Loss of a Child

“Pieta” (“Mother with her Dead Son,”) 1937–38/39 & “Woman with Dead Child”, 1903 Etching

“A mother, animal‐like, naked, the light‐colored corpse of her dead child between her thigh bones and arms, seeks with her eyes, with her lips, with her breath, to swallow back into herself the disappearing life that once belonged to her womb…” Beate Bonus- Jeep in regards to seeing “Woman with Dead Child”. I pair these pieces together because (though they come from different times in Kollwitz’s life) they both cover the same subject, that of a mother’s loss of a child. This is an ever occurring theme in Kollwitz’s life, not only seen in her work but as well as her childhood and later into her adulthood. I touched briefly on her mother’s loss of children, specifically the emotional impact of Benjamin of which haunted her for the rest of her life in her biography. “At times my parents said to me ‘why do you show only the dark side?’ I could say nothing to that. It draws me in. In the beginning I did not feel much empathy with or pity for the proletarian life. But I saw it as beautiful.”

 As we delve into the loss we should remember that though, she like other artist’s (Freud for example), at the time were making work which depicted the Human Condition. Of which did not always consist of loss and pain; they chose to depict the “ugly” aspects of life because of how fascinating they found it, how “real” it felt. Of course her work proceeded to get darker as she experienced further grief and other life occurrences, one of which was after the loss of her son. Even though she knew the likelihood of his death was to come, who could blame a mother for mourning the imminent loss, “[h]er diary speaks of her anguish over this decision, her tears and her subsequent unrelenting pain. Not only was her grief intense, but so was her burden of guilt, a guilt she never really recovered from.” We look back at the images provided and we feel it, all of the pain, the loss, and the “ugly” of what it was like to be a mother during the time of war. To not only lose a son to battle but to have to make hard decisions due to the conditions around them; the second of which we will touch on in the next post.

Coulter, Helga “Pictures on My Analyst’s Walls: Reflections on the Art of Kathe Kollwitz, the Nazis and the Art of Psychoanalyis.” British Journal of Psychotherapy Issue 4, no.32 (2016)
Both Images are from: https://www.kollwitz.de/en/collection

Introduction

“However much we feel we know the war; it is a superimposition of interpretations built up over time. Sometimes it is enough to recognize this and work with it but sometimes we need to look beneath, and quite simply, start afresh”(*) Kathe Kollwitz experienced so much from living during and between both World Wars. Her work, as well as that of other women artists of the time, is a good way of understanding the lives which took place on the “home front.” Where, prior to the spread of their work, what is made sense of war is that of the pro-war propaganda; (that of economic growth and the peace of the domesticated home life of which soldiers would return to) Kollwitz and other proactive artists of the time threw out the idea of peace insisting it were an illusion.

Though civilians are important to manufacturing products they also suffered from violence and war crimes, resulting in a shared scarring mentally and physically by war. Of which admiration to their service was partially deemed as nonsense at the time since they were purely “supplemental” to their participation in the war. (**)Eric Weitz comments that these acts are best depicted by Kollwitz’s work as her “artistic creation did little to assuage her own pain, which mirrored the ache felt by so many German mothers.” (***) Specifically if we look at the piece known as the “Pieta” (“Mother with her Dead Son,”) “She holds her son as if she wants him back in her womb. The unbearable grief is the impossibility of doing so,” (****) of which we will elaborate more so on the psychoanalysis of this work and many like it in the next post.

 (*)Ingrid Sharp. "Kääthe Kollwitz's Witness to War: Gender, Authority, and Reception." Women in German Yearbook 27 (2011): (Introduction 23) 88.

(**)Proctor, Tammy M. Conclusion: Consequences of World War I. In Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, 267-76. NYU Press, 2010.

(***)Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Weimar Centennial Edition, 11. PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton University Press, 2018. 

(****) Coulter, Helga “Pictures on My Analyst’s Walls: Reflections on the Art of Kathe Kollwitz, the Nazis and the Art of Psychoanalyis.” British Journal of Psychotherapy Issue 4, no.32 (2016)

Image Copyright:      

© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Käthe Kollwitz's Bio and the sources I reference throughout the blog

Biography:

Käthe Kollwitz was born July 8, 1867 in Königsberg (a city which was then under Prussian rule but now lies in Russia's domain) and died April 22, 1945 in Moritzburg, Germany. Kollwitz's was the 5th of 7 children, her childhood consisted of religious upbringing, and in in many cases paralleled that of her adulthood in which her mother also lost children and had dealt with much grief in her life because of it an events that haunted her for the rest of her life, personally responsible for the youngest child's (Benjamin) death. In her youth she showed to have a talent for the arts, of which her father encouraged to the point of suggesting she not marry as the likelihood of a woman artist continuing to make art after marriage at the time was low, though his efforts were only slightly in vain as she did meet and fall in love with Karl. Though she was married and started a family she did not let it stop her from making art. As a humanitarian Karl's job as a physician allowed for them to be among the people of which her art spoke of. She won a few awards in her life time, and much to the Kaiser's dismay continued to make work that called for action to be taken in the betterment of civilian lives, even after the Nazi regime went through their giant purge of art. Kollwitz later lost her youngest Son and Grandson (both named Peter) to the wars, around the time her Grandson died her husband passed as well., these events had a great impact on her production of work as she was heavily depressed. Not long after this her home was destroyed in an air raid during the war which caused her to move to the Moritzburg estate of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony, where she lived the rest of her life. Käthe Kollwitz was an amazing artist who dreamed of family, love, and something more than pacifism, that of a world that was entirely anti-war.

Bibliography:

Coulter, Helga “Pictures on My Analyst’s Walls: Reflections on the Art of Kathe Kollwitz, the Nazis and the Art of Psychoanalyis.” British Journal of Psychotherapy Issue 4, no.32 (2016)

Ingrid Sharp. "Kääthe Kollwitz's Witness to War: Gender, Authority, and Reception." Women in German Yearbook 27 (2011): 87-107.

Piotrowski, Piotr, Art Beyond Borders Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe. Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Jerôme Bazin. (1945-1989) Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2016.

Price, Dorothy. Between Us Sleeps Our Child—art: Creativity, Identity, and the Maternal in the Works of Marianne Von Werefkin and Her Contemporaries. In Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle, edited by Malycheva Tanja and Wünsche Isabel, 106-22. LEIDEN; BOSTON: Brill, 2017

Proctor, Tammy M. Conclusion: Consequences of World War I. In Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, 267-76. NYU Press, 2010.

Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Weimar Centennial Edition, 7-40. PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton University Press, 2018.