Käthe Kollwitz's sacrifice

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 193-221

  Schulte, Regina ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749853746     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1996.41.193     Document Type: Article

References (138)

1. The German version of this essay was written for Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit. Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Hans Mommsen zum 5. November 1995, ed. Christian Jansen, Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod, Berlin, 1995. With her art historian's eye, Magdalena Drexl assisted me in choosing the pictures and offered useful comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank Ute Daniel, Karin Hausen and Susanne Rouette for their inspiring questions, suggestions, and criticisms.
2. Käthe Kollwitz, Die Tagebücher, ed. Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz, Berlin, 1989, p. 151.
3. Excerpts from the diaries have been published in English as Käthe Kollwitz, Diary and Letters, ed. Hans Kollwitz, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Chicago, 1955.
4. Kollwitz, Tagebücher, p. 148.
5. Quoted in Michael Reiter, 'Opferphilosophie. Die moderne Verwandlung der Opferfigur am Beispiel von Georg Simmel und Martin Heidegger', in Gudrun Kohn-Wächter (ed.), Schrift der Flammen. Opfermythen und Weiblichkeitsentwürfe im 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1991, p. 133.
6. On women's 'August experience', war pathos and war work see Ursula Baumann, Protestantismus und Frauenemanzipation in Deutschland 1850 bis 1920, Frankfurt am Main, 1992, pp. 229ff;
7. Regina Schulte, 'Die Schwester des kranken Kriegers. Krankenpflege im Ersten Weltkrieg als Forschungsproblem', in Bios. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung und Oral History, 7, 1994, pp. 83-100.
8. Pamela Selwyn, in Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (eds), Gender and Gender Relations in German History from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, London, forthcoming 1995.
9. Marianne Weber succumbs to the same gory pathos as Käthe Kollwitz and other middle-class women, Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild, Tübingen, 1926, pp. 526ff.
10. See also how Lily Braun, whose son also volunteered, addresses enthusiasm for the war and the search for the meaning of life. Braun, 'Lebenssucher', in her Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols, Berlin, 1923, Vol. 4, pp. 355ff.
11. Kollwitz, Tagebücher, p. 152.
12. Kollwitz, Tagebücher, p. 152.
13. Kollwitz, Tagebücher, p. 154.
14. Kollwitz, Tagebücher, p. 157.
15. On the sacrifice see Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier, 'Opfer. Religionswissenschaftliche Bemerkungen zur Nutzbarkeit eines religiösen Ausdrucks', in Hans-Joachim Althaus et al. (eds), Der Krieg in den Köpfen. Beiträge zum Tübinger Friedenskongreß 'Krieg - Kultur - Wissenschaft', Tübingen, 1988, pp. 109-120;
16. Reiter, Opferphilosophie: Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, 'Opfermodelle am Altar des Vaterlandes seit der Französischen Revolution', in Kohn-Wächter, Schrift, pp. 57-92.
17. On fire and flame metaphors see Silke Wenk, 'Nike in Flammen. Gründungsopfer in der Skulptur der Nachkriegszeit', in Kohn-Wächter, Schrift, pp. 199-200.
18. Kollwitz, Tagebücher, p. 158 (27 August 1914).
19. Tagebücher, p. 158.
20. Tagebücher, p. 159 (8 September 1914).
21. Tagebücher, pp. 165-66 (30 September 1914).
22. Tagebücher, p. 167 (4 October 1914).
23. Tagebücher, p. 164.
24. Tagebücher, p. 177-78.
25. Tagebücher, p. 180 (New Year's Eve 1914).
26. Tagebücher, p. 184 (11 April 1915); for another example see p. 237 (18 April 1916).
27. Tagebücher, p. 336.
28. Tagebücher, pp. 292-293. 'Sagt es niemand nur den Weisen/Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet./Das Lebendige will ich preisen/Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.'
