Käthe Kollwitz: Using the Tools of Feminism

Raped, Käthe Kollwitz

The Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, or Federation of German Women's Associations, strove to improve the rights of women in many sections of German society, including the access to higher education which were attained in 1909. However, this was a number of decades after Käthe Kollwitz, a German Social Realism artist, began seeking to further her education in the arts during her youth, and she was unable to to attend any academies or colleges as they were males only, until arrangements were made for Kollwitz to attend an art school for women in Berlin. Feminist activism during the Wilhelmine era of 1890 to 1918 in Germany rose simultaneously during the life of Käthe Kollwitz which is why I found it necessary to connect contemporary concepts and models within feminism to Kollwitz.

In 1903, Kollwitz began her second great cycle of prints called Peasant War, which was based on a revolution that took place during the early sixteenth century and went by the same title. During the Reformation, the proletariat were inhumanely treated as slaves without the right to property and were hit with excessive amounts of taxes, leading the peasants and working class to revolt against the nobility and the church. The revolt backfired and was brutally squashed. Käthe Kollwitz's cycle consists of seven prints, one of which will be focused on in this paper, entitled Raped which was completed in 1907. Kollwitz's choice to include Raped as part of the cycle reveals her interest in women's issues and the acknowledgement of the vulnerability of a poor woman and her responsibility as a mother during times of social distress and war.

I argue that Käthe Kollwitz employs the same tools and ideas that have been developed by contemporary feminist scholars: the feminist standpoint theory, intersectionality and a global sisterhood. Standpoint feminism is a research method where the point of view is recentered to the subject(s) who exist on the margins of the social periphery and have been traditionally neglected from the production of knowledge, so that the analysis will possess stronger objectivity. Intersectionality is an analytical tool that looks at people's lives and the organization of power as being formed by many axes of social division such as class, race and gender that cooperate and influence each other.

While standpoint feminism and intersectionality are the tools in which complex issues can and should be analyzed from, the concept of a global sisterhood which advocates for a commonality that can be universally applied to women globally, disregards the differences of lives, ordeals and priorities between women. I will discuss how Kollwitz uses tools akin to both standpoint feminism and intersectionality by taking the standpoint of a complex, marginalized woman to focus on the layers of sentiment associated with rape and the plunder of war. Thus, unlike the concept of a sisterhood being global, Raped achieves a universality that transcends well beyond the print.

In this paper, I will (1) explore the subject matter of Raped and how Kollwitz constructs the image using intersectionality and feminist standpoint, then (2) pinpoint socialism as the origin of Kollwitz's print, Raped, as well as the origin for the feminist standpoint theory, and (3) affirm the print's universality, a renowned characteristic of her work, by contrasting it with the concept of a global sisterhood, developed by Robin Morgan who is a key leader in the international women's movement.

Feminist Standpoint Theory and Intersectionality in Raped

As part of the Peasants' War cycle, Käthe Kollwitz created the print entitled Raped in 1907. The

print explores the subject matter of rape and violation of a peasant woman's body by a feudal lord during the actual Peasant War from 1524-1525. Kollwitz portrays the emotions and pain

carefully by constructing the image using perspectives similar to that of the intersectionality of identities and a feminist standpoint of those identities.

The Subject Matter of a Peasant Woman's Body

Kollwitz's print illustrates a woman's body lying in a field of flowers and vines in a secluded area. The woman's legs are sprawled apart, with a cloth covering her private region. Her body is so foreshortened that it appears to resemble a slab of meat, like the mind has separated from the body leaving behind a carcass. The woman's carcass has been ravaged and abandoned among the flowers. Her body is raped and her mind is violated, forcefully robbing the woman of her integrity, humanity and life.

In Raped, Käthe Kollwitz uses women's bodies as a subject matter and the historical context of the Peasants' War in 1522 to address how war and revolution can create victims and cause pain and distress to the marginalized people in society. Kollwitz strips bare the pretense of a story and zones in on the female victim herself, exposing what and how a woman feels when her body is stripped, violated and raped. This is a realism that does not intend to please, especially not to the elite audience at the salon at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Paris nor the presumably male art critic. Kollwitz exemplifies a realism that is experienced by many women, wives and mothers. That realism is what contemporary feminist scholars would attribute to standpoint feminism.

