Death Before, During, and After War

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Recommended: Relationship between art and death

Käthe Kollwitz’s artwork focuses on her ever-changing belief about death. Infant mortality, death as result of war, and her own relation to death are a few ways in which she associates death in her work. She showed death as a worthy sacrifice, as a villain taking life to soon, and finally as a friend coming to escort her to the thereafter. She had an almost obsessive relationship with death. When death was not physically personified in her work it was an unseen enemy portrayed in her figures faces and body expressions. Her view on society and her duty as a mother was entangle with death. Though the topic is morbid her artwork is something to be admired and praised. As the old saying goes beauty is in the eye of the beholder and though death is shown in Kollwitz’s artwork it is somehow beautifully sad.

Before talking about her artwork it is best to know where Kollwitz’s fascination with death originated. The infant mortality rate was much higher back then so it was not uncommon for women to give birth to five or six kids and only three of them live past the age of three. Kollwitz’s mother was no exception. Mrs. Schmidt gave birth to five children and only three survived. Kollwitz distinctly remembers her younger brother, Benjamin’s, death and its impact on her mother. The death of her baby brother caused a distance between her and her mother. Death was always walking beside her in her thoughts from then on.

Throughout all of her artwork there is sprinkled a mother, child, and death. Estella Lauter and Kominque Rozenberge discuss in their work The Transformation of the Mother in the Work of Kathe Kollwitz the different facial and body expression the mothers in Kollwitz work portray. This was increasingly interesting because it...

... middle of paper ...

... scary but beautiful at the same time. It is human nature to wonder what death is like. She gives death a face so to speak.

Works Cited

Käthe Kollwitz on Sacrifice, Mourning, and Reparation: An Essay in Psychoaesthetics

Angela Moorjani MLN , Vol. 101, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1986), pp. 1110-1134 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Lauter, Estella, and Dominique Rozenberg. "The Transformation Of The Mother In The

Work Of Käthe Kollwitz." Anima 5.2 (1979): 83-98. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Web. 4 Nov. 2011.

R Schulte “Kathe Kollwitz's Sacrifice” Hist Workshop J (SPRING) 1996(41): 193-221

doi:10.1093/hwj/1996.41.193

Yates, Wilson. "Käthe Kollwitz And The Question Of Death." Visual theology. 207-224.

Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Pr, 2009. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Web. 4 Nov. 2011.

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