AUGUST 2 — “Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.” – Käthe Kollwitz
Along the north pavement of Berlin’s Unter den Linden – the grand boulevard that stretches from the Brandenburg Gate to the Berlin Cathedral – stands a neo-classical building known as the Neue Wache. Built in 1816 as a royal guardhouse for troops of the Prussian Kingdom, it was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, one of Germany’s most influential architects.
During the reign of the Nazis from 1933-1945, the Neue Wache served as the site for the annual Heldengedenktag (Heroes’ Commemoration Day). A decade and a half after the end of Second World War, the Communist authorities of East Berlin rebuilt it as a memorial to the victims of Fascism and Militarism, with an eternal flame burning within a glass prism. It was also the site of the Communists’ ceremonial changing of the guard.
Since 1993, it has served as Germany’s Central Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny – from the World Wars to the Holocaust, to post-1945 totalitarian dictatorships – and is the site of ceremonies on Volkstrauertag (The People’s Day of Mourning). Today, the visitor who enters the Neue Wache witnesses no glorification of military triumph or ideological heroism, but encounters instead a deeply moving work of art.
At the centre of the sombre hall, lit by natural light that falls through an open vault, a larger-than-life mother sits cradling her slain child. It is a bronze replica of a sculpture entitled “Mother with Dead Son” by Käthe Kollwitz, a Berlin artist celebrated for her powerful anti-war images.
Kollwitz’s mother and child immediately suggest an allusion to Michaelangelo’s Pietà – the marble statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ upon her lap.
Yet there is something about the bronze mother and son that cannot be traced to the symbolism of the Lamentation of Christ. While a Christian pietà traditionally offers the promise of resurrection and life everlasting in God’s heavenly kingdom, Kollwitz’s pietà offers no redemption for the living or the dead.
Both are shrouded in dark sorrow and regret, both have been irrevocably destroyed in the brutal futility of war. The dead son lies slumped between his mother’s legs, as if returning to the womb – the place of birth is now the place of death. There is no end to human suffering in Kollwitz’s pietà, and what was once sacred and noble has been rendered meaningless.
Revolt and war
Born in 1867 into a politically progressive family, Käthe Kollwitz studied art in Berlin and Munich. After her marriage, Kollwitz settled in a working class neighbourhood of Berlin where her doctor husband was stationed.
It was here that she sharpened her skills doing etchings of proletariat men and women, who interested her aesthetically as well as politically. Kollwitz once remarked: “The working-class woman shows me much more than the ladies who are totally limited by conventional behaviour. The working-class woman shows me her hands, her feet, and her hair. She lets me see the shape and form of her body through her clothes. She presents herself and the expression of her feelings openly, without disguises.”
Kollwitz had met the disapproval of imperial authorities for her acclaimed print cycles, Revolt of the Weavers (1893-98) and Peasant War (1902-08). These intense and meticulous works were partly based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s plays about the Silesian Weaver Uprising of 1844 and the German Peasants’ War of 1525. Hauptmann’s naturalist depiction of the exploitation of the urban and rural working class resonated with Kollwitz’s own radical socio-political views and ignited her artistic imagination.
Kollwitz experienced the bitter hopelessness of war first hand. When World War I – the “Great War” – broke out at the end of July 1914, her youngest son Peter volunteered out of idealism to defend the Fatherland. Although Kollwitz was hardly a nationalistic supporter of the German Reich, she accepted Peter’s decision.
Perhaps it was Kollwitz’s belief in self-sacrifice for a higher cause that made her give Peter her blessing. Perhaps she sensed that Peter’s desire to fight in the Great War was rooted in noble idealism and the spirit of revolt. Her maternal instincts, however, remained ambivalent about sending him off to the battlefields.
An entry in Kollwitz’s diary in October 1914 reads: “Wrote a farewell letter to Peter. As if the child is being cut off the umbilical cord for the second time. The first time to live, the second time to die.”