Kollwitz not only chose women as the subject matter, but she specifically uses the poor peasant woman as the standpoint in which to portray the emotions of pain, torment and loss of innocence which then becomes unique to a woman whose identity is socially neglected and exists in the far edge of the social periphery. Her preoccupation in humanity has her focused on the people considered the downtrodden of society. This included povertized men, peasant children, and especially poor or working-class women who were also mothers, as these women carried the responsibility of caring for the life and soul of another human. As evident in her prints, Kollwitz has realized that the people who were marginalized and existed on the lowest level of the social hierarchy had to be at the intersection of most of these identities. This is intersectionality where struggles become more complex and convoluted as more crossroads of social divisions intersect. Those who stood on the intersection of these identities experienced struggles that were more, darker and raw.

Kollwitz herself has experienced grief, pain and suffering as a woman and mother throughout her long life: her son, Peter, was killed in the forefront of a battle in WWI and Peter, her grandson, in WWII7. Unfortunately, she became her own subject matter, as she used herself as a model to create a number of self-portrait prints.

Metaphorical Borders

Raped also features an underlying subject matter of borders. These are metaphorical borders that exist between gender, class, and justice wherein raw human emotions are found. The gender border exists between the portrayals of women and mothers by different genders of male and female artists. Male artists usually portray mothers as tender and often sentimental which was typical of the iconography produced during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Käthe Kollwitz's print does not portrays a glorified nor superficial depiction of rape that would portrayed as part of a bigger story, but through realism instead. She uses the realism to illustrate the subject matter of rape and the mental state of the peasant woman as true to reality as possible, broadening her realism from the style to the social.

A border exists between people within a certain class in the social hierarchy. In Raped, Kollwitz utilizes the Peasant War as an example from the past to address an implication for the present and future about the consequences of war and the pervasiveness of the horrific treatment towards the downtrodden. The consequences and repercussions of rape is different based on class. In the print, the perpetrator is a male feudal lord who is of a higher class than the peasant woman, demonstrating the power imbalance between the two subjects and the implications of exploitation and domination. These processes of the abuse of power is evident where a social hierarchy is so blatant.

In the print, while the young woman lays bare on a vine-infested ground, a fence stands between the crime scene and the child who leans over the fence to peer at the woman. The fence is a border that separates the classes of hierarchy; the peasant woman lies abandoned in the area

representing the periphery of society. Raped shows the woman physically and metaphorically

marginalized and neglected. The inclusion of the child forces the viewer to wonder what the child is thinking when he or she found the woman? Has the child's vision and mind been stained by the discovery of what a man can do to another human being, and the extent of the reach of war's wrath? Has the child lost his or her innocence as well? The inclusion of the child, a symbol for innocence, observing the aftermath of the violent act signifies a spiraling chain of the robbing of innocence from woman to child.

The Root in Socialism

One of the remarkable connections between Käthe Kollwitz's print, Raped, and contemporary

feminist scholarship is their roots in socialism. For Kollwitz, her environment fostered the development of her own rhetoric and beliefs pertaining to socialism and social justice, allowing her a deep understanding of the emotions that are experienced by the people in the margins of

society and to be able to create such a compelling piece in Raped. Socialism also influenced the

feminist standpoint theory, a theory in which systems of power should be explained from the worldview of the marginalized and socially oppressed so that it could reveal how women socially

construct their lives based on the system of power that oppresses them. Käthe Kollwitz's did not initially advocate for social justice nor felt sympathy for the downtrodden. She was drawn to the lives of the oppressed and simply found them to be "beautiful." Her socialism allowed her to comprehend deep human emotions which she expressed in her art through her deliberate decision of subject matter and the emotions she wants drawn out from the viewer. The intended audience reaction when viewing Raped were most likely the same emotions I felt when the print was retrieved from the inventory room and attentively placed on the easel: unease, silence, desolation.

Her environment growing up was very influential for Kollwitz's art. Her exposure to socialism was from her Social Democratic father who was a pastor where he receives the sentiments of the local poor folks such as peasants and sailors on the harbor as well as her grandfather who often lectured her on religion and socialism. She admitted that she "...felt the influence of two generations in me: my father in close proximity, because he served to introduce me to socialism, socialism understood as the much-desired Brotherhood of Man.'" Furthermore, it was later when she married her husband who was a doctor tending to people in the slums of Koenigsberg, a city that used to be part of northern Germany, that she became more acquainted with poor people.

