Questioning German Expressionism: Nazi Reception and Contradiction in the Art of Käthe Kollwitz

Madeline Ullrich

Dr. Juliet Bellow

Department of Art History

General University Honors

Spring 2014

My research is a study of Käthe Kollwitz's reception by the Nazi regime from 1933-1945 rather than one that focuses on her artistic production. Despite remaining a practicing artist up to her death in 1945, few art historians correlate her career with significant political events of the 1930s and 40s, such as the rise of the Third Reich. Relegated a “degenerate” artist by Hitler, Kollwitz’s art was initially included Degenerate Exhibition of 1937; however, her work was quickly removed from this derogatory spectacle. In fact, the Nazis even appropriated her work for their own propaganda. Hence, my project is defined by a single term: contradictions. The inconsistent treatment of “degenerate” artists reflects contradictions in a variety of realms: Nazi ideology, the artistic movement of German Expressionism as a whole, and gender. Exploring these contradictions not only reveals more about Kollwitz at the end of her career, but also speaks to her position as a German artist in contemporary art historical discourse. Ullrich 1

Berlin, 1941. Picture a small, poorly lit apartment, cluttered with items one would see in the studio of an artist: clay, drop cloths, modeling blocks, and the like. This is the home of the renowned German artist Käthe Kollwitz, which also became her studio in 1940. When Otto

Nagel, a close friend and fellow artist of Kollwitz, came to visit her in this modest apartment the following year, he found the usually calm and reserved Kollwitz beside herself with rage.

Kollwitz had just discovered her artwork had been plagiarized. Such a revelation would be horrifying for an author of any kind, but Kollwitz was upset not just because of the fact that her works were appropriated, but also about who had committed this deed: her intellectual property had been stolen by the Nazis.1 Images from Kollwitz’s print cycle Hunger, a series originally created to depict the horrific economic conditions faced by working-class German families in the aftermath of World War I, had been included in a Nazi-Fascist periodical. And not only had the print been reproduced without her knowledge or permission, but Warte (Viewpoint), a National

Socialist women’s newspaper, changed their very meaning, claiming that these images showed victims of communism in Stalin’s Soviet Russia.2 To top it all off, Warte reproduced Kollwitz’s

1924 print Bread! (Fig. 1) under a fake signature, “St. Frank.”3

The scenario I just described occurred several times during the period of the Third Reich: the Nazis reproduced a number of Kollwitz’s prints without giving her credit, sometimes changing the artist’s signature altogether and reattributing their authorship. Kollwitz’s anger, conveyed in Nagel’s biography, was partially directed towards having her socially-concerned, left-leaning works appropriated for Fascist ends. But her anger must also have been fueled by the fact that only four years earlier, the Nazis labeled this very art “degenerate,” placing her works—

1 Otto Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz, trans. Stella Humphries (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971), 81. 2 Ibid., 81. 3 Ibid. Ullrich 2 among the 650 pieces by 112 artists featured—in their notorious “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate

Art”) exhibition in 1937.

The intention of this now infamous exhibition was to show the German people the artwork—and, by association, the artists—that the Third Reich officially condemned, and thus deemed “un-German.” In his 1937 decree calling for museum leaders to relinquish modern artworks for “Entartete Kunst,” Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels requested any art that was seen to “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”4 Kollwitz’s works were among the many removed from museums for such reasons. Yet, to complicate the story even further, while “Entartete

Kunst” had a successful run in Munich in 1937 and went on to travel throughout Germany and

Austria from 1938-1941, it seems that Kollwitz’s works only appeared in the original Munich version of the exhibition. Her work was subsequently removed once the show traveled to Berlin and on to other venues.5[6]

My essay thus hinges on a paradox: why would the Nazis appropriate the work of an artist they ultimately disavowed? Furthermore, why would they condemn Kollwitz as

“degenerate” only to exonerate her from this status after the first iteration of “Entartete Kunst”?

Scholars have never discussed at length such facts concerning Kollwitz and her treatment during the Third Reich. Thus, my paper takes a twofold approach to Käthe Kollwitz. The unraveling of the Nazis’ contradictory behavior towards Kollwitz during the Third Reich—was she

“degenerate,” or was she not?—reveals the internal struggle within Nazi ideology on modern art.

4 Stephanie Barron, “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 19. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 Christoph Zuschlag, “An Educational Exhibition: Precursors of “Entartete Kunst” and Its Individual Venues,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 92. Ullrich 3

In turn, my study of Kollwitz’s reception during the Third Reich will simultaneously create a more complete understanding of this artist and explore the problem of her categorization within the German art world of the early twentieth century. I will argue that it is the “universality” of her art—that is, its ability to straddle artistic movements both thematically and stylistically—that facilitated the appropriation of her work, complicating her reception by the Nazis in terms of their Degenerate Art Exhibition and, consequently, her place in subsequent art-historical scholarship.

Categorizing Kollwitz: Her Legacy in Scholarship

While scholars have paid scant attention to Kollwitz’s late career and the reception of her work during the Third Reich, there is certainly a developed literature devoted to the artist; methodologically, that field is relatively limited, primarily emphasizing biographical interpretation. Scholars often view Kollwitz as a tragic figure, equating her eventful life circumstances with her grim, sometimes disturbing representations of war, death, and economic despair. Otto Nagel, a close friend of Kollwitz, wrote a biography of the artist only 18 years after her death, connecting the events of her life to a broader historical context and discussing the key influences on Kollwitz’s style and subject matter. However, unlike other authors, Nagel devotes considerable time documenting Kollwitz’s production from 1933-1945, the official years of the Third Reich. He is the only author to go beyond a cursory reference to the interaction between the National Socialists and Käthe Kollwitz. His descriptions of her interactions with

Nazism, revealed in her interrogations by the Gestapo, the Nazi appropriation of her artwork, and the removal of her artwork from museums across Berlin and Germany, serve as one catalyst for my paper. Ullrich 4

Yet, despite the wealth of information Nagel provides, scholars seem hesitant to analyze the artist from more theoretical perspectives, resulting in texts that are biographical in nature, the majority of which lack in-depth, scholarly analysis. With the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, art historians started making attempts in reviving female artists and their histories through biographical methods. Thus, the first biography on Kollwitz written by an American scholar is Martha Kearns’ Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976). As is common with feminist texts of this era, Kearns’s goal here is to bring Kollwitz, as a female artist, out of obscurity and to place her within a historical context. While this is certainly a noble ambition,

Kearns’s biography on Kollwitz falls prey to the problem typical of feminist scholarship at that time. That is, while feminist scholars may have brought women artists into the scholarly discourse, they were often not engaging with the societal constructs that caused female artists to fall by the wayside in the first place.7 As a result, my paper will instead favor a social, historical approach to Kollwitz, questioning the institutions that shaped her career both leading up to and during the Third Reich specifically.

Elizabeth Prelinger’s work on Kollwitz, on the other hand could perhaps be read as a reaction to feminist art history’s hesitancy in discussing the more formal aspects of Kollwitz’s work. Prelinger is the first to discuss what she refers to as Kollwitz’s “ambivalence”: both the ease of appropriating Kollwitz’s works during her career, and scholars’ difficulty placing this artist within movements or categories.8 In her essay “Kollwitz Reconsidered” from 1992

National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue Käthe Kollwitz, Prelinger sheds new light on the

7 Feminist thought was introduced to art historical discourse by means of Linda Nochlin’s renowned essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in which she asks art historians to consider the societal institutions that have prevented the success of female artists. Kearns’s biography on Kollwitz, though she does place the artist in some historical context, does not follow Nochlin’s call to action for a more social art historical approach. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power: and Other Essays, ed. Linda Nochlin, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 169. 8 Elizabeth Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” in Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Elizabeth Prelinger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 77. Ullrich 5 artist. Early on, she makes a significant assertion: the importance of studying Kollwitz’s practice, first and foremost, and the social and personal implications of her art as secondary information.

