ARTISTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF SUFFERING by MARK CELINSCAK & CURTIS HUTT

Author:MARK CELINSCAK & CURTIS HUTT
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Published: 2021-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Beyond Redemption

7

Käthe Kollwitz and the Tragedy of War

JAY WINTER

THERE HAVE BEEN THREE APPROACHES to the artistic configuration of loss of life in twentieth-century warfare.1 The first is redemptive, seeking to find meaning in death in wartime in the triumph of a noble cause. This form dominated commemorative art until the First World War. The second is less triumphalist, moving from the cause to the individual men and women who died. I term this approach “nominalist” because in the context of twentieth-century wars, roughly half of those who die in war have no known graves. What they left behind are their names, and those names are what we honor. This form became more prominent after both world wars and after the Vietnam War. The third approach is pacifist, in that it focuses not on the cause, nor on the names of the dead, but on war itself as unredeemed tragedy. In this third category, religious references or motifs do not convey the idea that death in war was justified or noble. In this third domain, the message of the war memorial is that war is the enemy. It is war that wreaked havoc on the world; it is war that destroys the future. This third approach was rarely chosen by commemorative artists, though there are notable exceptions.2

I want to present to you the artistic reflections of Käthe Kollwitz as having moved from the first to the third of these approaches to commemorative art. She did not engage with the second form, preferring to focus on individuals in their grief. After a long and difficult struggle, she abandoned her belief in noble sacrifice and adopted what I term a postredemptive approach to war commemoration. I will focus on a number of her post-1914 works and, in particular, on her project to produce a memorial to be placed near her son Peter’s grave in a German war cemetery in Belgium. I will then try to suggest that although suffering is a subject she addressed throughout her life as an artist, after 1914, her artistic reflections on the ravages of war slowly but surely moved away from the Christian tradition of art as consolation.

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