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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) The weather is dreary, rain and wind.

If only the days would begin to grow

longer soon.

The shore opposite has lost its beautiful colours.

The dammed-up water has grown stagnant.

My work consists now in faithfully following the

course of each day and keeping an account

of it.

I note down how the clouds drift, which

way the wind blows, and so I trace

the course of the days.

It provides me with a measure of contentment

to keep accounts this way.

I can't undertake any other work, and there

is a systematic element about this which satisfies

me.

I have not been able to work for

months, but even this I don't take as

hard as I used to think I would.

My deepest desire is no longer to live.

I am near my 77th year, and that

is old enough to give one the right

to long for complete rest.

February 1945.

Dearest Lisa, you say that all my life

I have had a dialogue with death.

Oh, Lisa, being dead must be good.

But I am too much afraid of dying,

of being terribly afraid at the moment of

death.

Nevertheless, the longing for death remains, dire.

The unquenchable longing for death remains.

In the years when a young person is

developing, his gifts feed on everything that pours

into him from all sides.

During those years, almost everyone has some talent,

because they are receptive.

My parents followed the principle of giving us

the opportunity to develop ourselves without pushing our

noses into things.

Father also read aloud to us occasionally.

Once he read to us Freilichrath's The Dead

to the Living.

This poem made an indelible impression on me.

Battles on the barricades, with father and my

brother Conrad taking part and myself loading their

rifles.

These were some of my fantasies of heroism

at this time.

I shall always be grateful to my parents

for the fact that they allowed Lisa, my

sister, and me to wander through the town

in the afternoons.

We used to buy cherries and wander through

the city, out through the gate, and take

the ferry across to Prevel.

At that time, Koenigsberg had a number of

sailors' taverns near the pregel, and visiting them

at night was as much as one's life

was worth.

As I stood outside, I could hear a

terrible din from inside.

Knife-stabbings were commonplace.

All I could do was to make my

sketches in the morning at these places.

For a long time, my work dealt with

the world of the workers, and it can

all be traced back to these casual expeditions

through the busy commercial city.

I was about 16 when I did my

first drawing of working people.

From my childhood, my father had expressly wished

me to be trained for a career as

an artist.

As I was a girl.

But he assumed that I would not be

much distracted by love affairs because I was

not a pretty girl.

So he was all the more disappointed when

I became engaged to Karl Kollwitz, who was

then studying medicine.

My father, who saw his plans for me,

endangered by this engagement, decided to send me

away once more.

This time to Munich.

In Munich, I learned a great deal.

The day was filled with work.

But in the nights, we enjoyed ourselves.

Went to beer halls, took walks in the

country.

I felt free because I had my own

house key.

That was in 1889.

Almost all my early drawings were anecdotal.

I drew everything imaginable that I thought of

or saw or that happened.

I knew only narrative art and was interested

in nothing else.

And that was to be the case for

a long time.

Karl, my future husband, was put in charge

of the tailor's health clinic for the poor.

And with this prospect of earning a living,

we decided to take the leap.

Shortly before our marriage, my father said to

me, well, you have made your choice.

You will scarcely be able to do both

things.

So be holy what you have chosen to

be.

In 1891, we moved into our home in

North Berlin where we were to live for

50 years.

My husband devoted most of his time to

his clinic and was soon burdened with a

great deal of work.

In 1892, our first child, Hans, was born

and in 1896, our second, Peter.

The quiet, hard-working life we led undoubtedly

was good for my work as an artist.

A great event took place about this time.

The premiere of Hauptmann's The Weavers.

The performance was in the morning.

My husband's work would not allow him to

go, but I was there burning with anticipation.

The performance was a great success and in

the evening there was a large gathering to

celebrate and Hauptmann was hailed as the leader

of youth.

That performance marked a milestone in my work.

I stopped the series on Germinal and began

to work on The Weavers.

At the

time, I had so little technique that my

first attempts were failures.

For this reason, the first three plates of

the series were lithographed and only the last

three successfully etched.

A few weeks later, it was in the

academy show at the Lehrter station.

Then I heard that the jury had voted

The Weavers be given the gold medal.

In fact, the Kaiser vetoed the award, described

it as gutter art.

But from then on, I was counted among

the foremost artists of the country.

The Peasants' War series occupied me for a

long time.

Then I read Zimmermann on The Peasants' War.

He tells about Black Anna who incited the

peasants.

So I did the large print on the

uprising of the peasant mob.

The rest were built around this already finished

print.

I have never done any of my work

cold.

I have always worked with my blood, so

to speak.

Those who see the things must feel that,

for all these prints are the distillation of

my life.

Sorrow is not confined to social misery.

All my work hides within it life itself,

and it is with life that I contend

through my work.

I should like to say something about my

reputation for being a socialist artist that clung

on to me from then on.

Undeniably, my work was influenced by socialism because

of the attitudes of my brother and my

father and the whole of literature of that

period.

But my real motive for choosing my subjects

almost exclusively from the life of the workers

was that only such subjects gave me in

a simple and unqualified way what I felt

to be beautiful.

Much later on, when I became acquainted with

the difficulties and tragedies underlying proletarian life, when

I met the women who came to my

husband for help and so incidentally came to

me, I was gripped by the full force

of the proletarian fate.

