A harrowing collection of works by one of Germany’s most acclaimed female artists…
Berlin’s Käthe Kollwitz Museum is one of those Berlin attractions not particularly recommended for anyone looking to cheer themselves up on a rainy day. This permanent exhibition, which opened in 1986, was formerly housed in a charming nineteenth-century villa next to the Literaturhaus on Fasanenstraße, but since 2022 exists inside the opulent confines of Schloss Charlottenburg.
It presents an extensive range of the German artist’s work, embracing “crucial aspects of life suffering…poverty and death, hunger and war… as well as the truly happy and positive sides of life.” Those “truly happy and positive” parts are outweighed by the darker stuff somewhat unanimously. The self-portraits are a case in point: of the dozen or so on display—Käthe made around a hundred or so throughout her life, calling them ‘psychological milestones’, many of them unflattering—only one shows her laughing. It’s likely the only smile you’ll see during the exhibition, either on the walls or on the faces of any visitors.
The titles of the charcoal and crayon sketches, woodcuts, lithographs and sculptures that fill the villa’s three floors say it all. Poverty, Unemployed, The Lament, Battlefield, Raped, Killed in Action… these are not uplifting works. The artist once said that while she drew, she “wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate.”
Withdraw she did not. For nearly five decades she trained her compassionate yet unflinching gaze on those who needed it most. The exploited and oppressed; the desperate and needy; the dead and the about to die.
Kollwitz (née Schmidt) herself was born into a comfortable East Prussian middle class family in 1867. A nervous and sensitive child, given to tempers and nightmares, she began drawing when she was fourteen, attended the Berlin School of Art in 1884 and later studied in Munich. She marri…