When Germany entered World War I in August 1914, many families went in a period of anxiety that all too often turned into a time of mourning. At the end of October, the Kollwitz family received news of the death of their son Peter, who had fallen as a war volunteer on the Belgian front. This became a significant juncture for Käthe Kollwitz, who had persuaded her husband to allow her underage son to take part in the war. In the years that followed, she processed her grief, her sense of guilt, and the consequences of the war through her art, and in 1922 completed seven woodcuts in the series War.
The younger son Peter (1896-1914) wanted to become an artist. He started his studies in late 1913. When in August 1914 World War I began, Peter and his friends immediately returned from a hiking trip to Norway to enlist as volunteers.
Since Peter was still a minor, he needed his parents’ permission to do so. Karl Kollwitz wanted to refuse him, but with the support of his mother, Peter managed to persuade him. At that time the family was still convinced that it was a necessary and short defensive war. After some weeks of basic military training Peter was sent to the front line in Belgium. He died the night of October 22, 1914.
The illustration above shows the draft sketch for the eponymous second sheet of the series War from 1922/23. In contrast to the final woodcut version (illustration below), this pencil sketch shows only four figures: the drum-beating Death and three war volunteers who are carried away by Death. In the woodcut, the five young men following Death stand for their son Peter and his friends who died in the war.
The illustration above shows a study for the lithography Mothers (fig. below) from 1919, which Käthe Kollwitz worked on for the cycle War and eventually discarded.
As so often, Käthe Kollwitz took herself and her children as models for this study. In her diary on 6 February 1919 she recorded: “I have drawn the mother enclosing her two children, it is I with my own children born in the flesh, with Peterchen.” After seeing Barlach’s woodcuts in the summer of 1920, she completed the war cycle in the technique of the woodcut.
In contrast to the woodcut, the mothers in the previous, discarded lithograph are arranged in a gestaffeltered form and side by side. They appear less uniform and fortified than in the woodcut version and in the sculpture The Tower of Mothers.
