STONE WITNESS: Käthe Kollwitz’s Quiet Resistance under the Third Reich
Seed for Sowing Should Not Be Milled, 1941, crayon lithograph
When the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Käthe Kollwitz was sixty-five and, by common consent, the moral conscience of German art. Her dark lithographs of hunger, rebellion, and mourning hung in museums across the country; newspapers called her “the mother of the nation.” She might have retreated into safe respectability. Instead, four weeks after Hitler became chancellor, she put her name to a petition urging the Left to unite against him.
On a raw February morning a note arrived from the Prussian Academy of Arts—an institution that had, only the year before, elected her as its first woman member. The president’s tone was apologetic, but the message was blunt: resign at once or be expelled. Kollwitz signed the resignation and packed away the diploma. By spring she was barred from exhibiting anywhere in the Reich.
She could have joined the exodus of Jewish and socialist artists streaming through Paris and Prague. Her friends urged her to go. But the old doctor’s wife from Prenzlauer Berg shook her head: “I belong to the people who are suffering here.” She stayed in her narrow apartment, a short walk from her husband Karl’s clinic, and turned her grief inward, carving massive shapes in her mind that she could no longer show in public.
Mother with Dead Son
Paint was out of the question—canvas and pigments required ration coupons now controlled by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts—so she worked in secret on clay maquettes, wrapping them in wet cloth each night to keep the surface alive. One of those kitchen-table sculptures would become Mother with Her Dead Son, a Pietà of fused bodies whose shoulders bulge like battered stone. The authorities granted a casting permit only because her friends in the Academy whispered that it was “merely” a memorial for her younger son Peter, killed in Flanders in 1914. In truth the piece was a silent indictment of every war Germany had ever waged.
By 1936 an informal “Ausstellungsverbot” tightened the noose. Gallery doors closed before she could even knock. Yet her hands kept moving across copper plates and lithography stones. In 1942, when a clandestine publisher asked for an image that might slip past the censors, she drew a gaunt mother sheltering three children beneath the slogan “Seed corn must not be ground.” The picture was mimeographed in basements and pasted to walls at night; patrols tore it down by dawn.
Then the bombs came. In November 1943 an Allied raid flattened her apartment and studio. Decades of drawings—faces of weavers, peasants, mothers—went up in a column of sparks she watched from the street. Homeless, she accepted refuge first in Nordhausen and later in Moritzburg, near Dresden. There, among the quiet Saxon lakes, she filled small sketchbooks with heads: hollow-eyed soldiers, widows in kerchiefs, children leaning into the dark.
The Parents
The Red Army closed on Berlin in April 1945. Food was scarce, coal scarcer. On 22 April, eight days before Hitler’s suicide and the city’s surrender, Käthe Kollwitz laid down her pencil for the last time. She was seventy-seven.
A generation later, in 1969, the bronze she had modelled in secret was placed beneath the oculus of Berlin’s Neue Wache. Snow falls through the open roof onto the mother’s bowed head; rain pools in the stone floor around her knees. The inscription reads “To the victims of war and tyranny.” Few visitors realize that the sculptor herself had lived those words sentence by sentence, year after silenced year.
Self-Portrait in Profile
Kollwitz once wrote, “I am in the world to change the world.” The Nazi regime tried to erase her, but could not. Her images endured—smuggled, salvaged, re-cast—to remind us that art’s truest power is not in the applause it earns, but in the witness it keeps when the applause is forced to fade.