29. Tagebücher, p. 436 (20 September 1919).
30. Tagebücher, p. 338.
31. Tagebücher, pp. 175 (12 November 1914)
32. and Tagebücher, 191 (7 July 1915).
33. Tagebücher, p. 193.
34. On non-denominational Protestant mysticism in the second half of the nineteenth century and the experience of religious feelings in the mystical incestuous union see Christina von Braun, Die schamlose Schönheit des Vergangenen. Zum Verhältnis von Geschlecht und Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main, 1989.
35. Tagebücher, p. 464 (Good Friday, 1920).
36. Tagebücher, p. 540 (17 October 1922).
37. Tagebücher, p. 280.
38. Luke, Chapter 22, Matthew, Chapter 26.
39. Tagebücher, p. 183 (10 April 1915).
40. Tagebücher, p. 183.
41. Tagebücher, p. 251.
42. Käthe Kollwitz, Briefe der Freundschaft und Begegnungen, Munich, 1966, p. 134.
43. Tagebücher, p. 583.
44. Tagebücher, p. 211.
45. Tagebücher, p. 361.
46. Tagebücher, p. 183.
47. She was presumably familiar with Das Mutterrecht by Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose Romantic mother ideology of closeness to the earth and deification took up the mythical Great Mother. Bachofen's ultimately patriarchal utopia, which sought historical origins in a matriarchal mythology of Antiquity, was also incorporated by Engels and Bebel into their utopian social projects, to which Käthe Kollwitz, as an active socialist, had a strong affinity. On the matriarchy debate see Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs (ed.), Das Mutterrecht von Johann Jakob Bachofen in der Diskussion, Frankfurt am Main, 1987.
48. Heinrich points to Bachofen's ties to and religious exaltation of his own mother, and emphasizes the significance of this biographical context for his work (p. 10). On this see also Lionel Gossman, 'Macht der Kultur gegen Kultur der Macht', in Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887). Eine Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung im Historischen Museum Basel, Basel, 1987, pp. 41-57,
49. and Beate Wagner-Hansel, 'Rationalitätskritik und Weiblichkeitskonzeptionen. Anmerkungen zur Matriarchatsdiskussion in der Altertumswissenschaft (1989)', in Hansel-Wagner (ed.), Matriarchatstheorien der Altertumswissenschaft, Darmstadt, 1992, pp. 295-373.
50. On the significance of theories of matriarchy for discussions among women's rights advocates and circles of intellectuals - for example around Max and Marianne Weber - at the end of the nineteenth century see Michelle Perrot, 'Women, Power and History', in Perrot (ed.), Writing Women's History, trans. Felicia Pheasant, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992, pp. 160-174.
51. She recalls here the Protestant Bachofen for whom, according to Edgar Salin's 1926 interpretation, 'the history of the world is an ascent from darkness into light, from Mother Earth to God the Father. Because he possessed the certainty that Christ the Word represented the ultimate perfection, world history was for him a progress from the material to the immaterial, from the physical to the metaphysical, from tellurism to intellectuality'. Edgar Salin, 'Bachofen als Mythologe der Romantik (zur Neu-Herausgabe von Bachofens Werken)', Schmollers Jahrbuch 50, 1926, pp. 839-848,
52. quoted in Heinrichs, Mutterrecht, p. 156.
53. Tagebücher, p. 183 (15 February 1915).
54. Tagebücher, p. 184.
55. On the artistic symbiosis between mother and son in middle-class society since the eighteenth century see also Ulrike Prokop, Die Illusion vom Großen Paar, Vol. 1, Weibliche Lebensentivürfe im deutschen Bildungsbürgertum 1750-1770, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 200-257.
56. Quoted in Sibylle Tönnies, 'Armer Peter, armes Deutschland. Todes- und Opfersucht bei Käthe Kollwitz', Merkur 48, 1994, pp. 493-94.
