—Now both of them wore swastika armbands. They looked more cheerful than she had ever seen them.
They didn’t even notice her at first. Then they did see her. The man in the tophat said: Well, well, it’s Frau Kollwitz again.
And she realized that all these years he had also been watching her.
She’d put up with enough at the Prussian Academy. She had nothing to say to him.
But the man in the tophat had something to say. Taking two steps closer, while the ashen-faced grocer’s apprentice gazed at him with shining eyes, he said: You know the difference between you and us, Frau Kollwitz? We’re optimists.
This shocked her so much that she could scarcely breathe, because it was true.
The dying apprentice chimed in: We never gave up. Even at the end we still believed in victory.
She looked them in the face and said: Do you believe in it now?
Yes, Frau Kollwitz; we at least will keep our faith.
She rushed upstairs to Karl’s office; the door was closed and a man was groaning. She needed Karl right then, but so be it. The last flight of stairs exhausted her. She unlocked the flat and went straight to Peter’s room.
That was the night when she dreamed that the man in the tophat had come two steps closer, and two steps closer, until suddenly he turned into a drawing she did once, of a mother catching her dead soldier-boy as he tumbles gruesomely into her arms; it was early next morning, when she awoke in Karl’s arms, sobbing, that she realized that death had now become a friend; and there would be one famous self-portrait (catalogue number 157) where death kindly leads her away. (As the sleepwalker laughed to Colonel Hagen: Don’t you think there’s something Jewish about that?) Ruf des Todes, she entitled it. That hand descending in the fullness of time to touch the artist’s shoulder, whose was it? Not a skeleton’s but also not Peter’s. His hand was eternally frail and little to her now, just as he was no grown man but a beautiful naked little boy. The hand in Ruf des Todes was heavy and old; perhaps it was Karl’s; its touch was domestic; it called her to herself so that she, weary and not at all surprised, could go with its owner to lie down in peace. But even if the hand wasn’t Peter’s, it was Peter’s bed she lay down upon.
In that same year 1927, the fraternal peoples of the USSR prepared to celebrate the achievements of Soviet power. In spite of Trotsky, the kulaks and the bourgeois monopolists, we’d built socialist democracy! Specifically, the emiseration of the masses under capitalism, which our dear friend K. Kollwitz has depicted so powerfully in her graphic work, was forever vanished, like the prewar prostitutes of the Nevsky. Moreover, we’d carried out this feat of humanism without giving ground to the capitalist anaconda which encircled us. By 1927, we could show the world an unbroken and unbreakable chain of victories. This was the year when an airplane of our R-3 series accomplished the first Moscow-Tokyo-Moscow flight. On the musical front, Shostakovich had not yet been disgraced. Photographically and metallurgically we held our own; on the educational front, we’d nearly liquidated illiteracy.
Therefore, to mark our Revolution’s tenth birthday, it was decided to invite nine hundred and forty-seven foreign delegates, among whom K. Kollwitz came quickly to mind:11 K. Kollwitz, who empathized so sincerely with the working class—the Kaiser had called her a gutter artist—K. Kollwitz, who had never joined the Party and whose presence in our land would thereby prove the broadmindedness of our goodwill; K. Kollwitz, whose grief-hued tableaux of worker-martyrs, by being set in Germany, showed the superiority of our own system—I myself especially admire her lithograph of a proletarian woman in profile (1903), whose tired old hands clasp one another uncertainly, and whose pale face bows submissively in the darkness; Kollwitz has done the hair in stipples rather than in lines, so that this worker resembles a shaved convict—K. Kollwitz, who offered good odds of dying before she could turn against us; she was sixty years old, tired, worried she was done.—Retrospection proves that we gambled well; in 1944, the second to last year of her life, with the sleepwalker’s war against us obviously lost, we find her writingher children, advising that little Arne be taught Russian: With the two countries bound to be so linked… so let him learn the language while there is still time. That same month she wrote: My only hope is in world socialism. (Needless to say, she also wrote: The desire, the unquenchable longing for death remains.—I shall close now, dear children. I thank you with all my heart.) In other words, she remained as reliable as our Polikarpov-Grigorovich I-5 biplane fighter of 1930 (two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour).
11
In 1924 our fellow traveler Otto Nagel had opened the first German arts exhibition in the Soviet Union. Käthe Kollwitz was represented. No one came out against her.