Witness to War

8/17/2019 Witness to War

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Käthe Kollwitz’s Witness to War:Gender, Authority, and Reception

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Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is one of Germany’s most popular and successful

graphic artists and sculptors, but her witness to World War I has often been over-

looked or misinterpreted. Consequently, the authority based on direct experiencehas gone unacknowledged. This article compares two cycles from Weimar Ger-

many: Kollwitz’s seven woodcuts, War (Krieg, 1923–24), and Otto Dix’s fifty

etchings, The War (Der Krieg, 1922–33), and argues that the previous reception

of both artists’ works made gendered assumptions about the experience of war as

well as the creative process. This reception tends to stress the emotionality of Koll-

witz’s work, while overemphasizing Dix’s ironic detachment and antiwar stance

at the expense of a deeper psychological complexity. By contrast, I demonstrate

that responding to both artists on equal terms as moral witnesses to war enables a

deeper understanding of their art and challenges and expands our understanding

of the nature of war itself.

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was one of the most significant and

successful graphic artists and sculptors in Germany in the 1920s. In

January 1919 she became the first woman to be elected to the Prussian

Academy of Arts, and from July that year she held (though seldom used)

the title of Professor. Although the financial rewards remained modest

(Bohnke-Kollwitz 27), she received much recognition for her art until

the National Socialists objected to her political affiliations, dismissed her

from her position in 1933, and prevented exhibitions of her work. In the

decades since she began exhibiting, she has been positioned variously as

a left-wing political artist, even a revolutionary producing crude socialist

propaganda, a pacifist artist protesting against World War I, and a sen-

timental, even kitsch artist whose intense moral and social engagement

was out of step with the spirit of an age more attuned to the ironic detach-

ment of Otto Dix and the apocalyptic visions of Max Beckman.1 More

recently, she has attracted the positive interest of feminist historians and


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art critics, with monographs by Kearns in 1976, Krahmer in 1981, and an

essay by Comini in 1982 that highlights the discriminatory, gendered na-

ture of art reception through a comparison with Edvard Munch.

At the time of writing, Kollwitz’s critical reputation is secure, exhi-

bitions of her work frequent, and she enjoys enormous popularity.2 Buteven so, an important aspect of the artist’s intentions has been consis-

tently overlooked: she has rarely been categorized, discussed, or exhib-

ited as an artist bearing witness to war. While Kollwitz’s work, especially

the monument to her fallen son, The Parents ( Die Eltern), now standingin Vladso cemetery, where he is buried, has often been seen as central to

the commemoration of the Great War, it is rarely accorded the weight and

authority of firsthand account. This anomaly is revealed especially clear-

ly if we compare her war cycle, War (Krieg, 1922–23), with Otto Dix’sThe War ( Der Krieg, 1923–24) in terms of intention, content, execution,and reception.3

My aim in looking at the two cycles together is to make a case for

moving beyond an over-marked, gendered reading which has had the ef-

fect of masking the oppositional, political dimension of Kollwitz’s work

and overemphasizing Dix’s antiwar stance at the expense of a deeper

psychological complexity. By this I mean that Dix’s witness to the war,

which reflects and embraces the entirety of what he saw and felt, has beenplaced too narrowly within the masculine narrative of disillusionment ex-

pected of the veteran front soldier. Likewise, Dix’s ironic detachment has

been overread in stark contrast to the excessive emotionality attributed

to Kollwitz. This inquiry is very much in the spirit of Gail Braybon’s

exhortation to reexamine the evidence for shared assumptions about the

war: “However much we feel we know the war: it is a superimposition

of interpretations built up over time. Sometimes it is enough to recognize

this and work with it, but sometimes we need to look beneath and, quite

simply, start afresh” (Introduction 23). I will argue that reception of both

artists’ work has become overlaid with gendered assumptions about the

nature of war and in Kollwitz’s case also about her motivation and cre-

ative process. In overemphasizing her status as a bereaved mother, her

supreme artistry and her insights as a “moral witness” to war have largely

been overlooked.4 I ask, too, in what ways it challenges and expands our

understanding of the nature of war if we respond to both Kollwitz and

Dix on equal terms.

The importance of cultural representation of the war through film, lit-


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responses to World War I has been recognized and extensively explored

in recent years, but while the current account allows historians an un-

derstanding of war that goes beyond the battlefield, this “heterogeneity

and richness” (Horne xxiv) is not matched by the popular cultural mean-

ing attached to World War I.5 Nor has art history been quick to embracethis heterogeneity. Overwhelmingly, studies and exhibitions of war art-

ists have included only male depictions or categorized women’s art as

reflecting something peripheral to the war itself. The urge of the artist to

bear witness is far from new or limited to Dix and Kollwitz; it is also a

prime motivation of a number of the artists whose work can be found on-

line in the Art of the First World War exhibition. This UNESCO-fundedsite brings together 110 paintings by 54 artists, including eleven works

by Dix (by far the greatest number by an individual artist), but not oneby Kollwitz. All the artists included in this exhibition are male, sever-

al of whom had very limited (Grosz, Kirchner, Masereel) or ancillary

(Spencer) involvement in the conflict. Elsewhere, too, far more attention

is paid to Dix’s The War than to Kollwitz’s War ; for example, while Dix’scycle is extensively discussed in Paret’s Imagined Battles: Reflections ofWar in European Art (104–07), Kollwitz’s is not even mentioned.6 Thereare exceptions, and the most recent trend is toward a more inclusive ap-

proach, signaled for example by the 2009 exhibition at the Imperial WarMuseum in Manchester, England, titled Witness: Women War Artists, andby the inclusion of both Kollwitz’s and Dix’s cycles under the theme of

“War” in MoMA’s major exhibition of expressionist art running from

March to July 2011.

