Kollwitzplatz: Käthe Kollwitz's Square
Why is it significant?
In the middle of the square, between sandpits and chestnut trees, an old woman in bronze sits heavily in her chair, hands in her lap, looking at nothing in particular. Children climb on her knees, and she does not seem to mind.
Key Facts
| Place | Kollwitzplatz: Käthe Kollwitz's Square |
|---|---|
| Address | Kollwitzplatz, 10405 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53610, 13.41700 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
In the middle of the square, between sandpits and chestnut trees, an old woman in bronze sits heavily in her chair, hands in her lap, looking at nothing in particular. Children climb on her knees, and she does not seem to mind. She is Käthe Kollwitz, one of the greatest German artists of the twentieth century, and this was her neighbourhood.
Kollwitz moved to the corner of this square in 1891 with her husband Karl, a doctor who treated the poor workers of the district. She lived here for more than fifty years. While Karl saw patients downstairs, his wife watched the women in the waiting room: exhausted mothers, sick children, widows. Those faces went straight into her drawings, etchings and lithographs, which show hunger, grief and the dignity of working people more honestly than almost any art of her time.
In October 1914, in the first months of the First World War, their younger son Peter was killed in Flanders, aged eighteen. She never recovered from it. Her grieving mother holding her dead son became one of her great themes, and an enlarged version of her Pietà now sits in the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, Germany's central memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they forced her out of the Prussian Academy of Arts and soon stopped her from exhibiting. In 1943 the house on this corner was destroyed by bombs, along with prints and plates. Käthe Kollwitz died in April 1945 near Dresden, just days before the end of the war she had drawn against all her life. Two years later, the square was renamed in her honour.
The bronze statue is by Gustav Seitz and was made in the late 1950s, based on one of her own self-portraits. Look around now: cafés, a weekly farmers' market, prams everywhere. It is hard to imagine the poverty she drew. Take Wörther Straße west from the square towards Schönhauser Allee, where a long wall hides one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Berlin.