Käthe Kollwitz Quotes

Diary entry (12 January 1912).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

Diary entry (21 February 1944).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

Quoted in Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976) by Martha Kearns The Feminist Press, ISBN 0-912-67015-0, p. 82.
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Diary entry (21 February 1944).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

"In Retrospect" (1941).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)

Quoted in Käthe Kollwitz: Graphics, Posters, Drawings (1981) by Renate Hinz
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Context: My work is not, of course, pure art in the sense that Schmidt-Rottluff's is, but it is art nonetheless... It is all right with me that my work serves a purpose. I want to have an effect on my time, in which human beings are so confused and in need of help.

Diary entry (28 June 1921).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)
Context: I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dreams of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they were like in reality. And so I know now what an illusion I lived in for so many years. I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary. Yes, sometimes I do not know whether I am a socialist at all, whether I am not rather a democrat instead. How good it is when reality tests you to the guts and pins you relentlessly to the very position you always thought, so long as you clung to your illusion, was unspeakably wrong.

Diary entry (April 1910).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)
Context: I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. When both the boys went away for Easter, I hardly did anything but work. Worked, slept, ate and went for short walks. But above all I worked. And yet I wonder whether the "blessing" is not missing from such work. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes.

Reply to questionnaire sent to prominent artists, (1942/1943), quoted in Käthe Kollwitz (1971) by Otto Nagel, translated by Stella Humphries.
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Context: The artist is usually a child of his times, especially if his formative years fell in the period of early socialism. My formative years coincided with that period, and I was totally caught up in the socialist movement. At that time, the idea of a conscious commitment to serve the proletariat was the farthest thing from my mind. But what use to me were principles of beauty like those of the Greeks, for example, principles that I could not feel as my own and identify with? The simple fact of the matter was that I found the proletariat beautiful.

Diary entry (28 June 1921).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)
Context: I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dreams of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they were like in reality. And so I know now what an illusion I lived in for so many years. I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary. Yes, sometimes I do not know whether I am a socialist at all, whether I am not rather a democrat instead. How good it is when reality tests you to the guts and pins you relentlessly to the very position you always thought, so long as you clung to your illusion, was unspeakably wrong.

Letters of Friendship and Acquaintance [Briefe der Freundschaft und Begegnungen] (1966), edited by Hans Kollwitz, p. 95; cited in Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976) by Martha Kearns, p. 172.
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Journal August 22 1916 Voices of German Expressionism ISBN 9781854374813
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