Due in part to the vast numbers of non-professional soldiers involved,

historical emphasis in the aftermath of World War I placed the front-

line experience (Fronterlebnis) at the center of the war story. The privi-

leged position of the soldier meant that for a long time only those with

direct combat experience were deemed able to tell the truth about the

war. Hynes’s 1997 study, The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to ModernWar , makes this point clearly indeed, beginning “with the assertion ofthe authority of ordinary men’s witness” and reminding us that “about

war, men who were there make absolute claims for their authority” (1).

For Hynes, soldiers’ tales are essentially “experience books,” telling the

reader (or more likely reminding him, as most memoirs were primarily

addressing initiates) what had happened and how it had felt (25).

Bearing witness, telling the truth about the war is in one view only


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witz, middle-aged, female, and civilian, set out to do exactly this. In her

diaries and letters and in her War cycle she claimed absolute authorityin expressing a central truth about the war on the basis of bitter personal

experience. On 10 November 1914 she wrote in her diary: “Haven’t Karl

and I been through this war a hundred times more than some of thosewho are surrounded by grenades?”7 To the French peace activist and au-

thor Romain Rolland she wrote of her emerging War cycle on 21 October1921, “These pictures should be shown everywhere and tell people: this

is how it was in the war, that’s what we all had to bear throughout these

inexpressibly difficult years.”8 Especially in the context of Weimar Ger-

many throughout the 1920s, where right-wing forces were appropriating

the myth of a glorified war experience to boost nationalism and prepare

for another war, oppositional accounts such as her and Dix’s war cyclestake on an urgent political dimension and deserve attention.

The Cycles

Kollwitz produced War , a series of seven woodcuts, in 1922–23. Dix cre-ated his cycle of fifty etchings in 1923–24, and both were included in the

Never Again War ( Nie wieder Krieg) exhibition of 1924, which positioned

them as antiwar artists of the political left. This cycle was—for neitherartist—the final or full expression of their wartime experiences. Dix spent

almost the entire war as a combatant, and his cycle documents his direct

experience on the eastern and western fronts, whereas Kollwitz remained

in Berlin throughout and her work presents war from the perspective of

the “home front.” Both artists make skillful use of the print media strong-

ly associated with expressionism, etching, and woodcuts, revealing “an

extraordinary ability to marry technique to expression” (Whitford 184).

In choosing his medium, Dix was consciously placing his cycle intothe tradition of Callot and Goya, who had used etching techniques for

their war cycles, Misfortunes of War (1633) and The Disasters of War (1810–15), respectively. Dix uses a range of intaglio techniques: etch-

ing on soft and hard ground, aquatint, and drypoint to build up his ac-

count. This allows him to capture very fine details in some plates as well

as the textures of pollution and decomposition appropriate to others:

“[T]he corrosive qualities of aquatint were exploited to suggest physical

and moral decay” (Whitford 184). This method is well suited to Dix’snarrative, which seeks to convey truth through a series of specific, in-


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Dix’s marking of events by place-name, date, or the phrases “seen on”

(“gesehen am”) or “found on” (“gefunden am”) that occur in over half the

plates nevertheless adds up to a claim to the authority of direct witness.

Though largely self-taught, Kollwitz was skilled in engraving, having

used it to great effect for part of A Weavers’ Rebellion (1893–98) and forher later cycle Peasants’ War (1903–08), and was also adept at lithography,

which she used for a number of her most compelling postwar images.9

After struggling to find a medium in which to express the emotional in-

tensity of the war years, she turned away from her earlier techniques in fa-

vor of the woodcut after seeing the expressive power of work exhibited by

Ernst Barlach at the Berlin Secession in 1920 (Bohnke-Kollwitz 476). For

the cycle she chose the hard, practically grainless pearwood, working over

several months at achieving a coherence of line, images, form, and shapein order to communicate with her audience as directly and clearly as pos-

sible. For Prelinger, “Kollwitz compressed a wealth of associations into

simple motifs. [. . .] Everything is expression, gesture and iconic form”

(“Kollwitz Reconsidered” 59). Unlike Dix’s sprawling account, Kollwitz’s

woodcuts are lean, reducing all she has come to understand about the war

into seven starkly iconic images. With none of the specificity or the nar-

rative detail of Dix’s account, “unencumbered by particulars that would

restrict them to a specific time or place” (“Kollwitz Reconsidered” 59),

Kollwitz’s War , with its generic titles and pared-down, expressive images

makes claims to a more universal truth about the nature of war.

