Paul Sullivan on the eternal relevance of one of Germany’s most acclaimed social realist artists…
Berlin’s Käthe Kollwitz Museum opened in 1986, more or less the same time as its sister museum opened in Cologne (1985). Putting aside the curious and slightly disconcerting fact that it took four decades for Germany to open an official space for one of its most famous pre-war artists, the Berlin museum was, at least, set inside a graceful nineteenth-century villa that formed a classy cultural triumvirate with the equally elegant Literaturhaus next door (since relocated to Moabit) and the nearby Grisebach auction house—all of them located on Charlottenburg’s decidedly debonair Fasanenstraße.
In 2022, due to a heartening increase in visitor attendance and the difficulties of modernising the old villa, it was decided to move the museum to the former theatre building of the Schloss Charlottenburg. Fortunately, this new space is not only just as charming—equally quiet and private, with similar wooden parquet floors as its predecessor—but also offers barrier-free accessibility and double the amount of space for more works to be displayed as well as special exhibitions.
The title of the museum’s permanent exhibition, “And yet it is art… ”, is taken from a note in one of Kollwitz’s 1922 diary entries, and offers visitors a comprehensive retrospective of her life’s work, which spans charcoal and crayon sketches, etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and sculptures. These are displayed more or less chronologically with the occasional thematic breakout, and include loans from other collections and private lenders. It’s possible to whizz around the whole thing in half an hour—but since you’ll likely be stopped in your tracks or at least want to linger, it’s best to plan for more time.
The self-portrait of a smiling Kollwitz that greets visitors upon entering the exhibition is a deft curatorial touch: of the dozens of self-portraits the artist made in her life—which she called, with a hint of grim determination, “psychological milestones”—this is literally the only one that doesn’t show her looking stony-faced, exhausted, or both. While slightly misleading in that sense, it serves nonetheless as a reminder that despite the harrowing themes of her work and her tragedy-filled biography, Käthe Kollwitz was by many accounts a positive and sunny personality.
Look more closely and you’ll see the self-portrait is signed “Schm.”—an abbreviation for Schmidt, her maiden name—and was made when she was in her early twenties, just before she met and married the doctor, Karl Kollwitz. Having been born in East Prussia’s Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in 1867, the fifth of seven children, two of whom died in childbirth, she was allegedly a fairly nervous and sensitive child and took up drawing as a young teen. Her father encouraged her, despite the challenges she would inevitably face as a woman in a male-dominated realm, based partly on the notion that she might be too “homely” to marry.
In fact she did both, taking lessons in Königsberg with the painter Gustav Naujok and the copperplate engraver Rudolf Mauer before gravitating towards printmaking techniques, and also marrying Karl Kollwitz, her brother’s childhood friend, in 1891, just shy of her 24th birthday. The couple moved to Berlin, settling into an apartment at No. 46 Weißenburger Straße (renamed Kollwitzstraße in 1947), and a year later they had their first son, Hans; their second, Peter, followed in 1896.
Although her family was ultimately bourgeois, she had several left-leaning relatives that informed her politics from a young age. Her grandfather was a rebellious Protestant cleric; her left-leaning lawyer father had been involved in the 1848 revolution and re-trained as a stonemason after being debarred for being a member of the banned Free Congregation of Königsberg; and her elder brother Konrad, who introduced young Käthe to Goethe, was also—like their father—a member of the SPD. Her husband, Karl, was political too, not only an active member of the Youth Welfare Committee in Prenzlauer Berg and the German League for Human Rights, but the co-founder of the Social Democratic Doctors’ Association and author of numerous political essays.
Kollwitz never joined the SPD, nor the later KPD (German Communist Party), but she did read SPD founder August Bebel’s…