This is not to say that one should ignore the historical context of her works; rather, Prelinger maintains that the political aspects of her work often overshadow her artistic skill and techniques, hence why she needs to be “reconsidered.” Prelinger importantly asserts that

Kollwitz does not fit into the Expressionist model in which she is often placed. This is not only because Kollwitz disavowed the Expressionists in her own writings, but also because her works, according to Prelinger, are “humanitarian and universal,” and thus very different than that of the

Expressionists, artists who Kollwitz saw as too obscure.9 In fact, Prelinger claims scholars’ associations between her and Expressionism would have shocked Kollwitz herself.10 Thus,

Prelinger’s ardent renunciation of Kollwitz’s connection to Expressionism is an essential consideration when attempting to place Kollwitz in the context of the Third Reich and the Nazis’ aversion towards Kollwitz’s work.11 I will consider Prelinger’s rejection of Kollwitz as an

Expressionist and how it relates to the Nazis’ willingness to place Kollwitz into this category of artists.

Prelinger’s assertion of the “universal” quality of Kollwitz’s work—what she believes sets Kollwitz apart from her Expressionist contemporaries—is not the only way of understanding the artist’s relationship to contemporaneous artistic movements. Alessandra Comini, for example, believes that Kollwitz was an Expressionist, but that the artist’s emphasis on socially

9 Ibid., 80. 10 Kollwitz’s diary entry from February 21, 1916 plays a primary role in Prelinger’s argument for Kollwitz’s repudiation of l’art pour l’art, or what Kollwitz believed to be the goal of Expressionist artists and stresses the importance of her art to “restore the lost connection,” between art and the spectator. Kaethe Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, ed. Hans Kollwitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 1988), 68. 11 Prelinger herself hints at Kollwitz’s universality playing a role in her complex treatment by National Socialists, yet limits her discussion of the Nazis’ behavior towards Kollwitz to a mere paragraph. Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 82. Ullrich 6 involved subjects caused the artist to be excluded from the Expressionist dynasty. She asks,

“Why are we always told severely that Kollwitz tended to favor ‘social’ themes as if this weakened or negated the power of her poignancy? Concern with society […] would seem to tarnish Kollwitz’s candidacy as a full-fledged Expressionist.”12 Comini sees Kollwitz’s exclusion from the Expressionist movement as a result of Kollwitz’s gender; she points out that Kollwitz’s male counterparts who similarly created works with social themes, such as Edvard Munch, are at least considered Expressionists. Comini’s argument is contingent on the assumption that

Expressionism, as a movement, possesses an elevated status in the art-historical canon. To further prove her point, Comini then cleverly (and somewhat controversially) cite Kollwitz’s persecution by the Nazis, asserting that “Adolf Hitler was surer about Kollwitz’s place in art history than many art historians have been: he specified that her works be included in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937—possibly the greatest retrospective of modern art ever held.”13 Viewing Comini and Prelinger in dialogue with one another—both engaging with

Kollwitz’s questionable status as an Expressionist—my paper highlights how contemporary scholarship echoes the difficulty the National Socialists had in categorizing Kollwitz in comparison to her contemporaries.

Though few scholars discuss Kollwitz’s persecution by the Nazis in depth, certain key details often are noted: that she was asked to step down from her position at the Prussian

Academy of Art in 1934; that her artwork was removed from museums; that she was, at least temporarily, considered “degenerate.” Nagel, Kearns, Prelinger, Comini—all of these scholars make mention of Kollwitz’s persecution; however, they tend to state these facts without any

12 Alessandra Comini, "Gender or Genius? The Women Artists of German Expressionism," in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row: 1982), 271. 13 Ibid. Ullrich 7 thorough investigation of the circumstances of Kollwitz’s treatment by the Nazis. My paper differs from the existing scholarship in that I will investigate why Kollwitz could have faced

Nazi persecution. I both connect Kollwitz to contemporaneous artistic movements and point to significant differences that reveal why her art stood on the edge of the Nazis’ developing art ideology, at once “degenerate” and acceptable.

It should also be noted that texts covering the Nazi persecution of modern and avant- garde artists hardly do a better job in addressing Kollwitz. She is only briefly mentioned in

Stephanie Barron’s “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, the foremost text on “Entartete Kunst.” In fact, Barron does not feature Kollwitz amongst the extensive biographies on artists included in the show, despite Christophe’s Zuschlag’s claim that

Kollwitz was indeed in the Munich Exhibition and later removed from the show once it traveled to Berlin. He places her in a select group of other artists considered “critical cases”—artists whose work no longer appeared in the exhibition for exceptional reasons.14 Meanwhile, artists such as Emil Nolde, former member of Die Brücke and a Nazi himself, and Ernst Barlach, a sculptor viewed as a critical influence on Kollwitz (though never the other way around, as

Alessandra Comini points out) have entire articles, even books devoted to their reception by the

National Socialists. What is fascinating in particular about Barlach in this case, is that he and

Kollwitz supposedly remained in the Degenerate Exhibition for the same amount of time, both being removed in 1938 before it traveled throughout Germany and Austria. Why, then, do scholars choose to focus on Barlach’s reception, rather than Kollwitz’s, during the Nazi Regime?

Did he and Kollwitz not have remarkably similar experiences at the hands of the Nazis? In fact, wouldn’t the Nazis’ inconsistent treatment of Kollwitz—their appropriation of her work and

14 Christoph Zuschlag, “An Educational Exhibition: Precursors of “Entartete Kunst” and Its Individual Venues,” 92. Ullrich 8 later, contradictory categorization of the artist as “degenerate”—not make her an equally remarkable case study as Nolde or Barlach?

Thus, my project fills these gaps in scholarship by exploring the latter half of Kollwitz’s career and an exploration of the possible motives behind the Nazis’ contradictory behavior towards her art. In order to unravel their treatment of Kollwitz, I will first analyze and establish her status amongst her German contemporaries: namely, the Expressionists, a status much disputed by scholars through their passivity and hesitation in categorizing Kollwitz. After considering how and why Kollwitz may or may not have been grouped with the Expressionists, I then explore Nazi aesthetics—the National Socialists’ understanding of Expressionism and modernism—and their ideological attempts to discredit modern artists. As will become evident,

Kollwitz’s universality created a problematic case for the Nazis who, as a result, not only appropriated her work, but also wavered on their “degenerate” categorization of the artist.

Grappling with the Graphic Medium: Klinger, Kollwitz, and Print Media

A significant link between Kollwitz and the Expressionist artists is their use of the woodcut medium, though the two parties arrived at the use of this technique from disparate standpoints.

What exactly makes their use of the medium dissimilar is a subject to which I will return later in this paper; for the moment, it is important to point out that Kollwitz arrived at the woodcut by means of print media—specifically etching and lithography—which she was convinced to pursue from the early years of her artistic training.