Otto Dix’s The War: A Soldier’s Tale

In September 1915, Dix volunteered for the front from his machine gun-

ner’s training camp at Bautzen, apparently fearful that he would miss out

on the direct experience of war, anticipated in his art with a mixture ofrepulsion and fascination, eagerness and apprehension. For the art critics

Otto Conzelmann (211–51) and Linda McGreevy, his attitude to combat

reflects a Nietzschean desire to embrace the totality of human experi-

ence.10 McGreevy points to marked passages in Dix’s copy of Nietzsche’s

Twilight of the Gods: “the tragic artist is not a pessimist. It is preciselyhe who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence” (273). In

1914–15, before his first experience of combat, Dix explored his ideas

about the war in a series of self-portraits that reflect different aspects ofthe anticipated war experience—the euphoria and intoxication, but also


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The 1924 war cycle represents a more reflected position. It was re-

ceived at the time, by both admirers and detractors, as a clear and unam-

biguous indictment of war, exposing not only the horrors of death and in-

jury on the battlefield but also debunking dominant nationalistic myths of

steel-eyed soldiers in heroic action. Instead, the cycle shows battered, ve-nal soldiers retreating and advancing, wounded and dead, bored, priapic

and lousy in the trenches, drunk and randy behind the lines. Dix presents

the lives of ordinary soldiers with an uncompromising refusal to conceal

their flawed humanity: physiognomies depicted range from the timidly

intellectual to the brutish, and every so often Dix is there himself.12 Vari-

ous themes appear seemingly at random, reflecting the inchoate nature

of the experience and the mechanisms of memory. Like the war itself, it

is impossible for an individual to gain an overview. Only seven plates ofthe cycle show soldiers in combat and its aftermath, nine depict soldiers

engaged in front-line activities, and four present life behind the lines.

Women are present in six of the plates, in three as victims of aerial bom-

bardment, while three record the activities of prostitutes behind the lines.

Eight are of the landscape at the front, while the largest number (twenty-

two) deal with suffering and death. The boundaries between these themes

are fluid: death—for Hynes the “truest truth, the realest reality” of war

(Soldiers’ Tale 19)—permeates everything.Reception of the cycle stresses the authority of the artist, the authentic-

ity of his experience. For Conzelmann, Dix probably gave the unknown

soldier “his only true monument” (167), while Dix himself claimed that

“no one else has seen the reality of war as I have.”13 This claim to author-

ity is underlined by the pen-and-ink drawing (fig. 1) used as the frontis-

piece to one edition, This Is How I Looked as a Soldier (So sah ich alsSoldat aus).14 This image sets the context for the cycle, identifying Dix as

“the man who was there.” Unlike the hesitant boy in Self-Portrait as Tar-get , this soldier has seen action, and the image has elements of self-paro-dy as well as the uncompromising honesty and mordant wit that charac-

terizes the cycle as whole. Although Dix is unshaven, cigarette clenched

between his teeth, and his uniform and helmet are damaged and torn,

his expression of steely-eyed endurance does not suggest vulnerability.

The soldier’s overdetermined masculinity is evident in the sheer size of

his gun: he is almost, but not quite, unable to bear the weight of his own

manhood. Dix is present in other images, too, retreating from battle in

Battleweary Troops Go Back behind the Lines, Battle of the Somme ( Ab-


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ly lost than the rest of his company in what could be mud, fog, or soupy

human remains in Machine-gun Squad Advances, Somme, November1916 ( Maschinengewehrzug geht vor, Somme, November 1916 ). In RollCall of Those Who Made It Back ( Appell der Zurückgekehrten) we see amotley crew of exhausted and ill-matched soldiers, their disarray in stark

contrast to the officer’s telltale neatness. Dix appears at his most pug-

nacious and proletarian with his stevedore’s arms protruding from tornsleeves, and in Surprise Attack at a Sentry Post (Überfall einer Schleich-

Fig. 1. Otto Dix, This Is How I Looked as a Soldier. The Online Otto Dix Project, http://www

.ottodix.org/index/catalog-item/ 133.053.html.


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in the whole cycle, it appears to be Dix himself, with his characteristic

lantern jaw, who is violently stabbing an enemy soldier at close range,

his expression showing an atavistic pleasure in unleashed violence rarely

encountered in cultural representation.15 In this way, Dix associates him-

self with even the nastiest instincts of masculine nature unleashed by thewar. For art critic G. H. Hamilton, “it was truly this quality of unmiti-

gated truth, truth to the most commonplace and vulgar experiences, as

well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that gave his work

a strength and consistency attained by no other contemporary artist” (qtd.

in Osborne 2).

Dix’s development has been placed firmly into the traditional frame-

work of the soldier’s journey from naive enthusiasm to the utter disillu-

sionment of experience, an antiwar stance clearly marked as male as it isrooted in an experiential truth only accessible to the ex-combatant.16 His-

torian Jay Winter claims, for example, that Dix’s postwar work “dropped

any element of celebration of the warrior” (Sites of Memory 160), andthere is certainly no room for traditional action heroes in Dix’s cycle. His

soldiers are predominantly passive, reduced to the infant state of satis-

fying basic desires and bodily functions, naked survival instincts inter-

spersed with the hunt for physical comfort: “The solider eats his grub,

drinks his booze and shags the whores, and when his time is up, hedies.”17 Dix’s searing, frequently grotesque images, which Starr Figura

rightly claims are still “some of the most relentlessly difficult things to

look at ever created in art,” force us to confront the effects of industrial

warfare on the human body in image after image of men suffering and

dying, blown to pieces, caught on barbed wire, and left to rot without

burial, their dead faces blackened by gas in ghastly close-up or distorted

in sheer animal terror.18 Yet, Dix is recording all this degradation and hor-

ror not to deny the possibility of heroic masculinity but to redefine it.

