Käthe Kollwitz Portrait of the German artist of expressionism

Käthe Kollwitz died at Moritzburg, near Dresden, in April 1945, shortly before the end of the Second World War. As the film begins she is an old woman in the last months of her life, contemplating death. Using words taken from her diaries and letters, she looks back over her life and work. It was always of great importance to Kollwitz that her art should communicate directly with an audience, and by working with graphic media lithography, etching and woodcuts she hoped to give her images a wide circulation, as campaign posters and in leftwing books and periodicals. She spent most of her working life in Berlin during the politically turbulent years before and after the First World War. Her husband ran a medical practice for the poor and it was through his work that she became intimately aware of the problem of the urban working class. She worte: I want my art to have a purpose. I want to have an effect on these times when man is so perplexed and in need of help. I will be his