Born in 1867 in Koenigsberg, Prussia, Kollwitz was encouraged to become an artist by her father from an early age.15 Thus her father sent her to Berlin when she was only 17 years old

15 One cannot help but to “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” here, where the Nochlin writes “It would be interesting to investigate the role of benign, if not outright encouraging, fathers in the formation of women Ullrich 9 to receive training under artist Karl Stauffer-Bern, the teacher responsible for inspiring Kollwitz pursue drawing. When he saw Kollwitz’s portfolio upon her arrival in Berlin, Stauffer-Bern was immediately reminded of the work of Max Klinger, a German artist known for his naturalistic drawings depicting social issues in precise detail. Stauffer-Bern advised Kollwitz to visit an exhibition in Berlin featuring Klinger’s print series from 1880-84, A Life (Fig. 2) an event that

Kollwitz felt profoundly influenced the rest of her artistic career.16

When Kollwitz first took up drawing, it had previously been considered a less sophisticated medium, and hence inferior to painting. Such a belief has its roots in the French academy, which privileged painting over other media; in the nineteenth century, this view was imported into the German art world in an attempt to emulate the French academy system.

However, around the turn of the century German artists began to embrace print media—in part, to distinguish themselves from French artists, they took up woodcut prints, which came to be viewed as a distinctly “German” medium. Klinger played an important role in this revaluation of media, writing a treatise on the importance of drawing, Malerei und Zeichnung (Painting and

Drawing) in 1891 (a text that Kollwitz later encountered during her training in Munich). In the treatise Klinger desires to justify “drawing,” the term he uses to describe hand-drawing, engravings, etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, in the realm of artistic media. He outlines the history of drawing, noting its initial function as a preparatory step in the process of painting, but then its use as a principal medium with artists such as Raphael, Dürer, and Goya. He then attempts to validate drawing by articulating a sort of paragone, claiming that drawing’s seeming immediacy allows the artist to achieve motifs that are impossible to depict in painting. For

professionals: both Käthe Kollwitz and Barbara Hepworth, for example, recall the influence of unusually sympathetic and supportive fathers on their artistic pursuits.” Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, 169. 16 Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (New York: The Feminist Press, 1976), 38. Ullrich 10

Klinger, the lack of detail and color—often seen as drawing’s drawbacks relative to painting— gives the medium greater freedom of imagination. The drawing artist is therefore not just representing his or her own world, as an individual, but rather is “representative of his species,” because the viewer may perceive a drawing through the projection of his or her own personal experiences.17

According to Kollwitz’s biographer Nagel, Painting and Drawing was highly influential in legitimizing the artist’s natural skills in print media.18 Though she first heard of Klinger while studying in Berlin, she first read Painting and Drawing while studying in Munich at the

Women’s School of Art. Her preference to the medium of Klinger’s “drawing” is a result of the immediacy and expression she could depict in her subject matter. Klinger emphasized the use of print as a “critical tool,” to engage with social subjects, whereas he saw painting as frivolous in its attempts to “beautify” the world.19 Thus it is likely that Kollwitz saw drawing in its “freedom of imagination,” or lack of specificity, as a way to make her motifs more universalizing—a way to identify with a large audience.

With her affinity for the graphic arts, consisting of etching and lithography, Kollwitz first gained attention in the art world with her cycle A Weaver’s Rebellion, a series of three etchings and three lithographs.20 Kollwitz was inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The Weavers, which tells the story of a revolt by a group of Silesian workers in 1944—a play so controversial that it was banned by the German government at the time.21 She saw the play in 1893 and later wrote,

17 Max Klinger, Painting and Drawing, trans. Fiona Elliot and Christopher Croft (Birmingham: Ikon, 2005), 21. 18 Nagel leads us to believe that Kollwitz had access to and read Painting and Drawing by Klinger, and that the text finally persuaded Kollwitz to adhere to the graphic mediums of etching and lithography exclusively, despite her previous desire to paint. Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz, 20. 19 Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 16. 20 Carl Zigrosser’s introductory text is trite when compared to other scholars, but his compilation of Kollwitz’s oeuvre is one of the most reliable of its kind and is my primary source when referencing Kollwitz’s print cycles. Zigrosser, Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969). 21 Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 20. Ullrich 11

“that performance was a milestone in my work. I dropped the series on Germinal and set to work on The Weavers.”22 The Weavers (1895-98) sometimes also referred to as A Weaver’s Rebellion

(so as not to confuse it with Hauptmann’s play), shows the dire conditions of the peasant class, their attempts to overcome adversity through revolt, and ultimately, defeat, as evidenced by the final print in the cycle The End (Fig. 3) which shows some of the workers deceased in a dimly lit shed after their failed revolution.

By choosing to engage with socially-concerned subject matter, such as themes from the government-censored play The Weavers, Kollwitz established a legacy as a controversial artist early on in her career, a reputation that follows her even into present-day scholarship. Though A

Weaver’s Rebellion was extremely successful upon its exhibition in Berlin in 1898—it was even proposed to win the Gold Medal—Kaiser Wilhelm II himself vetoed the jury recommendation that Kollwitz should receive this recognition for the work. She later received the Gold Medal award for the series when it was exhibited in Dresden in 1899.23[24] Kollwitz believed that the controversy caused by the Kaiser’s veto was in fact what first brought her name prominence in the German art world, especially for her abilities in depicting emotional subject matter. In 1941,

Kollwitz looked back upon this pivotal event, where she retrospectively and famously claimed,

“my reputation for being a ‘socialist’ artist […] clung to me from then on. […] But my real motive for choosing my subjects almost exclusively from the life of the workers was that only such subjects gave me in a simple and unqualified way what I felt to be beautiful.”25 Here then begins the issue of Kollwitz’s ambivalence—the ease of seeing her work as overt political

22 Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, 42. 23 Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist, 76. 24 Scholars tend to attribute this decision to the socialist sympathy of A Weaver’s Rebellion. 25 Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, 43. Ullrich 12 commentary, which further becomes an issue when the Nazis attempt to both appropriate and disavow her work.

Regardless of Kollwitz’s claim to take an apolitical stance, A Weaver’s Rebellion played an important role in Kollwitz’s career: it both solidified her reputation as a talented graphic artist but also one who incorporated social themes into her work. Thus Kollwitz became beloved by her audiences but perhaps was equally looked upon with suspicion by the government, as evidenced by Kaiser Wilhelm’s disapproval. Kollwitz’s political reputation, which clearly has its roots in the Kaiser’s distaste for her work, foreshadows Kollwitz’s later censorship under the

Nazis, which I will argue may also be a result of her perceived politics.

