Käthe Kollwitz, Neue Wache

At the centre of Schinkel‘s Neue Wache is an enlarged replica – by Harald Haacke – of the Käthe Kollwitz sculpture "Mother with her Dead Son". The building, designed as a guard house by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and used as such for a hundred years until 1918, is now the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny (more details with the next image).

I “discovered” Käthe Kollwitz when I visited Berlin in 2011. The Berlin Käthe Kollwitz Museum is listed as another highlight in the Rough Guide to Berlin, but when I got there I was over­whelmed by her work. As I blogged at the time, “Her original pictures, beauti­fully displayed here, are incredibly moving, yet somehow not depressing: her mothers are always protective, cradling. Often she seems to convey grief through the hands.”

Later, in Cologne, I found a larger Käthe Kollwitz Museum, the first to be dedi­cated to her, in 1985, which claims the largest inventory of her work including early pastels and all of her anti-war posters. It’s well worth a visit. I found there that Kollwitz had always been very serious, years before her son Peter was killed in 1914 which is often said to be the trigger for her style and her preoccupation with death.

Technical: NIKON D300, f=18.0 mm, ISO720, 1/60 sec @ f6.3

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