Episode Details

At the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1898, a jury nominated a print cycle for a gold medal and Kaiser Wilhelm II personally vetoed it, declaring that medals belong on the breasts of worthy men. The artist was Käthe Kollwitz. This episode traces her life from a Königsberg household of radical thinkers, a childhood shadowed by a brother's death and severe anxiety, and a possible case of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, to her decision to abandon painting for the sharp line of etching, lithography, and woodcut.

We follow her move to a working-class Berlin district where her husband Karl ran a clinic for the poor, the Weavers and Peasant War cycles, and the etching After the Battle, which depicted a mother searching a battlefield for her dead son a decade before her own son Peter was killed in Flanders in 1914. The conversation covers her appointment as the first woman professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts, her Never Again War posters, the Nazi regime forcing her resignation while co-opting her imagery, the Gestapo's 1936 threats, the loss of her grandson in 1942, and her death sixteen days before the war in Europe ended.

• Why her early attraction to working-class subjects began as aesthetic rebellion rather than pity
• How woodcut's stark black-and-white violence suited her anti-war message
• Why it took nearly two decades to complete The Grieving Parents for Peter's grave
• What her roughly 50 self-portraits reveal as psychological milestones
• Why an enlarged Mother with her Dead Son sits at the center of Berlin's Neue Wache memorial