“Moabit Riots”
Together with her husband, Käthe Kollwitz also took part in demonstrations herself and drove through the city to accompany workers’ protests as an eyewitness.
In September 1910, the riots on Sickingenstrasse in Moabit, one of the city’s most homogeneous working-class neighborhoods, were significant in social history. They are now called the “Moabit Riots.”
Workers from the Ernst Kupfer coal company went on strike for days to demand higher wages. At the time, they were paid a low wage of 43 pfennigs per hour, and a shift lasted 12 to 14 hours. At the same time, rents and food prices had risen by a third in the previous ten years. The company refused to negotiate with the workers. Instead, it hired professional, armed strikebreakers from Hamburg, and with that the struggle for a few pennies more per hour escalated into bloody riots.
Heinrich Zille documented life in Berlin in his black and white photographs. Here a coal yard in the Danckelmannstraße 16a.
Around 30,000 residents and workers from the entire neighborhood protested, and about 1,000 police officers quelled the uprising. Two people died, about 150 were seriously injured. Kollwitz went to Sickingenstrasse and Beusselstrasse several times and recorded her impressions in drawings, including “Razzia (Coal Strike)”.
Today, Sickingenstrasse is still dominated by commerce. A company for industrial packaging is located on the site of the Kupfer coal company.