Expressionism and Its Influences

If Kollwitz had such success with etching and lithography, so much so that she was appointed to the Prussian Art Academy as the first female professor, it would seem odd for her to make a significant stylistic shift in 1919: the year she first employed the woodcut medium. At this time,

Kollwitz was asked to create a memorial portrait of Karl Liebknecht (Fig. 4), a Communist leader who was assassinated amidst the whirlwind of Wilhelm II’s abdication.26 Scholars tend to attribute this dramatic shift in style to Kollwitz’s dissatisfaction with etching and lithography around this time. In that year, Kollwitz wrote,

Today I looked again at my lithographs and saw again that almost all of them are not good. Barlach has found his way and I have not yet found mine. I can no longer etch, I am finished with it for good. And with lithography there are the inadequacies of transfer paper. […] Should I really make a completely new attempt like Barlach and begin with the woodcut?27

26 Alessandra Comini, “Kollwitz in Context,” in Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Elizabeth Prelinger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 77. 27 Kollwitz, in Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 54. Ullrich 13

Kollwitz was completely enamored with Ernst Barlach’s work, seeing the artist’s woodcuts for the first time at a Secession exhibition on June 24, 1920, when she was still working on the

Liebknecht memorial print. Viewing Barlach’s woodcuts certainly seemed career-altering, writing in her journal the very next day, “I saw something that knocked me over: Barlach’s woodcuts.”28

Though Kollwitz does not say why Barlach’s woodcuts clearly struck a chord with her, this certainly would not have been her first encounter with the medium. The woodcut had a long history in early twentieth-century Germany; artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde,

Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff of Die Brücke (The Bridge), a collective formed in

1905, frequently utilized this medium. The consensus concerning Die Brücke’s origins—and their use of the woodcut—often are attributed to the anxieties of the German people as a result of the vast industrialization the country was facing towards the end of the nineteenth century. The artists of Die Brücke reacted to this rapid modernization by creating art that evoked the primitive, or as art historian Jill Lloyd states, “primitivism provided modern artists […] with a means of negotiating the internal paradox of modernity,” the Expressionists’ tendencies to be both “forward-and-backward looking.”29 Though Die Brücke was formally long dissolved by the time Kollwitz adopted the medium, these artists were still producing works relying on similar themes and methods that brought the artists together in the first place into the late 1910s.30

The Expressionists were just one group that turned to the woodcut during the early decades of the twentieth century. Barlach, who Kollwitz so evidently admired, also used this medium, yet did not consider himself an Expressionist, or at least did not affiliate with any of the

28 Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, 97. 29 Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), vii. 30 Lloyd marks the writing of Kirchner’s manifesto, the Chronik der Brücke, as point of dissolution of the group in 1913. She also cites the outbreak of World War I in 1914 as a secondary cause. Ibid., 18. Ullrich 14 movements associated with this broad term.31 Peter Paret, the only scholar to write extensively on Barlach in the context of Nazi Germany, points out the tendency of scholars to place Barlach within the movement of Expressionism; Paret notes Peter Selz’s claim that Barlach is “the most significant exponent of expressionism in sculpture.”32[33] Paret points out two main differences between Barlach’s sculptures and those of the German Expressionists. The Expressionists mainly used wood for their sculptures, such as Kirchner’s sculpture from 1910, Dancer With Necklace

(Fig. 5).34 Barlach too used wood, but he also used other materials, especially bronze when sculpting memorial figures. Yet, when Barlach did use wood, like his contemporaries, his sculptures were figurative and evoked images of Gothic German art rather than the “primitive.”35

Paret also points out that Barlach completely avoided sculptures of the nude unlike the

Expressionists, where the nude figure, especially the female nude, was predominant in their oeuvre.36 Though Barlach may have paralleled the Expressionists in some senses—namely, in his chosen materials, woodcuts and wood sculpture—in a similar vein as Kollwitz, the stylistic and thematic differences far outweigh the similarities. Paret’s need to separate Barlach from other

German artistic movements demonstrates the tendency to place artists like Barlach and Kollwitz into inappropriate art-historical categories based solely on stylistic analogies.

Significantly, Kollwitz herself had an identity crisis in 1916 over her status relative to the

Expressionist movement, writing in her diary, “Read an article by E. von Keyserling on the

31Though Kollwitz spoke of Barlach’s woodcuts, Barlach seems to be mostly known for his sculptures. 32 Peter Paret, An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 25. 33 Paret, here, quotes from Peter Selz’s seminal book German Expressionist Painting, the first text published in English that recounts the history of the German Expressionist movement from 1905-1914. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 64. 34 Like the woodcut, Die Brücke saw wood carvings to be evocative of primitivism, as inspired by the Jugendstil movement. 35 By “primitive,” Paret is using the term as synonymous to the non-Western art the Expressionists emulated from ethnographic museums, such as the Dresden Ethnographic Museum, which the group often visited. Lloyd, German Expressionism, 34. 36 Paret, An Artist Against the Third Reich, 28. Ullrich 15 future of art. He opposes expressionism and says that after the war the German people will need eccentric studio art less than before. What they need is realistic art.”37 By citing Keyserling, a writer, critic, and major proponent of Naturalist literature, it seems as if Kollwitz is grasping for the justification of her figurative etchings and lithographs (keeping in mind she would not adopt the woodcut until three years later). Kollwitz was undoubtedly well respected at this point in her career, and she certainly was aware of the current trends in the art world, manifest in

Expressionism and other modern movements, and perhaps felt a hint of uncertainty in the fact that her figurative and politically-oriented artwork seemed antiquated compared to the abstraction and expression of Kirchner or the sculpture of Barlach.

If Kollwitz feared the abstruseness of the Expressionists, then what ultimately motivated

Kollwitz to make the stylistic leap to the woodcut with the Liebknecht memorial print in 1919?

As Kollwitz mentioned in her own writing, she was very much aware of the perceived link between woodcuts and the Expressionists, whose works—when compared to her widely distributed lithographs and etchings—seemed highbrow and exclusive. By choosing the woodcut, she perhaps experienced some anxiety in also being seen as esoteric by her audiences, especially when reaching a wide audience was central to her artistic mission. Hence, it is very possible her switch to the woodcut was strategic, given that she decided to take what she believed to be a huge stylistic risk, arguably at the height of her career—the year she was appointed professor at the Prussian Art Academy. Thus Kollwitz’s decision to apply the woodcut to such a highly politicized image at a time when her importance as an artist had been publicly established, is an attempt to combat the individualism previously associated with the woodcut established by Brücke artists.

37 Kollwitz, The Diary of Kaethe Kollwitz, 68. Prelinger, too, cites this moment as pivotal for Kollwitz in terms of German Expressionism. Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 78. Ullrich 16

It is also important to note that while Die Brücke is perhaps the group most often associated with the woodcut, they were not the only ones employing the medium at the time; other sects of Expressionists, such as Der Blaue Reiter, also experimented with the woodcut, and, as noted above, artists who did not belong to any particular group, such as Barlach.38 Kollwitz’s switch to the woodcut seems potentially to be influenced more by Barlach's works rather than those of members of Die Brücke; she certainly preferred Barlach over Schmidt-Rottluff or

Kirchner, for example. It would seem that she appreciated the woodcut as an expressive tool, but not its use in Expressionist images. Thus, Barlach is middle ground: he provided a concrete example of how the woodcut may appear outside the Expressionists’ model.

Stylistically, however, her woodcuts certainly share similarities with those of Kirchner,

Schmidt-Rottluff, and Nolde. In her third series of prints, War (1922-23), Kollwitz exclusively uses the woodcut method, creating seven woodcut prints, using only black and white. Unlike her previous series A Weaver’s Rebellion and Peasant’s War (1903-09) another series of etchings,

War shifts not just stylistically but also is simplified in terms of the prints’ themes. Kollwitz names the prints with titles such as The Parents, The Volunteers, The Mothers (Figs. 6-8). These titles have universal associations: they evoke themes applicable to everyone. With War, universality was Kollwitz’s primary goal, more than any other series she had previously created—A Weaver’s Rebellion being based upon Hauptmann’s play and The Peasant’s Revolt on the economic hardships of the working class. She felt that the woodcut could contribute to her desire to create a series that would garner an emotional response from the viewer: as an artist she believed it was her duty to create works that stylistically and thematically aligned. Prelinger

38 Kearns does briefly engage with Kollwitz’s exposure to the Expressionist artists, maintaining that Kollwitz was likely more aware of Die Brücke than Der Blaue Reiter because the latter group “had no dominant style, most of its adherents subscribed to the principle that art should discard external realities in favor of the expression of the artist’s inner-spiritual, psychological, or emotional-truths.” Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist, 139. Ullrich 17 suggests the woodcut in particular was suitable for Kollwitz because she was able to condense “a wealth of associations into single motifs. […] Everything is expression, gesture, and iconic form.

