Käthe Kollwitz. „Ich will wirken in dieser Zeit“

With her cycle of works on the weavers' revolts and her memorials to the dead of the First World War, Käthe Kollwitz found compelling images for suffering, grief and pain. In a sensitive introduction written in 1951, the painter and art writer Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann (1883–1973) drew a double portrait of the artist: taking her own words, “Ich will wirken in dieser Zeit” (I want to work in this age), he tied her art to the social commitment that came to her not least through her husband Karl Kollwitz, an “Armenarzt” (a doctor for the poor) in the Berlin working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg. Can a body of work be separated from the experience of one's own times? Do wars and the social question compete with an artistic œuvre? This new edition rediscovers an approach to Käthe Kollwitz that seems to put these questions to the present.