Mutter mit totem Sohn
(Mother with her dead son)
Käthe Kollwitz (1937)
Neue Wache Memorial
Unter den Linden
Berlin
I’ve been a massive fan of Käthe Kollwitz for years, initially aware of her work and then the fierceness with which she burned as an artist and the way she interpreted the lives of the working classes. The Nazis were deeply perturbed by her, partly because of her politics as a socialist, but also because of the terrific spread of her fame meant they couldn’t easily silence her, although they threatened to deport her and her husband to a concentration camp, the idea was dropped fairly quickly. Her cycles of work cover topics I find both compelling and fascinating. In particular the way she dips in and out of grief and loss.
The sculpture itself is an enlarged version, an exact copy by Harald Haacke. The original was made in 1937 by Kollewitz as a small Pietà; a mother holding her son, usually these are Christian art of Mary holding Jesus. This is however a contemplation on the death of her son Peter in 1914 in Flanders, he’s buried at Vladslo just in front of his mother’s mind-blowing work ‘The Grieving Parents’.
The Neue Wache has been a memorial since the end of the Napoleonic wars, heavily damaged during the bombing of Berlin, and reinstated by the DDR when this part of the capital was under Soviet control. In 1969 the bodies of an unknown soldier from the battlefields of the Second World War, and a nameless victim of the concentration camps were interred in the building surrounded by earth gathered from the both locations, they remain here. In 1990, after reunification, Kollwitz’s Mother with her dead son was installed. I’d encourage anyone to familiarise themselves with her work. It’s perhaps not easy, but it’s incredible in a way I can’t really express.
Visiting it I had something in my throat and a tightness around my heart. The way other people behaved around it showed me I wasn’t alone with that feeling. And while a part of me wanted to capture it in isolation, it ended up working better with the meditation of others in the space around it.