In keeping with her wish that the series should travel the world with its message, Kollwitz adopted a stark black and white language of signs that would be universally understood.”39 She saw the woodcut as the only just way to portray war, a concept that touches, and devastates, nearly every culture at one time or another.

Therefore it is not only Kollwitz’s universal subject matter that separates her from the contemporaneous German Expressionist movement, but it is her personal motive of universality that sets her apart from Die Brücke. Recall that the group wanted to return to the primitive specifically; their anxiety with the modern metropolis allowed them to use the theme of primitivism “as a critical tool to question the dominant values of Western bourgeois society—or as a panacea, a cure for all ills,” as Lloyd writes. The primitive was not only manifest in images portraying bathing nudes or frolicking dancers, it seemed inherent in the medium of the woodcut itself. In a recent article, art historian Monika Wagner reconsiders the woodcut, not for its historical significance, but for its status as a purely raw material. In contrast to metal and other modern, “industrial” materials, Wagner argues, “wood must have appeared traditional, commonplace, and provincial. It was only because of an overwhelming sense of rapid progress in industrialization that wood could be ‘newly discovered’ as a raw material of folk art, as well as more generally an artistic material.”40 Wood also shows the artistic process of carving; rather than materials such as bronze and marble, which sculptors often attempt to manipulate in

39 Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 59. 40 Monika Wagner, “Wood – “Primitive” Material for the Creation of “German Sculpture,” in New Perspectives on German Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 72. Ullrich 18 smooth, tangible surfaces, wood, to Die Brücke artists, shows the artists’ “struggle” with the material, evident in the Expressionists’ rough woodcuts and jagged sculptures.41

Brücke artists also were aware of the historical connotation of the woodcut; just as

Klinger wanted to establish print media as distinctly “German,” this group pursued the woodcut medium for its historical and cultural significance. Robin Reisenfeld explores the relationship between the graphic medium and German national identity, a connection made explicit by

Kirchner in his 1913 manifesto. Kirchner and the other Brücke artists, according to Reisenfeld, were well aware of the multiple connections the woodcut had in terms of German culture and history: the Jugendstil movement and its emphasis on simplification in art (as seen in the woodcut), and the readiness of late nineteenth century German art historians and artists to adopt the medieval and Renaissance woodcut as purely “German” legacies.42 While it seems that

Kollwitz adopted the woodcut primarily for its appearance and particular stylistic qualities, a case could also be made that Kollwitz adopted the medium to appeal specifically to a German audience or to identify herself and her work with the “Germanness” it was seen to connote. The issues she portrays in War—grieving parents, sons being sent to the battle front, and overall, the injustice of war—are issues that she believed should be of importance to the German people, especially in the post-World War I state. By rendering them in a style seen as nationalistically

“German,” she was further ensuring that viewers received this message.

Expressionism in the Eyes of the Nazis

The nationalist associations that the woodcut took on in the first two decades of the twentieth century came to the fore in Nazi debates about the medium and its use by the Expressionists.

41 Ibid., 80. 42 Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Nationalism, Brücke, and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity,” Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1997): 291. Ullrich 19

Shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, the Nazis embarked on a massive, wide- ranging program in the arts that included publishing an official manifesto concerning Nazi- supported art.43 Initially, Hitler seemed more concerned in amassing and exhibiting works he deemed as “German,” and collecting them in his House of German Art.44 However, Hitler thought the antithesis to German art was embodied in the modern and avant-garde art of the time, what he and members of the party came to refer to as “degenerate” art. As mentioned earlier, the

Nazis considered “degenerate” art to be anything that was seen to “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill,” blanket terms for the art Hitler actually intended to condemn: art that was seen as Jewish,

Bolshevist, Communistic, foreign, or abstract in nature. 45

Where exactly did Kollwitz fit into the Nazis’ conversations about art? Her appointment to the Prussian Art Academy in 1919 and retrospective shows throughout Germany before the

Nazis’ rise to power prove that Kollwitz was well known and respected in Germany. Such honors would lead one to believe that by extension, her art was indeed very much “German.”

Yet, the fact that the Nazis asked her to step down from her professorial position at the Prussian academy in 1934 and removed her work from museums throughout Germany suggests that

Kollwitz’s work somehow threatened their aesthetic agenda. Scholars generally assume that the

Nazis targeted Kollwitz as “degenerate” for her modernist style. That is partially true, however, they do not account for other ways in which Kollwitz defied Nazi aesthetic ideology, or more importantly, how Kollwitz ends up being a “critical case,” as Zuschlag describes.

43 Barron, “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” 14-15. 44 Historian Henry Grosshan seems to believe that Hitler was more concerned with establishing standards for “good, German” art, than he cared to disavow modern artistic movements as “degenerate,” at least initially. This point is evidenced by the fact that the House of German Art came before the 1937 “Entartete Kunst” chronologically. Grosshan, Hitler and the Artists (Holmes & Meier Publishers, Ltd.: 1983), 99. 45 Barron, “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” 12-19. Ullrich 20

Recall that the National Socialists appropriated Kollwitz’s art in 1941—four years after

“Entartete Kunst.” Such behavior was neither new nor unusual for the Nazis; before their rise to power, the Nazis appropriated a Kollwitz motif, specifically a figure from her poster 1924 Never

Again War! (Fig. 9) for their 1927 poster announcing the Nazi Party Congress of August in

Nuremberg.46[47] This poster, To Freedom! (Fig. 10) illustrated by Hans Schweitzer, shows a stoic, hyper-masculine figure, branded with a swastika upon his bare chest, holding a torch high above his head. The figure clearly evokes that of Kollwitz’s Never Again War! though her poster differs in both its anti-war message and its treatment of the human figure. These examples of

Kollwitz’s appropriation serve as reminders that the Nazis were by no means precise in what they considered appropriate “German” art, nor the art they believed was anathema or

“degenerate.” In 1927—and again in 1941—the Nazis must have seen Kollwitz’s art as

“suitable” and stylistically consistent with the goals of the Third Reich. Clearly, Kollwitz’s art— which did not always stylistically align with the modernist art the Nazis so despised—created a paradox for the Nazis in their attempts of classifying her art as “degenerate.” Though it is impossible that her work fully aligned with Nazi politics, when taken out of a political context the Nazis could appropriate her chosen subject matter, such as the image of the mother, one of

Kollwitz’s most depicted subjects, second in number only to her self-portraits.

Thus if Kollwitz’s work was initially appropriated by the Nazis and therefore seen as

“acceptable,” we must then speculate as to why Kollwitz was also considered “degenerate.” I believe the Nazis initially disavowed Kollwitz for two reasons: the simplicity in linking some of her work to that of the Expressionists for their visual similarities, and the ease, on a surface level,

46 Susan D. Bachrach, Edward J. Phillips, and Steven Luckert, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda (Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: 2009), 36. 47 Prelinger speculates that for Never Again War! Kollwitz looked to Max Pechstein’s pamphlet cover To All Artists! from 1919. If Kollwitz did find inspiration Pechstein’s work—himself an Expressionist—the fact that the Nazis would appropriate a motif common in Expressionists’ circles is even more ironic. Ullrich 21 in associating her artwork to the agendas of socialism and communism, political rivals of

Nazism. The second half of this paper will therefore focus on contextualizing the Nazis’ initial assumptions, and difficulties, in persecuting Kollwitz, and how such assumptions could possibly have changed—as evidenced by the Nazis’ retroactive liberation of Kollwitz, and other artists, from the category of “degenerate.”