The print, Raped, demonstrated Kollwitz's socialist beliefs in her expression of the woman's disfigured body structure and pose, in the irony of the woman's "carcass" lying upon a field of lively vines and flowers, and the idea of the wrath and abuse of powerful people like the feudal lord who violated her.

Standpoint feminism is developed by Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins who were

inspired by Karl Marx's socialism and Marxism where systems of power should be explained by

the perspective of the marginalized and socially oppressed in order to objectively analyze the

organization of a system of power, the way women live their lives and how they socially

construct their lives around the system of power that suppresses them.

The Universality of Kollwitz and a Global Sisterhood

One of the most remarkable characteristics of this print as well as Kollwitz's other work is the applied universality in the themes or emotions that she conveys which transcends social divisions. Universality is similarly advocated for in Robin Morgan's global sisterhood which supports for the formation of a solidarity between women around the world that is based on shared experiences. While the concept seems to check all the balances in creating international unity for women, the sisterhood implies a universal patriarchy, disregards the differences between women's lives and experiences, paints women as a monolith, and neglects the glaring effects of the processes of imperialism, colonialism and globalization.

It is a critique that I do not extend to Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz effectively draws out empathy for the people in her prints, as they experience events and emotions that would affect the core of people's humanity: loss, grief, depression, regret, during times of violence, stress and distress. I believe that due to using a perspective akin to that of standpoint feminism, she exposes the raw emotions that are felt by the poorest who makes up the majority and is exploited to carry the plebeians and the social order on their shoulders. This print demonstrate the result of a violent act by a male perpetrator, implying a feminist trope of females as victims of male sexual violence. However, she does not illustrate the rapist nor an extensive story to be told. She focuses in on the woman and her body, describing it as a shell of a body. Because the focus is on the woman and not the male perpetrator, Kollwitz is able to effect a universality of the emotions of violation and loss of innocence. It is these emotions that are universal.

In conclusion, the tools that Käthe Kollwitz used in her prints to evoke a sense of empathy by drawing out raw human emotions, were similar to the models that have advanced feminist scholarship. Kollwitz uses specific types of tool that are akin to the ones used in contemporary feminism, including the feminist standpoint theory and intersectionality to create a social type of realism that transcends the style and paper of the print to the social meaning and implications. This social realism allowed the print, Raped, and the rest of her works to be universally applicable beyond social divisions and national borders. I want to clarify that I do not want to identify Käthe Kollwitz as a feminist, nor do I think she possesses a feminist agenda.

Her work shares with feminism the concern for similar types of people: poor, oppressed, women, children, laborers and people in the working class, and the people that stands on the intersections of many of these underdog identities that makes them all the more vulnerable. Furthermore, Käthe Kollwitz and the feminist movement share the endeavor to explore the ordeals, hardships and emotions that is uniquely experienced by the people who have been exploited, neglected and marginalized within and by the global order.

Notes

1Linda L. Clark, Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe (United Kingdom:

Cambridge University Press, 2008), 231.

2Herbert Bittner, Kaethe Kollwitz, Drawings (New York: Sagamore Press, 1959), 3.

3Bittner, 6.

4Sandra G. Harding, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political

Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 5.

5Patricia H. Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Key Concepts) (United Kingdom: Polity

Press, 2016), 2.

6Elizabeth Prelinger, et al, Käthe Kollwitz (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 34.

7Bittner, 9.

8Prelinger, 40.

9Harding, 6-7.

10Carl Zigrosser, Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz (New York: Dover Publications,

1969), XII.

11Bittner, 2.

12Zigrosser, VII-VIII.

13Prelinger, 19-20.

14Janet Lee and Susan M. Shaw, Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on

Women (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011), 6.7.

Works Cited

Bittner, Herbert. Kaethe Kollwitz, Drawings. New York: Sagamore Press, 1959.

Clark, Linda L. Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe. United Kingdom:

Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Collins, Patricia H., and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality (Key Concepts). United Kingdom: Polity

Press, 2016.

Harding, Sandra G. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political

Controversies. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Lee, Janet, and Susan M. Shaw. Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on

Women. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.

Prelinger, Elizabeth, et al. Käthe Kollwitz . Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1992.

Zigrosser, Carl. Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz . New York: Dover Publications,

1969.