Heroism for him is nothing if not the power to endure in the face of bes-

tial conditions, and not only to endure, but to embrace even these darkest

and lowest aspects of human existence. The overall effect, while far from

celebratory, is nonetheless oddly affirmative: “If you want to be heroes

you have to affirm even this revolting stuff. Once you’ve been down to

the lowest depths: the lice, the hunger, the fear, shitting your pants, then

you’re heroes; if not—just heroes from a storybook.”19 As an intensively

lived personal account, Dix’s cycle thoroughly and effectively debunks

the romantic myth about the transcendence of the war experience. At the


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the cycle retains elements of the Nietzschean mix of fascination and re-

pugnance that characterized his earlier work.20

Dix’s cycle fits well into the tradition of the soldier’s tale, the more so

because he does not claim to tell the whole truth about the war or even

form anyone’s opinions about it: “Artists shouldn’t try to improve andconvert: they’re far too insignificant for that. They must only bear wit-

ness” (qtd. in McGreevy 325).

Käthe Kollwitz’s War: Transforming Emotion into Art

In December 1922, Kollwitz wrote to her colleague Erna Krüger: “No one

will suspect that these 7 middle-sized woodcuts represent long years of

work and yet that is indeed the case. Contained within them is my struggleto come to terms with that section of life between the years 1914–1918.”21

Women are central to Kollwitz’s wartime experience, which dwells on the

continuation of the war beyond 1918 through its effect on the civilian vic-

tims—widows, children, parents, and society as a whole. At the heart of

Kollwitz’s own war is the loss of her younger son, Peter, who was killed

in October 1914 at the age of eighteen, and the guilt she felt at having

helped him to volunteer while still under age. In 1914, Kollwitz, like most

Germans, accepted the war as a defensive struggle for national survival.Like many artists who volunteered or were drawn into the war, she had

expected the greatness of the experience to enlarge her vision and find

expression in her art.22 And like many other women, she was committed

to the concept of sacrifice for a higher ideal, a concept to which she re-

turns again and again in her diary. Kollwitz felt that she was complicit in

Peter’s self-sacrifice, led on by literary and biblical allusions to Abraham,

whose own sacrifice was not carried through, and the oft-repeated story

of the young man who threw himself into the abyss that threatened Romein order to close it up. On 10 October 1916, Kollwitz writes: “The abyss

still hasn’t closed. It has swallowed millions and it is still yawning.”23 In

her diaries and in her cycle, she sets the abstract concepts of redemptive

sacrifice, of death for the nation, and her belief in life after death against

the overwhelming significance of the embodied individual who dies and

is gone: “What was important was this form, [. . .] this unique living per-son, this human being.”24

The first plate, The Sacrifice ( Das Opfer ) shows the paradox of moth-ers’ wartime duty to send their sons into danger, which was dealt with


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for many women, including Kollwitz herself. This version of the motif,

which Kollwitz produced in several media before settling on the wood-

cut, shows a mother torn between her desire to protect and her duty to

relinquish. What was in reality the parting of a middle-aged woman from

a uniformed young man gains heightened intensity by its depiction as thereluctant handing over of a naked, vulnerable infant. The mother’s arms

offer up the sleeping baby, but they also appear to repress the sacrifice.

However, neither the encircling arms nor the womblike darkness of the

cloak can fully enclose and shelter the two figures.25

The second plate is the only one of the cycle to depict soldiers, and

this is the problem that cannot be resolved, the absence of the soldiers

and the gap it has left. Although its title, The Volunteers ( Die Frei-

willigen) suggests an act of volition, the image has a dreamlike qualitythat belies this. The “volunteers,” her son among them, trancelike, unsee-

ing, are being led off to their deaths, their ecstatic faces at once transfig-

ured and contorted in anticipation of the agony that is to come. Of the

group of four friends who rushed to volunteer to fight in the war in 1914,

only one survived beyond 1918. Kollwitz, age forty-seven in 1914, was

genuinely moved, even awestruck by the uncompromising purity of the

young men’s desire to sacrifice themselves and serve their country. On

13 August 1914 she writes: “They offer themselves up with joy. Theyoffer themselves like a pure, clear flame rising up to heaven,” and on 15

December: “What he gave me [. . .] was something the like of which I

had never known before. The piety of these young souls, the pure clar-

ity of their flames. My young sons, my beloved flames, who led us rath-

er than we you. Born of us, yet growing beyond us and taking us with

you.”26 Later, in October 1916, she came to see that this intensity of feel-

ing could all too easily be manipulated and that the duty of age was to

protect the young from the consequences of their own uncompromising

will (Bohnke-Kollwitz 279–80). This was a position she struggled enor-

mously to accept, and she expresses it here in an image that honors the

boys’ idealism while revealing them as being deluded and having to pay

too high a price for their freely given sacrifice.

Kollwitz’s imagination stops at the threshold of war: she does not fol-

low the volunteers into battle or speculate about their lives in the trenches,

and the rest of the cycle dwells on the experience of loss. The third plate,

The Parents ( Die Eltern), reveals the anguish of the bereaved mother andfather, molded together in shared grief, and in the fourth plate, Widow I


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child. Like the parents, she is unable to meet our gaze, looking down

and to the side, disconnected from society, alone in her grief. Does her

pregnancy suggest a possibility of redemption here, of regeneration? The

next plate, Widow II (Witwe II ), suggests that this is not the case: It shows

the bodies of a woman and her young child, the tension in the woman’sposition—head arched and feet stretched out—suggests they did not die

peacefully. The sixth plate, The Mothers ( Die Mütter ), takes an earlierimage of protective and encircling motherhood and develops it. The plate

shows a group of mothers joined en masse to rein in and protect their

offspring from the harm that they seem to anticipate from all directions.

