Kollwitz had repeatedly dealt with death in her work. The lithographic cycle Death, which comprises eight sheets, was created between 1934 and 1937 as a major work of her old age.
The plan for a print cycle with this theme had apparently been on Käthe Kollwitz’s mind for years. Diary entries from 1934 provide information about the beginning of the creative process, as well as the prevailing mood of the artist.
“Had resolved in this time, in which I can not work sculpturally, to carry out my old plan, graphically make a series of sheets on the theme of death and then finish with it. First of all, getting used to the new working space. The balcony room is quite small, but intimate. Since I brought the group [Mutter mit zwei Kindern] on the floor, space is enough. But in this hot summer almost daily sun. In general, this constant radiant weather is not favorable for work on the subject of death. The effort is great.”
Käthe Kollwitz, entry August 1934. Diaries, p. 677f.
With the Nazi takeover in 1933, Käthe Kollwitz lost her professorship and with it her studio space at the Prussian Academy of Arts. After she had to work at home again in Weißenburger Straße in the meantime, she managed to rent a studio space in the former Royal Art School at Klosterstraße 75 from 1934 to 1940. Here she worked next to the sculpture Mother with two children on the sheets from the series Death.
Eight encounters with death
“I had the idea that now, at my real age, I would perhaps be able to produce works – on this subject – that would go into depth. As old Goethe says: ‘Thoughts, hitherto unthinkable …’. It is not the case. The time of aging is harder than old age itself, but more productive. Precisely because death is already visible behind everything, it worries more the imagination. The threatening is more exciting than when one stands closer before it and yet does not overlook it in its greatness, indeed no longer has such respect for it.”
Käthe Kollwitz, entry August 1934. Diaries, p. 677f.
Death holding girl in lap
Death appears here as a maternal figure, on his lap a young woman who nestles against him seeking comfort. Her blackened eyes and the open standing mouth suggest that death has already arrived.
Death in water
This sheet is a depiction of a small family going to their death. Three figures are seen: a father, a mother and a child, whose lifeless bodies float in the water. While the father sinks erect and with his mouth open, the mother bends over the child and sinks into the depths. It was a tragedy that was not uncommon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cases of suicide had a strong presence in the daily press, which clearly shows the interest and preoccupation of contemporaries with this social problem.
Call of Death
The sheet Call of death from 1937 depicts an elderly woman who is touched by a hand. The bony hand symbolizes death, to which the woman willingly turns with closed eyes. In 1941, Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony acquired the print at the Karl Buchholz bookstore for the Friedrich August II collection. He was an admirer of her art and invited Kollwitz, who had fled the bombing war to Nordhausen, to Moritzburg in 1944. The artist died at the “Rüdenhof” in April 1945. Her urn was brought to Berlin in the summer and buried in the family grave at the Berlin-Friedrichsfelde cemetery. Käthe Kollwitz designed the tomb relief ‘Rest in the Peace of His Hands’ in 1934, after her brother-in-law Georg Stern had died.
