Käthe Kollwitz

The Käthe Kollwitz monument stands on Kollwitzplatz in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district. It is a bronze sculpture by Gustav Seitz, made between 1956 and 1958 and unveiled in 1961. The work honours Käthe Kollwitz, who lived on this square from 1891 until her home was destroyed in 1943. Earlier, in 1950, a granite copy of her sculpture ‘Mother with Two Children’ by Fritz Diederich had stood in the same spot. Seitz knew Kollwitz personally, having shared a studio in the Klosterstraße group in the 1930s. The monument shows Kollwitz as an elderly woman, seated with a large sketchbook beside her and a charcoal stick resting in her lap. Seitz based the figure on her 1938 lithograph self-portrait, made when she was seventy-one and already facing discrimination. Critics at the time called the design ‘block-like and inward’, fearing it lacked her fighting spirit. After Seitz moved to Hamburg in 1958, the bronze was cast in Schöneiche and installed without him present. In 1999 a plaque was added to explain the sculptor’s role. Visitors find the seated figure on a low plinth in the middle of Kollwitzplatz. The square itself is named after the artist and remains a quiet gathering place. The bronze’s rough surface catches the light at different times of day. A second cast stands in Magdeburg’s sculpture park near the former monastery, and a smaller version is placed outside Schloss Trebnitz.