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)

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