STONE WITNESS: Käthe Kollwitz’s Quiet Resistance under the Third Reich

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.