These mothers are replacing the womanly duty to sacrifice with one of

maternal protection and containment. The seventh and final image, The

People ( Das Volk ), moves from the individual to a social context by dem-onstrating again how problematic regeneration will be in a society dimin-

ished by the war. This is indeed Kollwitz’s central insight: war continues

its devastation long after the battles are over. The survivors of the conflict

will doubtless endure, but at what cost? In the 1923 poster The Survi-vors ( Die Überlebenden), which uses a similar image, the stance is moreaccusatory. The blind, the broken, and the exhausted have been left to

regenerate a morally and spiritually depleted population. Kollwitz’s revo-

lutionary zeal, always a rather literary, aesthetic affair inspired in particu-lar by the dramas of Gerhard Hauptmann, dissipates in response to the

reality of suffering and in the face of the corrupting effect of violence. Of

revolutionary socialism she writes on 21 March 1922, “What’s the good

of achieving better conditions but with worse people?”27

In her War cycle, Kollwitz presents the experience of the war as anongoing and insurmountable experience of loss. Her figures’ inward gaze

reveals the essentially private nature of their suffering, which, though

replicated many times, cannot be mitigated by the context or diminished

through being shared. In many ways Kollwitz’s subject matter—be-

reaved widows and mothers, pregnant women—was familiar: women’s

bodies had come to symbolize the nation, their violation standing for a

violated nation, and pregnancy suggesting the nation’s ability to regen-

erate itself after the war. Dead children and a “doomed” fertility, there-

fore, reflect Kollwitz’s vision of a diminished postwar society in ways

that were highly accessible to the viewer. Perhaps the familiarity of the

subject matter might help to explain why the oppositional nature of her

work and the bleakness of her message have often been overlooked or


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especially the Virgin Mary as a grieving mother, encourages a reading

of her work that justifies war. The association of the soldiers’ death with

Christ’s redemptive sacrifice can serve to validate the cause for which

the soldier died. In recent times, Kollwitz’s images of bereavement were

used by a neoconservative website as a positive model of what maternalgrief should be, which is in stark contrast to the publicity that surrounded

Cindy Sheehan’s campaign on behalf of her son who was killed in Iraq

in 2004 (“Grieving Parents”). Here, the silence and stillness of Kollwitz’s

widows is misread as an “appropriate” expression of dignified suffering

that is essentially passive and accepting in nature.

Kollwitz’s evolution from the “revolutionary” to an artist who be-

lieved in October 1920 that “the world has seen enough of murdering,

lying, destruction, distortion” is clearly reflected in the artistic develop-ment of the motif “parents” in her work after 1914, culminating in her

sculptural expression of grief The Parents, completed in 1932.28 Kollwitzbegan designing this monument to Peter and his generation of volun-

teers very soon after his death, and her diaries record the development of

the concept over the eighteen years it took to bring it into its final form

(see also Timm). Originally conceived as supporting each other in their

grief and kneeling at the feet of their dead son, the parents, whom Koll-

witz had first modeled naked with regenerative shoots sprouting from hisbody, are finally presented alone and separate. For Moorjani, the absence

of the son and his replacement by an empty space through which visitors

approach the graves represents the artist’s detachment from the sacrificial

position he embodies: “In displacing the heroic figure, [. . .] Kollwitz ex-

cised from the memorial the customary idealization of phallic valor and

sacrifice, leaving only the parents’ lonely sorrow for those who died in

vain” (1123). In contrast, Jay Winter’s concept of a “fictive kinship” ( Re-

membering War 136) that allows Kollwitz and, by extension, her figuresto “suggest a family which includes us all” (Sites of Memory 115) is toocozy and consoling an interpretation. Kollwitz the mother indeed formed

a fictive kinship with the friends of her dead son for some time after his

death (Bohnke-Kollwitz 266). Her plans for the memorial, even as late

as October 1925, did envisage the mother figure, arms stretched wide,

embracing all the fallen soldiers in the consolation of her maternal sor-

row (Bohnke-Kollwitz 603). However, diary entries show that this stage

of the mourning process was not sustained. As Kollwitz began to reassert

herself as an artist, she moved away from this position. The final version


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her insight of 22 August 1916: “I can be a mother only to my own sons,”

that each bereaved mother mourns only her own individual, irreplaceable

loss, and that the comforts of a community of mourners has limited value

in giving solace to the bereaved.29 The power and truth of her monument

lies in her uncompromising expression of that reality.The poignancy of Kollwitz’s position coupled with the powerful emo-

tional appeal of her images has led many critics to stress the raw emo-

tionality of the artist, to see her work as the inchoate cri de coeur of the

grieving mother, as if the work does no more than channel “the damned-

up [sic] pain which breaks forth in this cry from the artist’s heart” (Mc-Causland 24). The assumption that the artist’s ability to express and

arouse emotion must mirror her emotional state while creating the cycle

has led to interpretations of Kollwitz’s work as sentimental.30 As early as1937, McCausland felt she had to defend Kollwitz’s artistry and warned

against this tendency: “Kollwitz’s technical interests should be empha-

sised because it has been the custom to write as if she were an artist

who let emotion take the place of discipline” (23). She continues, “There

are critics who say that Kollwitz is a great human being but not a great

artist. These people should study the prints; careful scrutiny shows that

they have been designed to create lines equivalent to the emotion or idea

stated. Because of this identity between form and content, it is easy tooverlook the fact that the form was created by the conscious volition of

the artist” (25).

