Introduction

Figure 1. Käthe Kollwitz, Down with the Abortion Paragraphs, 1923, crayon lithograph, state II of II. Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne

In July 1923, printmaker Käthe Kollwitz was approached by the Women’s Secretariat of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party, hereafter designated KPD) to create a political poster (Figure 1).[1] This was not the first time that the KPD commissioned Kollwitz for a political poster, having previously partnered with her in 1921 to advocate for German post-war aid for Russia.[2] This time, Kollwitz was commissioned for a poster to aid the KPD in their campaign, organized by the Women’s Secretariat, against Paragraph 218 of the Weimar criminal code.[3] Paragraph 218 outlawed abortion, classifying it as a criminal act with the threat of a prison sentence for both women and medical practitioners. Kollwitz completed the commission a few weeks later, in August 1923. The poster, which bore the inscription Nieder mit den Abtreibung Paragraphen (Down with the Abortion Paragraphs), was distributed by the Women’s Secretariat to regional KPD offices. It was then posted in cities and towns across Germany with announcements for meetings and other events related to their large-scale movement against the abortion paragraphs.[4]

In Down with the Abortion Paragraphs Kollwitz made a pregnant working-class mother, who is accompanied by her children, the face of the KPD’s campaign. This mother is visibly suffering from various social as well as medical ills. Kollwitz makes clear the bodily and mental toll that additional children would pose to such women: her shoulders are slumped over as she cradles an infant in one arm and holds the hand of a toddler with the other. But her problems do not end there: her gaunt face shows that she is malnourished, and her black eye signals physical abuse. The assertive text of the poster urging for the dismantling of Paragraph 218 is placed in the center and slightly overlaps the group of figures, uniting the graphic text and image. Above the mother’s head is the phrase Herausgegeben von der KPD (published by the KPD). Kollwitz’s signature is emblazoned on the toddler’s sleeve, a move that subtly aligns the artist with the people in the poster as well as the political message that it communicates.

By foregrounding this working-class woman’s suffering, Kollwitz took aim not only at the abortion paragraphs, but also at the KPD, for its previous lack of attention to women’s issues. This capstone argues that the way Kollwitz depicted the working-class mother and framed the debate over abortion exposed the KPD’s lack of real commitment to women’s rights and to female voters. Publicly, the KPD positioned their stance on the abortion question as part of their larger championing of proletarian concerns: unwanted pregnancies would further disadvantage working-class families by adding yet more mouths to feed. Privately, though, the KPD used their anti-Paragraph 218 campaign as a way to gain positive publicity among women voters, a demographic with whom they consistently performed poorly.[5] This discrepancy between public and private debates was made clear through a party-wide memo that encouraged activists to use the issue of abortion to win the support of more women.[6] The KPD’s “woman problem” stemmed from the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1918, when women suddenly gained the right to vote, and began to join the workforce in increasing numbers.[7] Both the campaign and the decision to hire Kollwitz—a prominent working woman—to promote it were designed to court female voters.  

In executing this commission, Kollwitz specifically chose to portray a working-class mother as the beneficiary of the KPD’s campaign instead of the idealized, elite figure of the Neue Frau (“new woman”). Like the debate over abortion, the New Woman was a product of the Weimar Republic, in which women were perceived to gain greater cultural authority to go along with their increased political power.[8] According to popular stereotype, the New Woman was young, financially independent, urban-dwelling, athletic, and fashionable. The New Woman was widely perceived as rejecting the traditional role of domestic caretaker, to the dismay of members of older generations, including some women.[9] As a member of the older generation herself, Kollwitz reflected this conflict by refusing to abandon the proletarian mother in favor of the exciting New Woman who emerged in the 1920s. She thereby ensured that the working-class mother would remain the focal point of the KPD’s first large-scale abortion campaign and, ideally, that the KPD would respond by realigning their priorities and policies.

Figure 2. Käthe Kollwitz, Never Again War, 1924, crayon and brush lithograph, Cologne Kollwitz Collection

Down with the Abortion Paragraphs is one of a relatively small number of political posters that Kollwitz created over the course of her career.[10] One such work is Nie wieder Kreig (Never again War, 1924; Figure 2), a poster commissioned by the International Trade Union. The image depicts an androgynous figure making a pacifist pledge.[11] The poster is often viewed as an expression of Kollwitz’s personal anti-war stance, and a reaction to the death of her son Peter during World War I. Despite the popularity of Never Again War, which manifested Kollwitz’s pacifist activism and was reproduced for anti-war movements throughout the decades, her work making political posters for specific causes or organizations tends to be overshadowed by other aspects of her career as a printmaker. Kollwitz’s social activism and political beliefs are more commonly discussed in relation to print cycles such as A Weaver’s Revolt (1893-97) or Peasant’s War (1901-1908), which depict subjects from the past or were inspired by literary texts.

In using a maternal figure as the figurehead of the KPD’s anti-Paragraph 218 campaign, Kollwitz turned to a motif that she employed often in her career. This emphasis on the subject of motherhood has dominated the scholarly literature on Kollwitz.[12] Early feminist scholarship on Kollwitz, which was largely biographical in nature, connected her images of mothers directly to the artist’s own experiences as a parent. Martha Kearns’s Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976), for example, opens with a dramatic scene describing Kollwitz’s own birth, which not only sets a sensationalizing tone for the biography, but cements the artist’s association with the subject of motherhood. Arthur and Mina Klein’s Käthe Kollwitz: Life in Art (1975) uses similarly speculative language, as they aim to describe her innermost thoughts. Both of these texts use artworks as an avenue to illustrate Kollwitz’s life and personality, leaving aside questions of technique, style, and socio-political context. As Jay A. Clarke recently indicated in her contribution to the exhibition catalogue Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, and Politics, this approach has limited our understanding of the artist’s career.[13] Clarke called attention to how Kollwitz’s own journal and letters have been incorporated into art historical scholarship and skewed interpretations of her artworks towards aspects of her biography, especially in instances that involve mothers and children.[14]

While scholars have taken other approaches to Kollwitz’s art, most still remain focused on the iconography of motherhood. In 1976, Linda Nochlin compared Kollwitz’s images of motherhood with those created by Paula Modersohn-Becker, a fellow German Expressionist. Nochlin argued that Modersohn-Becker’s maternal imagery, which portrayed rural women as passive victims of circumstance, was influenced by the nineteenth century tradition of fatalism.[15] By contrast, she claimed, Kollwitz’s images depicted women as active protagonists in working-class struggles, and she linked this imagery to Kollwitz’s own political activism.[16] Twenty years after the publication of Nochlin’s essay, Rosemary Betterton examined Kollwitz’s maternal representation through the scope of sexual and creative identity. Betterton argued that Kollwitz used the motif of mothers and children as a way to depict the female nude in art—an important marker of achievement—while also addressing the fear of losing her artistic identity.[17] Importantly, Betterton did not simply rely on biographical information, but put these images into the socio-historical context of contemporary discourses on motherhood.[18] Most recently, Ingrid Sharp has analyzed the reception of Kollwitz’s images of war, comparing the gendered language used in analyses of her woodcut cycle War (1923-24) to Otto Dix’s etchings The War (1922-33).[19] Building on these precedents, this capstone aims to complicate our understanding of maternal imagery in Kollwitz’s art. I argue that Kollwitz used the image of the mother in Down with the Abortion Paragraphs in order to make a political statement about the abortion debate and the KPD’s abysmal record on women’s issues.