A few weeks later, in late October, Peter was killed in action at Flanders, Belgium. He was barely 19. Shattered to the core, Kollwitz broke the tragic news to a friend with the words, “Your pretty shawl will no longer be able to warm our boy.”
The art of grieving
Peter’s death plunged Kollwitz into deep sorrow and depression that lasted for many years. Beyond her personal loss and grief, it made Kollwitz question her deep-seated beliefs about war. She went from being convinced, like many of her contemporaries, that Germany had the right and duty to defend itself to the terrible recognition of the futility of war and betrayed idealism.
This sense of betrayal was saturated too with guilt and regret – the guilt and regret of parents having sent their children to die in a war in which there were no victors. All over Europe, the old were left to mourn for their young. Kollwitz struggled with herself for years, trying to find a way, through her art, to grieve for Peter and the millions of dead youth.
Kollwitz’s art became more overtly political and anti-war, while exploring personal yet universal themes of death and mourning. Some of her most compelling work dates from this period, including her “War” sequence (1918) and Farewell and Death portfolio (1923).
In these works, she portrays the unspeakable injustice against the dead and the unbearable suffering of the survivors with stark images that are nevertheless imbued with lyricism. Notably, but not surprisingly, many of her pieces depict the powerlessness of parents in wartime to protect their children from hunger, poverty, illness and death.
Along with posters she created for anti-war campaigns, these works attest to her espousal of pacifism – opposition to war and violence. No cause, no matter how “noble”, could justify the human cost of war.
The bitter reality of war also made Kollwitz question her position on revolutionary violence. While she remained a dedicated socialist, she could no longer accept the necessity of violence to achieve political or ideological ends. “I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dreams of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they were like in reality.”
The end of World War I in 1918 saw the defeat of Germany and triggered a civil conflict known as the German Revolution that brought about the collapse of the imperial government and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919.
Political radicalism, intellectual life and the arts flourished in Berlin between the end of WWI and Hilter’s rise to power in 1933. Post-WWI German Expressionism and Dadaism produced some of Europe’s most powerful anti-war artists including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, all of whom had experienced the horrors of war first hand.
Kollwitz was increasingly influenced by German Expressionist and Bauhaus aesthetics. She strove to find simplified forms in graphics and sculpture that would do away with inessential detail. Inspired by the artist Ernst Barlach, Kollwitz began using the technique of woodcut during this time.
Among her most renowned works is Memorial Sheet for Karl Liebknecht – a woodcut print commemorating the murder of the revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht during the Spartacist Uprising of 1919. The following year, Kollwitz became the first woman to be elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts.
In 1932, 18 years after Peter’s death, Kollwitz completed work on a huge sculpture entitled The Grieving Parents, a war memorial dedicated to Peter and the sacrificed youth of his generation. Two figures – a mother and a father – kneel in grief and regret before the grave of their son, as if asking for forgiveness.
They cannot give each other comfort: each figure wraps their arms around themselves, the distance between them only serving to emphasise their inconsolable sorrow. They are austere manifestations of Kollwitz’s pain of losing Peter and her determination never to reconcile herself with that loss: “There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it.”
The memorial, which now stands adjacent to Peter’s grave at the Vladslo military cemetery in Flanders, is a testament to the senselessness of war – a new kind of total war with no victors or heroes – as well as to the insurmountability of grief and the impossibility of forgetting.
When Hilter rose to power in 1933, Kollwitz was expelled from the Academy. The Nazis prohibited Kollwitz from exhibiting her work and classified her art as “degenerate”, along with scores of German Expressionist and Dada artists.
When the Gestapo threated to deport Kollwitz and her husband to a concentration camp, they resolved that they would commit suicide were that dreaded day to arrive. Despite the Nazis’ attempts to censor and intimidate her, Kollwitz continued to live and work in Germany until her death in 1945, shortly before the end of World War II.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