Unsolved problems such as prostitution and unemployment grieved

and tormented me and added to my feeling

that I must keep on with my studies

of the working class.

It is always the same story.

This is the typical misfortune of workers' families.

As soon as the man drinks or is

sick and unemployed, either he hangs on the

family like a dead weight and lets them

feed him, cursed by the other members of

the family, or he becomes melancholy, or he

goes mad, or he takes his own life.

For the woman, the misery is always the

same.

She keeps the children whom she must feed,

scolds and complains about her husband.

She sees only what has become of him

and not how he became that way.

I became very ill with diphtheria.

We stayed up all night with him.

I thought he was gone.

During this night, an unforgettable cold chill caught

and held me.

It was a terrible realization.

That at any second this young child's life

may be cut off and the child gone

forever.

It was the worst fear I have ever

known.

All is leveled by death.

I remember hearing the departing soldiers singing as

they marched past our hotel in Konigsberg in

1914.

Even then I knew it all beforehand.

All the horrors that now strike me as

almost more incomprehensible, more nakedly frightful than they

did then.

The heavy feeling that comes over one when

one knows there is war and one cannot

hold on to one's illusions anymore.

Our youngest son Peter went with the other

young men to enlist.

He fell at Dixmuda, the first in his

regiment.

He lies dead under the earth.

At dawn the regiment buried him.

His friends laid him in the grave.

Then they went on with their terrible tasks.

Everywhere beneath the surface are tears and bleeding

wounds and yet the war goes on.

It follows other laws.

Karl said he would like Peter to have

a gravestone.

I said then I should like to make

it.

After months of laboring over it, I had

spells of great weariness and for the first

time there came the thought may I be

unable to do it after all.

It was a sad time for me.

I will be able to do it.

The year 1918 ended the war and brought

the revolution.

We expected everything would be different.

There would be the boldest, freshest ideas.

We thirsted for truth, for brotherhood and wisdom.

I was a revolutionary.

My young dreams of dying on the barricades

will hardly be fulfilled now.

I should hardly mount a barricade now that

I know what they are like in reality.

Were I still young, I would certainly be

a communist.

I'm still attracted to it.

But I am now fifty.

I have lived through the war and seen

Peter and thousands of other young men die

away.

I am sick and tired of all the

hatred in the world.

I long for a socialism which lets men

live free from murdering, from lying, from destroying

and disfiguring from all the devil's work which

the world has seen enough of.

Rosa and Karl Liebknecht have been murdered in

the most underhand and revolting way.

On the morning of the funeral, I visited

Liebknecht's house and his family asked me to

do some drawings of him as a memorial.

He looked very proud.

There were red flowers around his head where

he had been shot.

As an artist, I have the right to

extract the emotional content out of everything and

so I also have the right to portray

the working class' farewell to Liebknecht and even

to dedicate it to the workers without following

him politically.

Or isn't that so?

So many times I have been asked where

the break in my work between 1910 actually

1912 and 1920 came from.

Yes, that was a critical time.

I should hardly like to live through my

youth again.

But I should like to relive the years

when I pulled myself out of that state

of suffering and came to a clear sense

of my own past.

I was still etching, but almost nothing came

to completion.

Almost all of it failed completely.

My depression was only relieved by the feeling

that I could find a new expression for

my work in sculpture.

Above all, I am afraid of sculpture.

It is true that my sculptural work is

rejected by the public.

Why?

The fact that I am getting too far

away from the general audience is a danger

to me.

I am losing touch with them.

Genius may run ahead and seek new ways.

But for the good artists who follow after

genius, and I count myself among these, they

must restore the lost connection once more.

I feel there must be understanding between the

artist and the people.

In the best ages of art, this has

always been the case.

I can no longer etch.

I am through with that for good.

I first began as etchings, came to nothing.

Expression is all that I want.

And therefore I told myself that the simple

line of the lithograph was best suited to

my purpose.

But the results of my work have never

satisfied me.

Ought I to do as Barlach has done

and make a fresh start with woodcuts?

I find the technique full of temptations.

It is like a photographic plate which lies

in the developer.

The picture gradually becomes recognizable and emerges more

and more from the mist.

Perhaps now a few other things will work

out too, so that they will all express

what I have to say about the war.

It can happen only through greater simplicity.

Simplicity in feeling, but expressing the totality of

grief.

I have been told from so many sides

that my work has value, that I have

accomplished something.

I want my art to have a purpose

beyond itself.

I would like to wield influence in these

times when people are so perplexed and in

need of help.

It is my duty to voice the sufferings

of man.

Everyone suspects a new, terrifying possibility of war

and wants to make propaganda against it.

First, a large poster for the International Trade

Union Congress in Amsterdam.

The Amsterdam people want a design showing the

survivors, old people with their families, widowed, blind,

to whom the children turn with their frightened

questioning, their perplexed eyes and their pale faces.

While I drew and wept along with the

terrified children I was drawing, I really felt

the burden I am bearing.

I felt that I have no right to

withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate.

Strength is what I need.

It's the one thing which seems worthy of

succeeding Peter.

Strength to take life as it is and

unbroken by life, without complaining and over much

weeping, to do one's work powerfully.

Perhaps I may wish the sculpture for Peter

after all.

I have the idea of a large entrance

gate to the cemetery in Rogerveld.

To either side, on the right and left,

kneel the parents.

The mother is to kneel and look out.