Kathe Kollwitz on Sacrifice, Mourning, and Reparation: An Essay in Psychoaesthetics

Abstract

When Peter, the artist's eighteen-year-old son was killed in battle in 1914, Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was 47 years old and an established Berlin artist. Her graphic works and sculptures, her diary and letters express not only a mother's intense grief, but also the inner turmoil, the uncertainty, the questions about the meaning of sacrifice in war with which she struggled for many years after. It is of interest to follow her evolution closely, since the path she took to her eventual pacifism was long and arduous. For what she confronted was the powerful ideology that surfaces repeatedly to acclaim and justify death in war: the call for voluntary sacrifice of life, one's own and that of family, friends, lovers, in the name of higher values, be it honor, freedom, religion, country. It was just this view, of course, that pervaded the conceptual horizon at the beginning of World War I to the point of eclipsing pacifist protests and prompting large numbers of idealistic youths-English, French, German, Russian-to volunteer to fight, among whom the artist's two sons. Far from being limited to male acclaim, the will to sacrifice was approved and promoted by women across the political spectrum. Thus Gertrud Baumer, who headed the Geman bourgeois women's movement, and the socialist leader Clara Zetkin agreed that mothers in particular understand and accept the necessity for one generation to shed its blood for the good of those to come.' Although Zetkin urged women to dissuade their