The Mothers
Kollwitz's lithograph, The Mothers, was created outside of her final series, War, as she experimented with a new medium. Completed on her deceased son's Peter's birthday, the foreground is dominated by a self-portrait of Kollwitz as a mother, holding her sons Hans and Peter when they were young.
The theme of mothers is a recurring motif in Kollwitz's work, from her early social justice imagery to her exploration of the impact of war and grief on families. In The Mothers, Kollwitz portrays the predicament and emotional toll of sons enlisting or being drafted into war on the mothers left behind. The woman on the left of the print covers her face with her hands, overwhelmed with grief at the loss of her son. The two women on either side of Kollwitz's self-portrait hold their children tightly, shielding them from the looming threat of eternal separation and an uncertain future. Kollwitz and her sons in the foreground represent the limits of a mother's protection. By 1919, her older son Hans was an adult, and Peter had died in the First World War in 1914. The children she embraces in the lithograph are thus memories of her sons as youths. This interpretation suggests that while a mother's desire to protect her children is intense, in the face of war's unpredictability and the inevitability of adolescent and adult independence, a mother can ultimately only protect her memories of them.
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