Essay by Lisa Seidlitz, Associate Professor of German

In her art, Käthe Kollwitz often depicted the working class, whom she considered more beautiful and worthy of artistic representation than the bourgeoisie (Kearns 81). For example, various works show a peasants' uprising, families despairing because of their poverty, and mothers agonizing over their children's hunger. Later in her life, she created political posters "to combat injustice, poverty, alcoholism, hunger, infant mortality, and other prevalent social ills" (Bachert 120) and she wanted to have an effect on her era through her art (Prelinger 79). However, even more works depict mothers and children in less clearly defined settings, and for much of her life she was not politically active. This piece, as much of her work, is not a call to political action but a depiction of universal human suffering.

This piece features a motif that was common in her work: a mother mourning a dead child. In this image, we see a mother grasping her child's head to her own. The eyes of both are closed, and one could believe that the image depicts only a tender moment between mother and child, were it not for the skull-like depiction of death in the upper left corner. The two heads pressed tightly together at first glance create a single face; the noses and mouths of mother and child are aligned as the mother clasps her child to her. Beyond the two heads is darkness, and the bodies are barely hinted at. The simplicity of the image is deliberate, since Kollwitz rejected the "use of too much technique as incompatible with the depiction of painful topics" (Prelinger 79). The piece is unsentimental but does not lack emotion: the mother's anguish is evident in her tight grasp of the dead child. Kollwitz produced many such images of loss and mourning, even before she lost her younger son Peter during the First World War; this etching predates that loss by several years. This image gives few hints about the identity of the subjects or of the setting of the scene, leaving only the basics: a mother, a dead child, and grief.