A visit to the Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin

What struck me first about Käthe Kollwitz’s work is the prominence that she gives to hands.

Hands are large in her drawings - disproportionately so. Almost the same size as her subjects’ heads, even. Their size is emotionally true if not technically true. They express the person just as much as the face, the posture, the clothes. They’re working hands - the hands of a poor man splayed across his eyes so that he doesn’t have to look at the child he can’t afford to feed. The hands of a mother cradling her little girl’s face as she drifts off to sleep. Kollwitz’s own hands, reverently holding a piece of chalk. Women in art are supposed to be looked at and exerted upon, but in Kollwitz’s work they do both the looking and the exertion. Backbreaking exertion - Kollwitz mostly drew working-class people in the neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, where she lived.

I first learned about Käthe Kollwitz in a GCSE art class. GCSE art was where I got my earliest diploma in bullshitting, but Kollwitz’s work cut through all that. I remember my teacher showing us this drawing:

‘I mean, when you look at that as a mother…’ she said, not needing to say anything else. Those muscular lines of the mother’s arms as they hold the too-light form of her dead baby say everything.

Kollwitz knew that grief. Her second son, Peter, was killed in the First World War. The grief lived in her work, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. Motherhood wasn’t a deified position for her - it was located in the most profound and animal part of humanity. It’s a version of motherhood that still feels modern, even all these years later.

I don’t think I could bear to look at Kollwitz’s work if I had children. I couldn’t really bear to look at her sculpture Abschied (Farewell). Often when I look at a work of art there’s some small part of me that tries to manufacture an emotional response, to prove to myself that I ‘get’ it. With Abschied I had to will myself not to lose it completely. Kollwitz made it after Karl, her husband died in 1940.

On the top floor of the Kollwitz museum sits Kollwitz herself, a bronze statue ten feet high. She’s clothed plainly, like a nun. She’s reached the point in old age where people become genderless, like sages or angels. Her bronze eyes are blank, yet intricately etched. If you want to you can convince yourself that she’s looking straight at you, holding you to account. I spent a good bit of time in there, looking at her. It was probably the first time in my life that I’ve sat alone in a room with a great work of art for any length of time; it’s something that I think everyone should have the opportunity to do.

When I left I went to sit in the restaurant of the Literaturhaus next door, and glanced over an essay about Kollwitz’s work. It glibly referred to the intensely humane attention that she paid to the plight of the poor as ‘superficially political’.

What nonsense.

There is nothing superficial about the political engagement of her work - she links the political moment with the eternal, with what it means to be human. That’s the point. Abortion rights aren’t important because they appeal to superficial politics, they’re important because motherhood is important, which means that the right to choose not to be a mother matters. Kollwitz knew this back in the 1920s, when she drew posters for a pro-choice movement. She knew this when she depicted victims of famine on posters for a campaign entitled Mothers, Share Your Abundance! She understood that the personal was political well before anyone had expressed it in so many words.

Kollwitz died in 1945, sixteen days before the end of the Second World War. Those final years couldn’t have been easy for her, either practically or spiritually. She put so much of herself into a more moral vision of the universe, and instead she died in what must have felt like morality’s nadir.

One of the things I love most about Berlin is that the art here is political, and it’s not considered gauche to acknowledge that. Kollwitz’s work sits close to the centre of that philosophy, at the moral heart of this city. This city, that has so often been used as a theatre for abstract ideas but where Kollwitz never allows you to lose sight of the human.