Käthe Kollwitz: the artist who gave the Kollwitzkiez its name

What is the Kollwitzkiez, and why is it called that?

In Berlin, Kiez is the everyday word for your own neighbourhood, the one you know street by street. The Kollwitzkiez is an area of late-nineteenth-century tenement blocks, wedged between Schönhauser Allee, Danziger Strasse, Prenzlauer Allee and Torstrasse, and its heart is the triangular square that gives it its name. The city's official website puts it in two steps: the neighbourhood is named after the square, and the square after the artist.

It wasn't always so. From 1875 to 1947 this was Wörther Platz, named in memory of the battle fought at Wörth, in Alsace, on 6 August 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War. And it wasn't alone: after that German victory, the streets in this part of the district were given the names of places in Alsace and Lorraine, such as Metz and Belfort. Berlin's street directory even calls it the "Alsace-Lorraine quarter".

On 7 October 1947 the square became Kollwitzplatz, and in the same year Weissenburger Strasse, where Käthe's house stood, became Kollwitzstrasse. The map swapped a military victory for an artist whose work is shot through with war. That last part is our own reading: there's no record of what the authorities had in mind when they chose the name.

Who was Käthe Kollwitz?

She was born Käthe Schmidt on 8 July 1867 in Königsberg, the city now called Kaliningrad. She studied art in Berlin and Munich, and in 1890 she opened her first studio in her home town and began making prints. The following year she married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor, and the couple settled in Berlin.

Her subject was ordinary people in their own surroundings: work, home, the hardships of working-class life. Her first major print series, A Weavers' Revolt, grew out of seeing The Weavers, Gerhart Hauptmann's play; she finished it in 1898, and that year it was shown at Berlin's big art exhibition. Then came the series Peasants' War.

Not everyone applauded. A poster she made for an exhibition on home-based work was taken down from every advertising pillar at the wish of Empress Augusta Victoria, who didn't like seeing a woman worn out by work.

But she kept opening doors. In 1919 she became the first woman to win election to the Prussian Academy of Arts, where until then women could only be honorary members, and she was given the title of professor. In 1928 she took charge of the Academy's master studio for printmaking, and in 1929 she was the first woman awarded the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.

The doctor who didn't charge

The Kollwitz home was number 25 Weissenburger Strasse, which is 56a Kollwitzstrasse, on the corner of the square. At first, Karl's surgery and Käthe's workspace were in the same flat; over the years they rented more rooms in the building. Their two sons grew up there: Hans, born in 1892, and Peter, in 1896. And the place was rarely quiet: the couple often had relatives and lodgers staying for long spells.

Karl was a health-insurance doctor who set up in a working-class district. The district council remembers him as a respected doctor, valued by many, who often helped people without asking for payment; the street directory simply calls him a "doctor to the poor". He saw patients in that house until his death in 1940.

One detail worth knowing: Käthe didn't make all her work at home. She worked there until 1912, when she rented a studio in another part of town; later she had two rooms at Berlin's art college and a studio in an artists' collective on Klosterstrasse. In 1940 she withdrew to the flat on the corner again.

The war and the two Peters

When the First World War broke out, both her sons volunteered. Peter, the younger one, was killed in Flanders in October 1914, aged eighteen. His mother spent years working on a memorial for him, Grieving Parents, which was installed in 1932 at the military cemetery of Roggevelde, in Flanders. In the 1920s she completed the woodcut series War and designed posters such as Never Again War.

The next war took another Peter: her grandson, killed in Russia in September 1942.

One of her small sculptures, a mother with her dead son, less than forty centimetres high, was enlarged to four times its size in 1993 for the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, which became Germany's central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny that year.

Persecution, bombs and a square with her name

Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, she was made to leave the Academy. Then came the bans on exhibiting and the removal of her works from public collections. No wonder a standard Berlin street directory, explaining the square's name, presents her as a victim of Nazism.

In 1943 she left Berlin because of the air raids: first for Nordhausen and, from 1944, for Moritzburg, near Dresden. On 25 November 1943 bombs destroyed the house on the corner, and many of her prints and plates with it. Käthe Kollwitz died in Moritzburg on 22 April 1945, aged seventy-seven. That same year her ashes were buried in Berlin, in the family grave at Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, where Karl already lay.

Two years later, the square and the street bore her name. In the middle of the square, with a little stand of larches behind it, is Gustav Seitz's bronze sculpture of her, seated, based on one of her self-portraits. According to the district council, not even she is spared by the children from the playground, who clamber over the statue too. And on the site of the house, a new building went up with a plaque in her memory.

Fact or legend.

• Fact: the Kollwitzkiez is named after Kollwitzplatz, which has carried the artist's name since 7 October 1947. Before that it was Wörther Platz, after a battle in 1870.
• Fact: Käthe Kollwitz lived in the house on the corner from 1891 to 1943. Karl saw patients there until his death in 1940 and, according to the district council, often treated people without charging.
• Our reading: that the renaming swapped a victory for an artist marked by war. We don't know what the authorities' reasons were.
• A nuance: not all her work was made at home. From 1912 she had studios elsewhere, though she went on living on the corner until the bombing.
• Unresolved: the exact year of the Seitz statue. The sources give 1958, 1959 or 1960–1961.

Where to hear it

Podtour tells this story on the route "Prenzlauer Berg: the Kollwitzkiez", thirteen stops around the neighbourhood. The first, "A neighbourhood named after a war", starts by the street signs with names from Alsace and Lorraine. At the sixth, "The doctor who didn't charge, and the artist", you're on the site of the Kollwitz house, and at the eleventh, "The bronze neighbour in a renamed square", you're facing the Seitz sculpture.

The mother in the Neue Wache opens another route, "Museum Island, the Palace and the Nikolaiviertel", at the stop "A mother beneath the open sky". If you're planning your trip, our Berlin guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin, "Biografie" (in German): https://www.kaethe-kollwitz.berlin/kaethe-kollwitz/biographie/
• Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin, "Käthe Kollwitz in Berlin" (in German): https://www.kaethe-kollwitz.berlin/kaethe-kollwitz-in-berlin/
• Pankow District Council, Roads and Green Spaces Office, "Der Kollwitzplatz – Nirgendwo ist mehr Prenzlauer Berg" (in German): https://www.berlin.de/ba-pankow/politik-und-verwaltung/aemter/strassen-und-gruenflaechenamt/gruenflaechen/ausstellung/artikel.1513005.php
• Kauperts Straßenführer, "Kollwitzplatz (10435)" (in German): https://berlin.kauperts.de/Strassen/Kollwitzplatz-10435-Berlin
• Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO, "Käthe Kollwitz 1867-1945" (in German): https://www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/kaethe-kollwitz
• Berlin.de, "Kollwitzkiez" (in German): https://www.berlin.de/special/stadtteile/kieze/7582053-7429665-kollwitzkiez.html