Käthe Kollwitz

1 Held between wars my lifetime among wars, the big hands of the world of death my lifetime listens to yours. The faces of the sufferers in the street, in dailiness, their lives showing through their bodies a look as of music the revolutionary look that says    I am in the world to change the world my lifetime is to love to endure to suffer the music to set its portrait up as a sheet of the world the most moving the most alive Easter and bone and Faust walking among flowers of the world and the child alive within the living woman, music of man, and death holding my lifetime between great hands the hands of enduring life that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time, and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for the unknown person held in the two hands, you. 2 Woman as gates, saying: "The process is after all like music, like the development of a piece of music. The fugues come back and again and again interweave. A theme may seem to have been put aside, but it keeps returning— the same thing modulated, somewhat changed in form. Usually richer. And it is very good that this is so." A woman pouring her opposites. "After all there are happy things in life too. Why do you show only the dark side?" "I could not answer this. But I know— in the beginning my impulse to know the working life had little to do with pity or sympathy. I simply felt that the life of the workers was beautiful." She said, "I am groping in the dark." She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality, then you will understand it too. The struggle begins. Never again to be free of it, often you will feel it to be your enemy. Sometimes you will almost suffocate, such joy it brings." Saying of her husband: "My wish is to die after Karl. I know no person who can love as he can, with his whole soul. But often too it has made me so terribly happy." She said: "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn, climbed up to the marble quarries and rowed back at night. The drops of water fell like guttering stars from our oars." She said: "As a matter of fact, I believe that bisexuality is almost    a necessary factor in artistic production; at any rate, the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work." She said: "The only technique I can still manage. It's hardly a technique at all, lithography. In it only the essentials count." A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me: "Kollwitz?     She's too black-and-white." 3 Held among wars, watching all of them all these people weavers, Carmagnole Looking at all of them death, the children patients in waiting-rooms famine the street A woman seeing the violent, inexorable movement of nakedness and the confession of No the confession of great weakness, war, all streaming to one son killed, Peter; even the son left living; repeated, the father, the mother; the grandson another Peter killed in another war; firestorm; dark, light, as two hands, this pole and that pole as the gates. What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open 4Song : The Calling-Up Rumor, stir of ripeness rising within this girl sensual blossoming of meaning, its light and form. The birth-cry summoning out of the male, the father from the warm woman a mother in response. The word of death calls up the fight with stone wrestle with grief with time from the material make an art harder than bronze. 5 Self-Portrait Mouth looking directly at you eyes in their inwardness looking directly at you half light    half darkness woman, strong, German, young artist flows into wide sensual mouth meditating looking right at you eyes shadowed with brave hand looking deep at you flows into wounded brave mouth grieving and hooded eyes alive, German, in her first War flows into strength of the worn face a skein of lines broods, flows into mothers among the war graves bent over death facing the father stubborn upon the field flows into the marks of her knowing— Nie Wieder Krieg repeated in the eyes flows into "Seedcorn must not be ground" and the grooved cheek lips drawn fine the down-drawn grief face of our age flows into Pieta, mother and between her knees life as her son in death pouring from the sky of one more war flows into face almost obliterated hand over the mouth forever hand over one eye now the other great eye closed