Nazi Aesthetics: The Portrayal of the Body

What Kollwitz is perhaps best known for—her sympathetic treatment of the lower classes and especially her images of the mother figure—may be what made her a complex and problematic figure to the National Socialists in their attempts to categorize her art as “degenerate.” Thus, in order to gain a clearer understanding of the Nazis’ reception of Kollwitz’s work, it is worth considering the roots of the term “degenerate”: both the term’s origins in Nazi racial ideology, and how they carried the expression over to their responses of modern art.

Despite the common link between Expressionist art and German national identity, Hitler despised the Expressionists in particular for their willful distortions of the human body, a critique that aligned with their desire for “racial purity.” The use of the term “degenerate” as a descriptor for works of modern art was by no means accidental. As art historian George Mosse points out in his essay “Beauty Without Sensuality: The Exhibition ‘Entartete Kunst,’” the terms

“degenerate” and “degeneration” originally were used in Europe as medical terms in the nineteenth century to describe anyone who was perceived as “abnormal”: those with “shattered nerves, inherited abnormalities, or behavioral or sexual excess.”48 The term was brought into the context of the German art world in physician Max Nordau’s 1892 book Entartung

48 George L. Mosse, “Beauty Without Sensuality: The Exhibition “Entartete Kunst”,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 26. Ullrich 22

(Degeneration) when Nordau used the term to describe the art of the Impressionists and

Expressionists, believing the distortions in these works reflected the mental deformities of the artists themselves, a concept Hitler would adopt as a criteria for “Entartete Kunst.”49

The Nazis viewed physical appearance as synonymous with the morality of a given society. This notion has a long history in the German art-historical discourse specifically, with

J.J. Winckelmann’s assertion that Greek sculpture (specifically the Greek male) symbolized ideal beauty.50 In turn, the Nazis used Greek sculpture as representative of the Third Reich and took necessary measures to ensure the artwork of the state reflected this ideal form. One famous example, Arno Breker’s bronze sculpture Readiness (Fig. 11) from 1937, evokes such sculptures of antiquity: a nude, male figure in a contrapposto stance draws his sword and turns his eyes in anticipation of a forthcoming attack. Breker’s work stands in great contrast to both Kollwitz’s own sculptures and her print works. Kollwitz never depicted a heroic male of this type; rather, in her works that do present male figures, she tends to represent them as victims, as seen with both the Liebknecht memorial print and other images related to war, such as The Volunteers from the

War cycle. To the Nazis, depicting the male in this way, as a “weak” victim rather than an aggressive warrior, would be a disgrace to their idea of German nationhood, which in the Nazis’ view, prides itself upon its heroic male citizens.

How, then, would the Nazis view Kollwitz’s female figures, especially her avid use of the mother figure? In terms of the female body, the Nazis seem to take multiple directions to aesthetic value. Like the classicized male body ideal, there was a female classical ideal as well: rather than the aggressive, male nude, the female nude tended to emphasize characteristics of

49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 27. Ullrich 23 athleticism but in a more “graceful” form.51 However, this was merely the ideal form. A more tangible representation of the female body stemmed from Hitler’s assertion that woman’s place in society was strictly the home. Where men served society through military and political achievements, the ideal woman of Nazi Germany was to serve the Reich through childrearing and raising the ideal “Aryan” family.52 Historian Leila Rupp posits that the Nazis created a

“mother cult” as a result of the declining birth rate between the decades spanning 1910 and 1930; they attributed the decline in birth rate to the liberal attitudes of the era and, specifically, feminism, which according to Nazis “had convinced women that motherhood was beneath their dignity,” amidst the rise of birth control and abortions.53 The mother figure was not only seen as emblematic of producing the “Aryan” race but also protecting it as the “guardian of racial purity.”54 The Nazis likely used such a phrase to construct the illusion that women were playing a more crucial role in the Third Reich than was actually possible. Propaganda perpetuating the

Nazi “mother cult” was prevalent throughout Hitler’s reign. For example, images depicting the

“Aryan” family,” usually consisting of a mother, holding a child, protected by the father figure, were common in both Nazi publications and other forms of media, such as the cover image of a

1938 calendar published by Neues Volk (New People, Fig. 12), one of the many Nazi commissioned magazines.55 Such an image stands in stark opposition to the depictions of the female body seen in the German Expressionist art condemned as “degenerate.”

51 Annie Richardson, “The Nazification of Women in Art,” in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, and Architecture in the Third Reich, eds. Brandon Taylor and Wilifried van der Will (Hampshire, United Kingdom: The Winchester Press, 1990), 52. 52 Leila J. Rupp, "Mother of the "Volk": The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology," in Signs 3, no. 2 (1977): 363. 53 Ibid., 370. 54 Ibid., 372. 55 Image of an idealized “Aryan” family of the type that pervaded Nazi propaganda, 1938. Bachrach, Phillips, and Luckert, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, 62. Ullrich 24

Both Kollwitz and the artists of Die Brücke frequently depicted female subjects in their works. Not surprisingly, the female figures of Die Brücke did not fit the ideal female body the

Nazis envisioned. According to Lloyd, the nude figure appealed to Brücke artists as a symbol of their rejection of industrialization: Kirchner, for example, saw the nude figure (especially the female nude) as emblematic of a return to nature as well as “the basis of all fine art.”56 His 1910 painting Bathers at Moritzburg (Fig. 13) perhaps one of Kirchner’s most famous works, depicts a large group of garish, yellow male and female nudes—bathing, conversing, napping, taking in the nature around them and fully integrated into the landscape. Such an image and its natural setting is emblematic of the “free body culture” promoted by the Expressionists. Places like

Moritzburg allowed the Expressionists to escape from the city. As Lloyd explains: “stripped of their clothes and ‘civilized’ trappings, the artists and their models were ‘at one’ with nature and led the life of modern ‘primitives.’”57 The Expressionists also attempted to replicate this

“primitive” spirit in their studios back in Dresden; Kirchner, for example decorated his studio with non-European art to recreate the “primitive” atmosphere. Thus, both nature and the studio acted as “alternative” locations, where “the hard and fast boundaries which separated art and life praxis could be dissolved.”58 Within these spaces, the Expressionists were able to construct an iconography they believed evoked the “primitive”; Lloyd points out that “primarily it is the children, the black dancers and circus artists, and the female models who feature in this primitivist studio iconography.”59 An image such as Erich Heckel’s 1910 painting Girl with a

Doll (Fig. 14), showing an adolescent girl, holding a doll and simultaneously posing as a reclining nude, falls into said iconography.