57. On the mother with a dead child see also Raymond G. Dobard, Subject-matter in the Work of Käthe Kollwitz: An Investigation of Death Motifs in Relation to Traditional Iconographic Patterns, PhD Diss. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 1975, p. 24.
58. He speaks of the mother's attempt to 'take back inside her the child to whom she gave birth'. On the various versions of the Pietà and the mother with her dead child see Elizabeth Prelinger, Käthe Kollwitz, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992, pp. 40-46.
59. Tagebücher, p. 242 (10 May 1916). During a conversation Esther Fischer-Homberger drew my attention to the strong presence of 'masculinity' in Kollwitz's mother's self-representations and to the son's 'feminine' features. In the mother with her strong arms she also oversteps 'feminine' corporeality. The arms holding the dead son appear 'strong' and 'masculine'.
60. Tagebücher, pp. 281-82.
61. See Prokop, Illusion, pp. 131ff;
62. Anne Juranville, 'Melancholie und Mystizismus. Madeline Janets "Fall" (1863-1918) und Thérèse de Lisieux (1873-1897)', Fragmente. Schriftenreihe für Kultur-, Medien- und Psychoanalyse, 44/45, 1994, pp. 115-146.
63. Tagebücher, pp. 268 and 254.
64. Tagebücher, p. 254.
65. Tagebücher, p. 254.
66. Tagebücher, p. 267.
67. Tagebücher, pp. 268-269.
68. Tagebücher, p. 348 (New Year's Eve 1917).
69. Tagebücher, pp. 368-69.
70. Tagebücher, pp. 181 (6 January 1915).
71. Tagebücher, p. 182.
72. Tagebücher, p. 297.
73. See Tagebücher, p. 443. '8 November 1919. Last night I dreamt of Peter. Something occurred to me that I had quite forgotten, that he was in Wengen. I could not understand why we hadn't spent out holiday together and I thought, this holiday will be [spent] with him. I began to worry about him so terribly, wondering how he was doing that I began to weep copiously, although I was surrounded by people. Then I saw him again. He stood there naked from the waist up; he was very thin. I worried about his lungs again. God, how very far away from me he already is, how rarely I dream of him'.
74. Tagebücher, p. 193.
75. Tagebücher, p. 297 (21 January 1917).
76. Tagebücher, p. 292.
77. Tagebücher, p. 176.
78. Tagebücher, p. 325 (5 August 1917).
79. Tagebücher, p. 302 (18 February 1917).
80. Tagebücher, p. 302.
81. Catherine Krahmer, Käthe Kollwitz. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, Reinbek, 1981, pp. 20-21.
82. On the founding of the free churches and its significance for the lives of women see Sylvia Paletschek, Frauen und Dissens. Frauen im Deutschkatholizismus und in den Freien Gemeinden 1841-1852, Göttingen 1990.
83. Tagebücher, pp. 302 and 270.
84. Krahmer, Käthe Kollwitz, p. 139 n. 10.
85. Tagebücher, p. 302.
86. Alice Miller, Der gemiedene Schlüssel, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, pp. 99-116; Tönnies, 'Armer Peter'.
87. Käthe Kollwitz, 'Erinnerungen' (1923), in Tagebücher, pp. 717-735, p. 721.
88. Tagebücher, p. 253.
89. Kollwitz, 'Erinnerungen', in Tagebücher, p. 722.
90. Miller, Der gemiedene Schlüssel, pp. 110-11.
91. On the interaction between the ideologies of 'woman's natural readiness to sacrifice' and of a 'maternal pathology' which, in the face of the overwhelming statistical probability of death, verged on the mystical, see Michela de Giorgio, 'The Catholic Model', in Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (eds), A History of Women in the West, Vol.4, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1993. Impressive in this context are the parallels between the family history of Käthe Kollwitz and that of the French mystic Thérèse de Lisieux (1873-1897). See Juranville, Melancholie, pp. 134ff.
