A memorial to the fallen volunteers
Soon after receiving news of Peter’s death, Kollwitz conceptualized a memorial to fallen volunteers in honor of her son and his many friends who did not return to their families from the First World War. However, many years were to pass from the idea to the final design. The work demanded a lot of strength, and the artist let it rest repeatedly. In 1919 she discarded the first concept and began a new one in 1924. The mourning parents gradually took shape and were to be placed in the military cemetery in Flanders, where Peter Kollwitz had also found his final resting place.
After the two figures were completed, they were first displayed in the vestibule of the Berlin National Gallery in June 1932 before being transported to Belgium to their final destination. In the presence of Karl and Käthe Kollwitz, they were placed in the German military cemetery near Esen-Roggevelde on July 23, 1932. When the fallen were reburied in 1958, the figures were transferred to the Vladslo-Praedbosch war cemetery in West Flanders, where they remain today.
Another “pair of parents” stands in the church ruins of St. Alban in Cologne. In the ruins of the church, a memorial to the dead of the world wars was erected in 1959. Ewald Mataré was commissioned in 1953 and created the “Parent Couple” with his two master students Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich.
In 2014, another pair of the “Mourning Parents” was erected at the German military cemetery in Rzhev, Russia. There is a high probability that the artist’s grandson Peter Kollwitz, who was killed in action in Russia in 1942, lies in this cemetery.
August 1932
Dear Mr. Gerhart Hauptmann.
I thank you most sincerely for the kind words with which you delighted me on my birthday. Your greeting reached me on my journey to Belgium. My husband and I went there to attend the installation of my sculptures at the military cemetery near Eessen. There lies our second son, he fell at the age of eighteen by Dixmuiden. The figures are a father and a mother. So many young people are resting there. I have been working on the figures for many years and I am grateful and happy that this year they could finally reach their destination. When you see the many cemeteries in Belgium with the endless rows of small wooden crosses, your heart gradually becomes heavier and heavier, almost as though war still continues. Near Dixmuiden are still-preserved trenches of German forces — such terrible relics! But on the opposite side of the Jizera Canal there is now a high tower, on its four sides written in Flemish, French, English and German: “Never Again War”. That instills courage.
I greet you and your wife warmly and my husband does too. In old admiration,
Käthe Kollwitz
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, letter dated August 17, 1932, GH Br NL A: Kollwitz, Käthe, 1, 12, fol.
