Käthe Kollwitz: Images of a Life

Käthe Kollwitz - Bilder eines Lebens

Part of the Series: Reel Women in East German Film

Kathe Kollwitz is 47-years-old, already a well-known artist in Germany and abroad. Peter, her youngest son, volunteers to join the German army in WWI and dies two weeks later. This painful tragedy changes Kollwitz' life and art forever. Always politically active, she now becomes a radical pacifist; in her art she reflects on her son and the meaning of war. After she signs a petition against that Nazis, she is excluded from the Academy of Arts and her art is labeled "degenerate." Lonely and sick, she spends the last days of her life in Dresden, dying at the age of 78 before the end of WWII.