56 Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity, 107. 57 Ibid., 31. 58 Ibid., 34. 59 Ibid., 39. Ullrich 25

Hence it’s not difficult to see how the Expressionists’ subject matter drastically differed from that of Kollwitz. Such paintings by Kirchner and Heckel, with women and even children, brightly painted, non-idealized in their forms, and nude, stand in great contrast to Kollwitz’s suffering human figures. And yet, because Kollwitz’s oeuvre is also dominated by images of namely women and children, one must consider how the Nazis would view Kollwitz’s works in the context of their body politics. Given the subjective nature of the term “distortion,” it is impossible to know for sure if the Nazis could have perhaps seen Kollwitz’s human figures as distasteful as say they saw the Expressionists’ images. Up until the War woodcuts, Kollwitz’s figures, though nowhere near the classical idealized form the Nazis admired, remained rather naturalistic. Thus, when Kollwitz rejected her previous naturalism for the emotive woodcut in the War images, it could be seen as result of the artist’s desire to simplify detail for the sake of universality.60 Yet the Nazis probably read these images from their aesthetic viewpoint—seeing

Kollwitz’s figures non-idealized, and hence, “degenerate.”

Interestingly enough, there is a thematic parallel between Nazi-sanctioned art and that of

Kollwitz: the mother. As has already been discussed in detail, the Nazis used the mother in propagandistic images with the aims of indoctrination, specifically to give the Nazi woman purpose in greater society, an image in which to aspire. Kollwitz’s images of mothers, perhaps her best-known motif, on the other hand, functioned in quite an opposite manner, both politically and technically. Rather than portraying a middle class, idealized mother, Kollwitz typically portrayed her mother figures in dire circumstances; economic hardship and death are the most prevalent themes. Consider her woodcut, The Sacrifice (Fig. 15) from the War series. The nude mother figure, somewhat skeletal in appearance, stands against an abstract backdrop, holding out her newborn child as a sacrifice. War as series critiquing World War I, was especially important

60 Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 54. Ullrich 26 to Kollwitz, considering the death of her own son in the war. The Sacrifice functions within this series as a commentary on the paradox of sacrificing one’s child in the name of war. Kollwitz brainstormed a way to conceptualize this concept in her artwork often, writing in her diary in

1918:

…There was the conviction that Germany was in the right and had the duty to defend herself. At the beginning it would have been wholly impossible for me to conceive of letting the boys go as parents must let their boys go now, without inwardly affirming it— letting them go simply to the slaughterhouse. The feeling that we were betrayed then, at the beginning. And perhaps Peter would still be living had it not been for this terrible betrayal. Peter and millions, many millions of other boys. All betrayed. […] What has happened? After the sacrifice of the boys themselves and our own sacrifice—will not everything be the same? All is turbulence.61

The Sacrifice perfectly evokes Kollwitz’s agony: the expressive and stark lines of the woodcut, coupled with the painstaking notion of sacrificing one’s own child represented the anguish many parents experienced during World War I. Unsurprisingly, many parents likely blamed the

German government for the loss of their sons; Kollwitz certainly did.

Thus, both ideologically and stylistically, Kollwitz’s woodcut embodied everything the

Nazis would despise in the image of the female figure: it follows neither the aesthetics of classical sculpture nor the stock image of the quintessential German mother, rearing children for the sacrifice of the German nation. Furthermore, Kollwitz uses the mother politically, both in

The Sacrifice, and in countless other images, often in opposition to war. As would be expected, such images likely displeased the bloodthirsty Nazis who, in their own propaganda, glorified war in their aims of taking over the European continent.

Kollwitz’s political images of mothers, and political images of women in general, threatened not just Nazi aesthetics of the body, but equally disrupted the National Socialist notion that women should not have power outside the home. The Nazis not only encouraged

61 Kollwitz, The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz, 89. Ullrich 27 women to exist only within the domestic sphere but saw women’s participation in the “male” arenas, such as politics, as outright dangerous; Goebbels twisted Nazi sexism to make it appear as though they intended to “protect,” women, supposedly telling women leaders in 1934,

“Woman's proper sphere is the family. There she is a sovereign queen. If we eliminate women from every realm of public life, we do not do it in order to dishonor her, but in order that her honor may be restored to her."62

Kollwitz’s work therefore not only opposed Nazi gender ideology but she herself would be the very anathema to Goebbel’s and the Nazis’ “sovereign queen” image of the female.

However, Kollwitz as a political figure is rather ambiguous: that Kollwitz was even political at all seems to be the only point of consensus for scholars. Scholars often refer to Kollwitz as a

Socialist or Communist sympathizer, with little evidence other than her prints themselves, her

1919 woodcut print of communist leader Karl Liebknecht being one example. Kollwitz herself never officially affiliated with any political party, writing in 1920, “…when I declare that I don’t belong to a party, the actual reason is cowardice […] I am not at all revolutionary, but rather evolutionary, but since one praises me as an artist of the proletariat and of the revolution […] I shy away from not continuing to play that role.”63 According to Prelinger, Kollwitz is often associated with Communism likely because of the artist’s trip to the Soviet Union in 1927 where her works were exhibited and much admired by the people, for they identified them with their communistic politics.64

What exactly Kollwitz’s political affiliations were, given her resistance to join any political party officially in contrast to her very socially active images, can only be called

62 Rupp, “Mother of the ‘Volk,’” 363. 63 Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” 80. 64 Ibid., 82. Ullrich 28 ambivalent, as Prelinger suggests.65 Attempting to determine her precise political motivations, if any, falls outside the scope of this paper—her works were certainly political in that they often commented on specific incidents, such as World War I. However, considering the reception and discussion of her work as Communistic and the ease of scholars to label the artist as the same, it would not require a great leap for the Nazis to see Kollwitz as a political woman, a Communist woman at that, and her images of politically-active woman as “culturally Bolshevist,” and therefore “degenerate.”66

“Nordic Expressionism”: Modernism’s “Critical Case”?

If Kollwitz’s alleged political affiliations, subject matter, and occasional stylistic choices could serve as reason why the Nazis were able to label this artist “degenerate,” one must then question how and why the artist was possibly liberated from the status of “degenerate” artist in 1938 when “Entartete Kunst” traveled to Berlin. Let us first consider the utility of the term “critical case,” the chosen term of art historian Christophe Zuschlag to describe Kollwitz and other artists who were supposedly removed from “Entartete Kunst” after the Munich show—a list that included Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, August Macke, Franz Marc, and

Ernst Barlach. First of all, though the Munich exhibition was highly successful in that it drew in record-breaking audiences (two million visitors in only four months), the exhibition’s content and overall organization changed considerably as it traveled from Munich, to Berlin, and then

65 Ibid., 75. 66 In the exhibition catalogue Woman Artists: 1550-1950, Linda Nochlin uses Kollwitz and German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, the first of many art historians to compare these two artists, as an example for her invalidation of typical “feminine imagery.” In terms of Kollwitz specifically, Nochlin points out that, remarkably enough, the politically active, proletarian woman was rarely depicted in the history of art. Nochlin, “The Twentieth Century: Issues, Problems, Controversies,” in Woman Artists: 1550-1950, eds. Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin (New York: Knopf, 1976), 65. Ullrich 29 sixty-five other venues throughout Germany and Austria.67 While some of the changes were due to many of the pieces being sold to foreign dealers abroad, the exhibitions were also tailored to fit the specific locales, proving that the term “degenerate” is contingent on the viewer who changed as the exhibition traveled to different venues. The original exhibition itself served as propaganda, by nature of the exhibition design, which combined inflammatory wall text with the crowded and haphazardly-hung paintings. “Entartete Kunst” was also strategically placed across the street from the “Great German Art Exhibition.” The subsequent exhibitions outside Munich, too, used propaganda technique to target specific audiences, but to different ends than the original exhibition. For example, whereas the Munich exhibition seems to have stressed the vilification of the Expressionists, the Berlin exhibition rather critiqued the socially-committed and political art that was prevalent in Berlin, in groups such as Dada, until that point.68

Furthermore, the Berlin exhibition was more explicit in labeling the works into specified categories: “collapse of sensitivity to form and color,” religious subject, “class struggle” propaganda, “draft-dodging,” “moral program of Bolshevism,” racial degeneration, mental degeneration, Jewish art, and “sheer insanity.”69 Rather than leaving the viewer to make their own judgments of the art, the labels helped to control even further the message the Nazis wished exhibition-goers to grasp after viewing the exhibition.

