Käthe Kollwitz’s Working-Class Women

At the end of the 19th century, the population of Berlin reached almost two million, far exceeding its capacity. It is estimated that by 1912, 100,000 of the city’s dwellings were inhabited by 600,000 people.¹ Overcrowding increased the spread of disease, and working-class districts like Prenzlauer Berg, where Käthe Kollwitz and her family lived, were marked by poverty and unemployment. Abortion was made illegal in Germany in 1872, but by the early 1900s the law was being protested, and the issues of women in the workforce and birth control were being debated in the public sphere.

In a number of works made between 1903 and 1905, Kollwitz directed her attention to the working-class women she encountered in her daily life, a subject she revisited with even greater focus after she completed her Peasants’ War cycle in 1908. She gained firsthand knowledge of their lives through her proximity to her husband Karl’s medical practice. As she recalled, “[Only] when I became acquainted with the women, who came to my husband seeking aid and incidentally also came to me, did I truly grasp in all its power, the fate of the proletariat. . . . Unresolved problems like prostitution, unemployment, tormented and worried me and acted as the source of my attachment to the depiction of the lower classes.”²

Käthe Kollwitz. Half Figure of a Woman with Crossed Arms, state III/III. c. 1905. Crayon and brush lithograph, printed in three colors

Käthe Kollwitz. Poster for the German Cottage Industry Exhibition, Berlin 1906. 1906. Lithograph, 27 1/2 × 17 5/8" (69.2 × 44.7 cm). Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne. Courtesy Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne

Kollwitz sketched patients in her husband’s waiting room, and at times she employed women from nearby neighborhoods as models.³ In works like Half-Figure of a Woman with Crossed Arms (c. 1905) and Bust of a Worker Woman with Blue Shawl (1903), she used effects she learned from studying French contemporaries like Edgar Degas and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen in order to depict her sitters in moments of introspection. Shades of deep blue and black lend her figures a somber tone, while subtle highlights reveal their individual features. Kollwitz isolated and tightly framed her subjects so they loom large, thereby monumentalizing and making visible those who were all too often invisible in society. The artist dignified working-class women through her honest portrayals, never resorting to 19th-century clichés like that of the passive rural worker, stoically content with her station as maternal nurturer, or the corrupt and dangerously erotic urban working girl.⁴ Her frankness was often disturbing to those who sought to maintain the status quo: the portrait of a fatigued worker that she included in her lithographed poster for the 1906 German Cottage Industry Exhibition (Deutsche Heimarbeit-Austellung) so offended Empress Victoria that it was removed from public display.

Käthe Kollwitz. Unemployment. 1909. Black chalk and white opaque watercolor over blue pencil on gray-brown paper

Between 1908 and 1911, Kollwitz published 14 drawings—unflinching depictions of working-class lives—in the satirical weekly Simplicissimus, a large-format Munich-based magazine that criticized the kaiser, the military, the clergy, and the class system. The publication allowed her to speak, as she explained, “to a large audience about the things that I am always drawn to and that have not been said enough: the many silent and noisy tragedies of big city life.”⁵ Unlike the humorous cartoons published in Simplicissimus, her submissions are earnest depictions of labor issues, homelessness, and unwanted pregnancy. Unemployment (1909), for example, features a gaunt woman with cadaverous eyes lying in bed with a newborn in her arms and a small child at her feet. Her despondent husband sits beside her, his face heavily shadowed, staring into the distance. The title suggests that he is unemployed, a commonplace situation at a time when industrial work was often short-term, and jobs were precarious.

Käthe Kollwitz. Home Worker, Asleep at the Table. 1909. Charcoal on paper

Home Worker, Asleep at the Table (1909) is a draft of one of the six drawings that Kollwitz published in the magazine between November 1909 and January 1910 under the series title Portraits of Misery I–VI (see a selection below). The published version, Home Worker (1909; at far left)—in which a woman is asleep at a table with scraps of fabric by her hand and a slumbering child next to her—lays bare the unfortunate consequences for those who processed raw materials like cotton at home for extra pay. German labor regulations did not extend to home workers, and Kollwitz’s picture shows how women exhausted themselves by working long hours while simultaneously caring for their families.

Käthe Kollwitz. From left: Home Worker (I); At the Doctor (III); Into the Water (IV); and Drunken Man (V). Reproduced as Portraits of Misery in Simplicissimus, nos. 31, 35, and 38 (1909) and 40 (1910)

Another work in the series, Into the Water (1909; second from right), depicts a pregnant woman carrying two young children down a steep flight of stairs to a canal. The phrase “into the water” was a euphemism for suicide by drowning, a tragic option taken by some mothers who lived in squalid conditions with more children than they could support. One of Kollwitz’s darkest images, it throws into sharp relief the fatal repercussions of rampant industrialization and social inequity along with the artist’s dire concern for Germany’s future generations.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Käthe Kollwitz today.

Käthe Kollwitz is on view at MoMA March 31–July 20, 2024.