At the end of July 1932, Germany was to elect a new Reichstag, and the NSDAP was threatening to become the strongest force. In an “Urgent Appeal”, Käthe and Karl Kollwitz, together with Albert Einstein, Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) and many other well-known personalities, called for the SPD and KPD to unite as a “united workers’ front”. The appeal remained politically inconsequential.
In February 1933, the “Urgent Appeal” again called for the left-wing parties to unite against Hitler, again signed by Käthe and Karl together with Heinrich Mann and other personalities. Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Mann were then forced to resign from the Academy of Arts. Max Liebermann resigned as honorary president of the Academy in May and also resigned, and Liebermann died in 1935. Kollwitz was one of the few who accompanied him on his last journey. Karl Kollwitz’s health insurance licence was temporarily withdrawn and son Hans, by now a school doctor in Berlin, also briefly lost his job.
At the beginning of 1934, the artist vacated her master studio at the Academy and moved into new rooms in the Klosterstraße studio community in autumn. There she finished work on the large sculpture Mother with Two Children and had the group cast in cement and hewn in shell limestone. The stone casting was to be presented for the first time at the exhibition on her 70th birthday. Finding a venue for this exhibition became increasingly difficult. As early as 1935, her works were removed from several exhibitions, and then in 1936, at short notice, both sculptures submitted by Kollwitz for the anniversary show on Berlin sculptors at the Akademie der Künste were removed. In 1937, confiscations followed in eleven German museums as part of the “Degenerate Art” campaign. Her birthday exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery was banned at the last minute, but was nevertheless accessible to insiders. Kollwitz finally presented the seven lithographs of the Death series, begun in 1934, in her studio.