92. Tagebücher, pp. 177, 254, 256.
93. A parallel pair to Käthe Kollwitz and her mother were Marianne Weber (1870-1954) and her mother Anna Weber. Here, the mother retreated into religious inwardness and the daughter had a leaning towards mysticism and a hunger for experience. The will to 'feminine sacrifice' remained a determining experiential structure for both, whereby, as in Kollwitz's case, the daughter developed a measure of activity and independence and her own ideas on life. The letters of Marianne Weber's grandmother Marianne and her mother Anna with their Protestant virtues and religious inwardness are characterized by renunciation and constant self-examination and also by an overwhelming anxiety and depressiveness, which represented the basic tenor of many texts by middle-class women. See Traueralltag und Trauerbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert. Materialsammlung zu der Abteilung 20. Jahrhundert im historischen Museum Frankfurt i Vol. 1, Industrialisierung und weibliche Lebenserfahrung 1890-1933, Frankfurt am Main, 1980, pp. 65ff, with a commentary by Ulrike Prokop.
94. Adels Schreiber (ed.), Mutterschaft. Ein Sammelwerk über die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter, Munich, 1912,
95. quoted in Karin Hausen, 'Mütter, Söhne und der Markt der Symbole und Waren: Der deutsche Muttertag 1923-1933', in Hans Medick and David Sabean (eds), Emotionen und materielle Interessen. Sozialanthropologische und historische Beiträge zur Familienforschung, Göttingen, 1984, p. 515 n. 139.
96. English translation, 'Mothers, Sons and the Sale of Symbols and Goods: The German "Mother's Day" 1923-1933', in Medick and Sabean (eds), Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 371-413.
97. Sigmund Freud, 'Femininity', Lecture 33, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
98. trans. James Strachey, Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 2, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 168.
99. See also Braun, Schönheit, p. 43. She points to the significance for the nineteenth century of the incestuous ideal of love.
100. Hausen, Mütter, pp. 515-16.
101. The memoirs of Max Weber show that the image of the mother as the mother of God with a Christ-like son on her lap was also of significance for sons. He imagined his own mother as the Sistine Madonna, himself as the 'infant Jesus' in her arms, and his other siblings as angels. See Marianne Weber, Max Weber. Ein Lebensbild, Tübingen, 1926, p. 520.
102. See also Bozena Choluj, 'Max Weber und die Erotik', in Hubert Treiber and Karol Sauerland (eds), Heidelberg im Schnittpunkt intellektueller Kreise. Zur Topographie der 'geistigen Geselligkeit' eines 'Weltdorfes': 1850-1950, Opladen, 1995, p. 252.
103. See also Tönnies, 'Armer Peter'.
104. Since 1870, the rhetoric of war had prepared sons for the sacrifice connected with the mother. On references to the mother-son configuration in the metaphors of battle rhetoric see Karin Hausen, 'Die Sorge der Nation für ihre "Kriegsopfer". Ein Bereich der Geschlechtspolitik während der Weimarer Republik', in Jürgen Kocka et al. (eds), Von der Arbeiterbewegung zum modernen Sozialstaat. Festschrift für Gerhard A. Kitter zum 65. Geburtstag, Munich, 1994, p. 720. 'The mother-son metaphor did something else as well. It held together the masculine bonds among soldiers by masking the fact that those same young heroes who were supposed to go to their heroic deaths with a joyful readiness to sacrifice were also brothers, lovers, husbands and fathers who were expected in peacetime to behave loyally and supportively towards those persons with whom they shared the intimacy of familial and love relationships'.
105. Kollwitz, Briefe der Freundschaft, p. 134.
106. Tagebücher, p. 175 (10 November 1914).
107. Tagebücher, p. 273.
108. Tagebücher, pp. 275ff.
109. George Mosse has the following to say about the notion of 'manliness' in the youth movement and the significance of the 'mother' within it: 'Their "new man" was an activist as well, and though they also wrote about a "new woman", she was merely the mother of the "new man", the vessel which contains him'. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York, 1990, p. 60.
