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