While there is no doubt that Kollwitz used her art to work through her

maternal grief, it is clear that her art is far from being an easy conduit

for her anguish, which is documented in her diaries in many passages of

almost unbearable intensity. Art as an expression of unresolved emotion

was anathema to her—therapeutic maybe, but invariably bad art. Koll-

witz could only work from a position of reflection. On 22 August 1916

she writes: “In order to work you need to be hard and distance yourself

from what you’ve experienced. If I start to do that, I become the mother

again who doesn’t want to let go of the pain.”31 While it is human to

be overwhelmed by grief, the artist must transform that grief and give

it expression through the creative process. One diary entry that is dated

soon after Peter’s death compares the intensity of the pain Kollwitz feels

as a bereaved mother with the meditative, prayer-like state in which she

is able to work: “It’s a different sort of love from the one that cries and

yearns and suffers. When I feel like that it isn’t prayer. But when I feel


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In order to give artistic expression to felt emotion, she had to distance

herself from that emotion. Nevertheless, she experienced both states as

an expression of love.

Although Kollwitz’s antiwar position has been seen as arising al-

most naturally and inevitably from her gender, Sara Friedrichsmeyerhas shown that it arises, in fact, from a hard-won process of reflection in

which the death of her son paradoxically had the effect of wedding her to

a position of support for the war. Once Peter had been killed, she felt she

had to remain true to his vision, because to question his faith would be

to render his death meaningless. She, therefore, initially vowed to Peter

to “recognize and preserve [. . .] your legacy. What does this mean? To

love my fatherland in my way just as [. . .] you loved it in [. . .] yours.” 33

She also wished to honor his life and express his potential through herown commemorative artistic production. The diary entries, in which she

seeks to mitigate her loss through a commitment to the cause for which

he died, show her clinging to an idealized vision of the war that is not

sustainable in the light of lived experience. Only much later, gradually

and painfully, is she able to accept that Peter was wrong and that she was

wrong as well. Kollwitz drew strength and support for what she worried

might be the betrayal of her son’s ideals from the growing disillusion-

ment of his young friends who continued fighting in the war for longer.On 22 October 1918 she wrote: “Hans Koch [a friend of Peter’s] was

here. He told me—and that was very important for me—that he wouldn’t

volunteer again now.”34

Kollwitz expresses her pacifism for the first time publicly in 1918.

This comes in response to the poet Richard Dehmel’s published appeal

for even more recruits to fight a war that was now clearly a hopeless

cause. The poet’s open letter, printed in Vorwärts on 22 October 1918,

is essentially a renewed appeal to the romantic ideal of redemptive sac-

rifice. Kollwitz responds: “There has been enough death! No one else

should be allowed to die!”35

Goethe’s phrase “seeds for the sowing must not be ground” (“Saat-

früchte sollen nicht vermahlen werden”) had been a leitmotif in Koll-

witz’s writing since the first weeks after Peter’s death, but only now does

she allow herself to express its full meaning: There can be no regenera-

tion for a nation that squanders its future. Kollwitz’s position on the duty

of maternal containment and protection continued to develop, becoming

increasingly dynamic until it takes on the force of an angry challenge, a


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len nicht vermahlen werden” of 1941: “This demand is, like ‘Never again

war,’ not an expression of sentimental longing but a command.”36

Kollwitz, then, moved painfully away from her commitment to ideal

sacrifice, her admiration of revolution and of uncompromising emotions,

and developed a vision of the war that extends beyond the battlefieldand the cessations of hostilities. It is a vision that dwells on absence, on

diminution of powers, of irreparable, unending loss, one that prioritizes

the unique, irreplaceable individual over abstract ideals. Kollwitz’s War ,while not exhorting the audience to specific political action, opposes all

attempts to aestheticize or affirm the war experience. It is a dynamic pro-

test against the misappropriation of the mother figure and her sacrificial

son in order to justify and perpetuate war. Her diaries clearly demon-

strate that through her art she honors the purity of the young men’s sacri-fice and makes public the private pain of loss while denying herself and

her audience the comforting fiction of any redemptive meaning to it.

Conclusion: Beyond a Gendered Reading

I have argued in this essay that, while the war cycles of Otto Dix and

Käthe Kollwitz reflect divergent experiences of war at home and on the

front line, their reception often reveals more about the persistence ofgendered assumptions about war than about the cycles themselves; con-

sequently, it tends to overemphasize Dix’s antiwar polemic and ironic

distance and Kollwitz’s emotionality. Although Kollwitz’s voice is no less

authentic than Dix’s, and her desire to bear witness no less strong, her

claim to authority in telling her story is undermined by a view of war that

privileges frontline combat. I have argued that Kollwitz should not be

viewed primarily as a sorrowing woman who found consolation in—and

offers consolation through—her art, because this interpretation masks notonly her achievement as an artist but also one of the key aspects of her

testimony.

To return to my central question: Do we learn anything new or differ-

ent about the war if we accept both Kollwitz and Dix as moral witnesses?