110. On the connection between birth and death/motherhood and the hero's death in the myth of sacrifice, see also Nancy Huston, 'The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes', in Susan Robin Suleiman (ed.). The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, pp. 119-136.
111. On the significance of the 'August experience' for mothers and sons see also Susanne Rouette, 'Nach dem Krieg: Zurück zur normalen Hierarchie der Geschlechter', in Karin Hausen (ed.), Geschlechterhierarchie und Arbeitsteilung. Zur Geschichte ungleicher Erwerbschancen von Männern und Frauen, Göttingen, 1993, pp. 169ff.
112. Tagebücher, pp. 278 and 281.
113. Tagebücher, pp. 241-42 and 331.
114. Tagebücher, p. 332.
115. See Tagebücher, p. 429: '6 July 1919. What strength Karl possesses. Sometimes he is tired and then also unproductive and dull. But then come times in which he appears positively triumphant'.
116. Tagebücher, p. 271.
117. See, for example, Tagebücher, pp. 256-57.
118. Tagebücher, p. 270.
119. Tagebücher, pp. 279-280.
120. Tagebücher, Appendix, p. 841.
121. Tagebücher, p. 428.
122. On ambivalences in dealing with experiences of war and death see Hanna Behrend's comparative study, '"Seedcorn must not be ground down": Vera Brittain's and Käthe Kollwitz's Response to the First World War', in Franz Karl Stanzel and Martin Löschnigg (eds), Intimate Enemies: English and German Literary Reactions to the Great War 1914-1918, Heidelberg, 1993, pp. 425-445.
123. Tagebücher, p. 348.
124. Tagebücher, p. 184.
125. Tagebücher, p. 429.
126. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, 'Käthe Kollwitz. Weibliche Aggression und Pazifismus', in Althaus, Krieg, p. 198.
127. Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Käthe Kollwitz, p. 198.
128. For an outline of the work on the memorial see also Richard Biedrzynski, Das brennende Gewissen. Maler im Aufstand gegen ihre Zeit, Braunschweig, 1949, pp. 147ff;
129. and Raf Seys, Käthe Kollwitz in Vlaanderen, Koekelare, 1990.
130. Ulrich Linse, '"Saatfrüchte sollen nicht vermahlen werden!" Zur Resymbolisierung des Soldatentodes', in Klaus Vondung (ed.), Kriegserlebnis. Der Erste Weltkrieg in der literarischen Gestaltung und symbolischen Deutung der Nationen, Göttingen, 1980, p. 269.
131. See also Reinhard Koselleck, 'Kriegerdenkmale als Identitä tsstiftungen der Überlebenden', in Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (eds), Identität, Munich, 1979, p. 267 n. 23: 'Without a belief in immortality, Käthe Kollwitz lives in close intellectual connection with her fallen son. It is the inner union that moves Käthe Kollwitz away from her original plan to portray her son himself. She addresses premature death by dispensing with any additions and leaving the parents standing alone'.
132. On the Pietà motif in war memorials see Volker G. Probst, Bilder vom Tode. Eine Studie zum deutschen Kriegerdenkmal in der Weimarer Republik am Beispiel des Pietà-Motives und seiner profanierten Varianten, Hamburg, 1986.
133. After 1912 the Red Cross also used the figure of a Pietà on the battlefield for the certificate of honour it awarded nurses who served at the front. See Schulte, 'Die Schwester des kranken Kriegers', pp. 97f.
134. Tagebücher, pp. 667-68, 603.
135. See Biedrzynski, Gewissen, p. 161.
136. See also Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Kollwitz, pp. 202-203.
137. Tagebücher, pp. 704-705 (December 1941).
138. Streit um die Neue Wache. Zur Gestaltung einer zentralen Gedenkstätte, Berlin, 1993.