Qualla: Käthe Kollwitz Museum

Käthe Kollwitz Museum: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Artist : Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) / photo Ji-Elle, Public domain. Käthe Kollwitz outlived her son Peter, who died as a teenage volunteer in the trenches of Flanders in 1914. She outlived her grandson Peter, named for him, who was killed on the Eastern Front in 1942. She died in April 1945, days before the Nazi regime collapsed. Between those losses she made some of the most unflinching art of the twentieth century - charcoal drawings of weavers' uprisings, lithographs against the death of soldiers, bronze sculptures of grieving parents. The largest collection of her work in the world sits, improbably, on the top floor of a 1980s shopping arcade in Cologne, kept there by a savings bank that decided her subjects were its own.

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Image: Artist : Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) / photo Ji-Elle | Public domain

Käthe Kollwitz Museum: Why a Bank Owns It

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne is owned and operated by the Kreissparkasse Köln, a regional savings bank. This is not a quirk of corporate philanthropy. The German savings bank movement was founded in the nineteenth century explicitly to serve the poor - workers, the unemploye...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0

Käthe Kollwitz Museum: The Cycles

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Halbey, CC BY-SA 4.0. Kollwitz worked in long, sustained series. Ein Weberaufstand, The Weavers, was a cycle of lithographs and etchings made between 1893 and 1897, inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann's play about the 1844 Silesian weavers' revolt - women and men with hollow cheeks pushing against the doors...

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Image: Anne Halbey | CC BY-SA 4.0

Käthe Kollwitz Museum: The Grieving Parents

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Halbey, CC BY-SA 4.0. Kollwitz spent fourteen years, from 1918 to 1932, working on a memorial sculpture for her dead son. Die trauernden Eltern - The Grieving Parents - is a pair of figures, a mother and father kneeling. The father's hands grip his own shoulders, holding himself together. The mother b...

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Image: Anne Halbey | CC BY-SA 4.0

Käthe Kollwitz Museum: Banned, Then Determined

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anne Halbey, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Nazis declared Kollwitz's work degenerate. In 1933 she was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy of Arts, the first woman ever elected to it. Her work was removed from public museums. The Gestapo interrogated her in 1936 and threatened her with a concentration camp; she ...

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Image: Anne Halbey | CC BY-SA 4.0

Käthe Kollwitz Museum: Fifteen Bronzes and the Shopping Arcade

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum is housed in the Neumarkt Gallerie, a thousand square meters on the top floor of a shopping arcade designed by Hans Schilling and opened to Kollwitz visitors in 1989. It owns all fifteen of her bronze sculptures that can be displayed as museum pieces, plus three hundre...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0