I think we do, because their work adds to the body of evidence that sup-

ports the idea that the war experience extends well beyond the combat

zone—a broader vision of war that should be able to incorporate the ac-

counts of both Kollwitz and Dix on equal terms. Our cultural memory ofWorld War I is shaped to a great extent by artistic and literary represen-


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matters a great deal if key pieces of the mosaic are omitted, misread,

overlooked, or suppressed, or if anachronistic layers of interpretation and

assumptions obscure the freshness and authenticity of what the artist is

struggling to convey. If these cultural representations are limited to de-

pictions of the combat experience of—and often by and for—“the menwho were there,” we are left with a distorted and partial understanding of

the experience and significance of war—what it was, how it felt, and how

it affected those who experienced it.

Notes

1. According to Jean Owens Schaefer, writing in 1994, Kollwitz has largely been

seen in the United States as a political artist whose standing has waxed and wanedwith the fortunes of the causes with which she was associated. Writing in 1979, Lucy

Lippard reflects that during her training she was taught to see Kollwitz’s passion as

“embarrassingly ‘uncool,’” commenting that “for a large section of the contemporary

art audience, the combined formal and emotional integrity of Kollwitz’s prints and

sculptures are almost impossible to see” (vii). In “Kollwitz Reconsidered” (1992),

Elizabeth Prelinger argues that critical reception had hitherto privileged subject mat-

ter over form and technique and aims to both redress this balance and complicate the

narrative of Kollwitz as revolutionary artist.

2. See Schaefer and Bachert for a discussion of Kollwitz’s postwar reception.3. The war cycles and other works by both artists can be viewed online at MoMA,

at the “Online Otto Dix Project,” and at the Käthe Kollwitz Museums in Berlin and

Cologne.

4. Avishai Margalit coined the term “moral witness” (discussed at length in Win-

ter’s Remembering War 238–43) to describe Holocaust survivors who set their expe-

riential truth against a discourse that denies or excludes their testimony. Rather than

trying to explain, moral witnesses only seek to truthfully convey what happened to

them and what it felt like. This is very much in line with the intention and effect of

both artists’ work: diary entries and interviews reveal that their overriding aim, even

compulsion, was to use their art to tell the truth about their war experience.

5. Among the many sources are key works on cultural representation by Fussell,

Leed, and Hynes (War Imagined ). For a succinct account of developments in Great

War historiography, see Winter and Prost, and Horne. Braybon’s “Winners and Los-

ers” offers a useful overview of historians’ debates about women’s roles.

6. In contrast, Richard Cork’s 1994 study devotes three pages to Kollwitz’s cycle

(270–72) and seven to Dix’s (272–79), and in Annegret Jürgens-Kirchhoff’s Schreck-

ensbilder (1993) Kollwitz’s work is discussed in detail as a representation of war

(279–93). Cultural historian Annette Becker’s recent survey article on artistic rep-

resentation of the war has explained and reinforced the predominantly narrow male


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of being in the trenches as the “truth of the first hand witness” that would not allow

“anyone who had not suffered in the trenches” to depict them (Becker 344).

7. “Sind Karl und ich nicht hundertmal mehr durch diesen Krieg gegangen als

manche, die von Granaten umflogen sind?” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 175). All quotations

from the diaries are from the Bohnke-Kollwitz edition, and all translations are my

own.

8. “Diese Blätter sollen in alle Welt wandern und sollen allen Menschen zusam-

menfassend sagen: so war es—das haben wir alle getragen durch diese unaus-

sprechlich schweren Jahre” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 879).

9. For a full account and discussion of Kollwitz’s skill and development as a

graphic artist, see Prelinger’s “Kollwitz Reconsidered.”

10. German art critic Otto Conzelmann is a recognized authority on Dix. He wrote

a number of detailed studies of his works and war diaries and also interviewed him

several times.

11. These are Self-Portrait as Soldier (Selbstbildnis als Soldat , 1914); Self-Por-

trait as Target (Selbstbildnis als Schießscheibe, 1914); Self-Portrait Wearing a Gun-

ner’s Helmet (Selbstbildnis mit Artillerie-Helm, 1914 / 15), and Self-Portrait as Mars

(Selbstbildnis als Mars, 1915).

12. Dix is recognizably present in at least five of the plates, possibly seven.

13. “Kein anderer hat so wie ich die Realität des Krieges gesehen” (qtd. in Con-

zelmann 187).

14. This edition, featuring twenty of the prints, was offered for sale for 1.80 marks

at the first exhibition of the cycle in 1924, in contrast to the 1,000 marks asked for the

full edition, which did not include the frontispiece (McGreevy 283–84).

15. Joanna Bourke’s research reveals the unpalatable truth that some men enjoy

the license for violence that war affords. This is hidden from civilians under layers of

protective language about sacrifice—while the soldier is often presented as willing to

die for his country, in fact his primary purpose is to kill, and the success of an army is

measured by its soldiers’ effectiveness in doing so.

16. But see Janet Watson’s Fighting Different Wars (2004) for a discussion of how

Vera Brittain placed her account within this narrative framework to become one of

the few women accorded the authority of experience (220–65).

17. “Der Soldat frißt, säuft und hurt, und wenn es an der Zeit ist, stirbt er auch”

(Conzelmann 68).

18. Starr Figura, Associate Curator, MoMA, New York City, exhibition German

Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, MoMA exhibition website, online audio guide.

