message, her images also make manifest the artist’s own powerful actions in the fight against poverty and hunger through the bold, sweeping lines from which her figures materialize. Her broad and gestural, yet simple and strong, marks formulate the bodies of her subjects in the midst of their plight but also trace her own physical, mental, and emotional thoughts and actions in response to those problems, showing her clear engagement with these social issues. In many of Kollwitz’s works we see human figures linked together, as their outlines merge to create a sense of interconnectivity and community. In a sense, Kollwitz, too, links 182 her own body to those of her figures through the traces of her physicality in the image and occasionally the use of her own self-portrait within her images of the downtrodden. In the powerful and iconic image Bread! (Brot!), a lithograph produced in 1924, Kollwitz presents the frantic hunger of a woman and her two starving children. Kollwitz’s gestural marks, in particular the long, bold, downward strokes that give form to the mother’s skirt and emphasize the pleading grip of her children, express the energetic actions of the artist’s hand in bringing this image to life. The call of Brot! is a call not just to awareness but also to empathy and action.
As the Nazis rose to power, Kollwitz became increasingly marginalized as an Expressionist artist and progressive individual under their oppressive regime. Although in 1919 she had become the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Art, she was stripped, along with writer Heinrich Mann, of her academy position in 1933 when Hitler seized power in Germany. In 1936, the same year Lange produced her masterful Migrant Mother photograph, authorities banned the exhibition of Kollwitz’s works in Germany due to her bold subject matter and anti-fascist political associations. That same year, the Gestapo interrogated her in her home. For the last decade of her life she wrestled with the problem of how to live and how to create art in this dangerous environment. Her unstable situation began to parallel the lives of the poor who had always been at the center of her work. She died in 1945 having witnessed the most harrowing decades of modern German history, which are recorded in her diaries and letters. Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, Germany, into the middle-class Schmidt family who were members of the progressive, inclusive, and tolerant Free Protestant Congregation led by Kollwitz’s uncle Julius Rupp. Her family, which educated its children at home, valued her intellectual and artistic pursuits as well as the development of her social consciousness.
The Schmidt family’s open-minded attitudes allowed the young Käthe to experience both the beauty and coarseness of her city. In 1881, her father sent the 14-year-old Kollwitz to take art lessons with a local engraver and four years later encouraged her attendance at the School for Women Artists in Berlin, where she studied painting. As a student and emerging artist in the late 19th century, Kollwitz came into direct contact with the international literary and visual style known as Naturalism, which attempted to illustrate modern life and living in all its stark and gritty realities. Kollwitz’s first mature encounters with the hungry and poverty-stricken came through such artistic sources that depicted the poor as characters in dramas celebrating their “authentic” lifeways and critiquing the inequities of capitalist society. Kollwitz later recounted that she was first drawn to workers, the proletariat, and the poor primarily through a broad sense of their freedom, dignity, and grandness, even in the face of their problems (Kollwitz 44). Only later did she transform this generalized, romantic idea into specific knowledge of the real lives of poor individuals with complex circumstances. Some of the earliest praise Kollwitz received as a young artist was for her work inspired by Zola’s novel Germinal, the story of a poor young miner