Art: Created with My Blood

All her life, Käthe Kollwitz could remember her parents’ bewilderment when, as a young girl in the East Prussian city of Königsberg, she first began to draw. They were perfectly willing to encourage her talent, but her choice of subjects was certainly unsettling. “After all,” they would say, “life has its bright sides, too. Why do you show only the darkest?” As Käthe Kollwitz wrote many years later, “I had no answer. I simply wasn’t moved by anything else.”

Few artists have recorded so searingly the anguish of their time, for almost every drawing or lithograph Kathe Kollwitz produced turned out to be a cry of pain. Last week, in honor of what would have been her 95th birthday—she died in 1945 —the East Berlin Academy of the Arts had on view 106 of her works, all but a few in stark black and white. Since she had spoken so lovingly of the proletariat, the Communists have tried to make much of her, but their stern and sterile ideology would hardly have found comfort in Köthe Kollwitz’ emotional utopianism. She was a woman who took every quiver of human agony upon herself, and then transferred it to paper again and again.

Beautiful Way. In the beginning, she claimed, it was not compassion that compelled her to draw what she did. It was rather that, while she found the German middle class “pedantic and small,” she found in the workers’ way of life “greatness and scope … I simply found it beautiful.” Later, after her doctor husband established a practice in the workers’ section of North Berlin, she came to know firsthand the “hardship and tragedy” of her husband’s patients. When her 18-year-old son Peter was killed in World War I, her sense of tragedy deepened. The bronze monument she designed for him, showing the two parents grieving, was agony in itself; it took her 18 years to finish.

On occasion, small, taciturn Köthe Kollwitz could slip into melodrama, but the occasion was rare. She drew the unemployed, the underfed, the suddenly bereaved; often she found inspiration in Berlin’s city morgue—by sketching accident or murder victims. Whether in the morgue, on a slum sidewalk, or in her big, incredibly cluttered studio in the Prussian Academy of Arts, the rhythm of her crayon or pencil varied with the mood, now feverish with shock, now heavy with despair. She was capable of depicting love in a tender drawing of a mother and a child; but in another drawing, the child might be dead and the love would turn from tenderness to shattering grief. Death was, in fact, almost always present in Köthe Kollwitz’ mind. “All my life I carried on a conversation with death,” she said.

Long Silence. In 1933, along with Novelist Heinrich Mann, she was forced to resign from the academy for having signed a plea against the election of the Nazis to national office. In time, Germany’s new masters let it be known that she was not to be exhibited again. With that, there descended upon her, as she put it, a long “silence.” In 1940 Dr. Kollwitz died, and two years later, her grandson—another Peter—was killed on the Russian front. Her house in Berlin was bombed out, and so was the one she moved to in Nordhausen. Finally, she settled in the gamekeeper’s lodge on an estate in Moritzburg, a half-hour’s drive from Dresden.

“Never,” she once said, “have I created a work coldly, but always more or less with my blood.” She was utterly exhausted, and her letters invariably ended with “Your very old and weary Köthe” or “Your old and life-sated Köthe.” She dreamed of dying. The self-portraits in the East Berlin show begin with the drawing of a confident and alert young woman in 1892 and end with a profile of a stooped, old Köthe waiting for release. In one of her last letters, she wrote: “My deepest wish is to live no longer. I bless my life; I have not wasted it. I ask you only to let me go now. My time is up.” A few weeks later, it was.