19. “Wenn ihr Helden sein wollt, dann müßt ihr diese Schweinerei [. . .] auch be-

jahen. Wenn ihr in die niedrigsten Tiefen gegangen seid, die Läuse, den Dreck, den

Hunger, die Angst, die Hosenscheißerei, dann seid ihr Helden—aber sonst: Helden

im Bilderbuch” (qtd. in Conzelmann 166). This quote is attributed to Dix in later life.

20. For a fuller development of this argument see Merz’s 1999 reappraisal of

Dix’s The Trench ( Der Schützengraben, 1923) and his epic triptych, The War ( DerKrieg, 1928–32). Dora Apel (368) and Linda McGreevy (288–326) observe a similar


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21. “Kein Mensch wird mutmaßen, daß diese 7 Holzstöcke mittlerer Größe eine

langjährige Arbeit in sich schließen und doch ist es so. Es steckt darin die Ausein-

andersetzung mit dem Stück Leben, das die Jahre 1914–1918 umfassen” (Bohnke-

Kollwitz 868).

22. This is not stated directly but revealed through diary entries, her later disillu-sion implying her earlier expectations. This entry from 1 July 1918 states: “I thought

and believed that the time from 1914 to now would purify me. The pain has left wea-

riness in its wake. It’s not just Peter. It’s the war that crushes you right down to the

ground” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 368–69).

23. “Der Abgrund hat sich nicht geschlossen. Millionen hat er verschlungen und

klafft noch” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 280).

24. Christmas 1915: “Wichtig war diese Form, die sich bildete. Diese einmal und

einzig lebende Person, dieser Mensch” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 206).

25. The tension between maternal protection and ideal sacrifice in Kollwitz’swork is discussed by Prelinger (“Sacrifice and Protection”) and Moorjani.

26. “Sie geben sich mit Jauchsen. Sie geben sich wie eine reine schlackenlose

Flamme, die steil zum Himmel steigt” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 154); “Was er mir gegeben

hat [. . .] war so etwas, was ich bis dahin kaum kannte. Die Frömmigkeit dieser jun-

gen Seelen, die Schlackenlosigkeit. Meine jungen Söhne, meine lieben jungen Flam-

men, die Ihr uns führet, nicht wir Euch. Aus uns hervorgegegangen, über uns hoch-

wachsend uns mitnehmend” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 178).

27. “Was hilft es bessere Zustände zu bekommen mit verschlechterten Men-

schen?” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 526).28. October 1920: “Vom Morden, Lügen, Verderben, Entstellen [. . .] hat die Erde

jetzt genug gesehen” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 483).

29. “Mutter sein kann ich doch niemand als meinen eigenen” (Bohnke-Kollwitz

268). This insight is confirmed in 1941 when her grandson, another Peter Kollwitz,

is killed. Even though she can deeply empathize with her daughter-in-law, she knows

that “you can heal from such a wound only by yourself—from within” (19 Nov.

1942, Bohnke-Kollwitz 708).

30. In 1945, two months after Kollwitz’s death, the art critic Clement Greenberg

expressed his disappointment at “our failure to be stirred as much as we feel we ought

to be” (qtd. in Schaefer 32), for which he blamed the artist’s technical deficiencies. In

1959, one critic wrote that “Kollwitz’s ideas are like being hit by a wet sponge, her

technique trite [. . .], her contributions to art, really, a debasement” (qtd. in Schaefer

33). In a 1984 British Museum publication, Kollwitz’s later work is characterized as

suffering through a perceived shift from the specific to the more general and abstract:

“Partly as a result, the quality of her art suffered and it often became infected by

sentimentality” (Carey and Griffiths 60). Although it does not denigrate her skill, the

Ontario Art Gallery’s 2004 exhibition suggests a blind spot to Kollwitz’s activism as

the catalogue’s page displays the incongruous juxtaposition of the title “Kollwitz: the

Art of Compassion” and “ Never again War ,” possibly the most dynamic of her anti-


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lege the emotional appeal or social content of her work over her artistry with several

examples from the print media cited by Bachert (131). An analysis of this aspect lies

beyond the scope of the current enquiry.

31. “Zur Arbeit muss man hart sein und das was man gelebt hat aus sich herausset-

zen. Wenn ich beginne das zu tun, so fühle ich wieder als Mutter, die den Schmerz

nicht von sich lassen will” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 269).

32. July 1915: “Es ist das eine andere Liebe als die die weint und sich sehnt und

grämt. Wenn ich ihn so liebe bete ich nicht. Wenn ich ihn aber so fühle wie ich es in

meiner Arbeit sichtbarlich nach aussen bringen will, dann bete ich” (Bohnke-Koll-

witz 193).

33. 26 December 1914: “Dein Vermächtnis zu erkennen und zu bewahren. Was

ist das? Mein Vaterland so zu lieben auf meine Art wie Du es liebtest auf Deine”

(Bohnke-Kollwitz 180–81).

34. “Hans Koch war hier. [. . .] Er sagte mir, und das war mir sehr wichtig, er

würde nicht mehr freiwillig gehn” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 376).

35. “Es ist genug gestorben! Keiner darf mehr fallen!” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 841).

36. December 1941: “Diese Forderung ist wie ‘Nie wieder Krieg’ kein sehn-

süchtiger Wunsch sondern Gebot” (Bohnke-Kollwitz 705).

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