Of course the biggest change in the exhibition for the purpose of this paper would be the removal of Käthe Kollwitz’s work from “Entartete Kunst” when the exhibition arrived in Berlin in 1938. Zuschlag observes that

Works by a number of artists were removed from the Berlin exhibition either because protest had been raised at the way in which they had been attacked—one thinks here of war heroes August Macke and Franz Marc and foreigners Piet Mondrian and Edvard

67Zuschlag, “An Educational Exhibition,” 92. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. Ullrich 30

Munch—or because they were regarded as “critical cases.” The latter group included prominent Expressionists Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, and Wilhelm Lehmbruck whose acceptance hinged on the outcome of the continuing debate over the legitimacy of Nordic Expressionism…70

What exactly is “Nordic Expressionism” and why would this term warrant the removal of artists from “Entartete Kunst”? The roots of this phrase lie in the debate between Joseph Goebbels,

Reich Minister of Propaganda and organizer of “Entartete Kunst” and Nazi ideologue Alfred

Rosenberg. Though technically not as instrumental in Nazi cultural policy as was Goebbels,

Rosenberg was well known for his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century. In the text he outlined Nazi racial ideology as well as his opinions concerning “true art”: not the elitist, foreign art perpetuated by the Expressionists, but rather völkisch art (art of the people). He defined the latter as “art of the peasant and the artisan, wholesome and warm-hearted, devoted not to the urban individual but to the rural and peasant collectivity.”71 The art Rosenberg proposes differs greatly from the art that dominated Germany at the time: the art of Kollwitz, the Expressionists, and other modern artists.

Goebbels, on the other hand, represented the camp that wished to instead extend the existing association of Expressionism with German identity; groups such as the League of

National Socialist Students argued that works by artists such as Emil Nolde evoked a true national style through depictions of the “primitive” that effectively countered the industrial and mechanized works of other Modernist groups, such as the Constructivists.72 Such a line of reasoning is consistent with the notion German art historians maintained towards the

Expressionists, that their art and especially their methods—specifically the woodcut—were

70 Ibid. 71 Brandon Taylor, “Post-Modernism in the Third Reich,” in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, and Architecture in the Third Reich, eds. Brandon Taylor and Wilifried van der Will (Hampshire, United Kingdom: The Winchester Press, 1990), 131. 72 Ibid. Ullrich 31 symbols of German nationalism, labeling said works under the category of “Nordic

Expressionism,” or “Nordic Modernism.” Thus, the dichotomy of “German” versus “un-

German” art was not a straightforward debate, considering Nazi officials could not even agree on what could be considered “German” in the first place. Part of Goebbels tendency to see the

Expressionists, particularly Nolde and Barlach (who, as mentioned earlier, did not see himself as an Expressionist, like Kollwitz), as German, was purely his admiration for their art; Goebbels supposedly had one of Barlach’s sculptures Man in the Storm (better known as Wanderer in the

Wind, 1934) in his office and, according to reports of those who visited Goebbel’s home, he at one point had copies of prints by Kollwitz as well, though this cannot be confirmed.73

Regardless, the many reports of Goebbels collecting Expressionist art are not only proof of his appreciation for the movement, likely his main reason for arguing in favor of its German heritage, but serve as a reminder that the term “degenerate” is not static. What exactly can or cannot be defined as “degenerate,” just as what can or cannot define as “Expressionist”? A case in point is Kollwitz—both the Nazis’ difficulty in categorizing her art as “degenerate” as well as scholars’ attempts to call her an “Expressionist.”

As a “critical case,” however, Kollwitz must be considered within the debate between

Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Hitler. Initially, it would be relatively easy for one to assume that

Kollwitz (like Barlach) fit into Goebbel’s category of “Nordic Expressionism.” However, given that such debates between Goebbels and Rosenberg took place in the early years of the Nazi regime, specifically in 1934, it is unlikely that Hitler would suddenly, in 1938, have had a change of heart for a select group of “Expressionists” and call to remove their works from “Entartete

Kunst” altogether. Given its highly publicized nature, the 1937 Munich Exhibition is viewed as

73 Jonathan Petropoulos, Art As Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 25. Ullrich 32 the final, official stance of the Nazis on “German” art; it would be highly uncharacteristic for

Hitler to so publicly renounce his earlier condemnation of modern artists, even if only a few.

Therefore, there must be reasons as to why Kollwitz was a “critical case,” other than Zuschlag’s claim that she, Barlach, and Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s “acceptance hinged on the outcome of the continuing debate over the legitimacy of Nordic Expressionism.” The debate, by 1938, was long over.

Zuschlag does not seem to consider what can perhaps be seen as the more logical reason for Kollwitz’s consideration as a critical case: Kollwitz’s legacy in Germany, especially in

Berlin. Though he believes protests occurred over the treatment of artists who were war heroes—

August Macke and Franz Marc—it is entirely possible that there were also protests over

Kollwitz’s inclusion in “Entartete Kunst,” actions that would have been specific to Berlin given her residence in the city for over almost fifty years. Hildegard Bachert, director of Galerie St.

Etienne in New York City, which has collected works of German Expressionists since World

War II, discusses Kollwitz’s prevalence throughout Germany, from the loftiest of museum and gallery collections to the homes of the working class in the form of postcards and reproductions.74 Her art was extremely popular throughout the country, both within the museum system, but also by the every day viewer; its universality drew in a large audience from a variety of social classes and backgrounds. Furthermore, Kollwitz was the first woman elected to the

Prussian Academy of Art in 1919, becoming the director of the graphic design master class less than ten years later.75 Such distinctions show her talent did not go unrecognized and that she was certainly seen as an icon of Germany.

74 Hildegard Bachert, “Collecting the Art of Käthe Kollwitz: A Survey of Collections, Collectors, and Public Response in Germany and the United States,” in Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Elizabeth Prelinger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 120. 75 Ibid., 122. Ullrich 33

Yet unlike other art historians, Bachert suggests that Kollwitz was not generally classified as “degenerate” by the Nazis, which she bases upon Zuschlag’s observation that the

Nazis removed Kollwitz from the exhibition in 1938. According to Bachert, Kollwitz’s removal from “Entartete Kunst,” coupled with Kollwitz’s universality, which allowed the Nazis to plagiarize her work, gives reasons as to why “the government evidently did not dare to persecute her, presumably because she was a symbol of compassion and humanitarianism to virtually an entire generation of Germans.”76[77] While Kollwitz’ eventual exoneration from the “degenerate” status may complicate her treatment by contemporary scholarship, leading scholars to waver on her presence in “Entartete Kunst,” Kollwitz was undoubtedly persecuted by the National

Socialists. Otto Nagel recalls that on one occasion, she was even interrogated by the Gestapo, who ransacked her studio and threatened to send her to a concentration camp if she did not cooperate with them—an event that rattled the elderly Kollwitz so deeply, she carried a vial of poison on her person at all times, lest the Nazis carried out their threat.78 Once again, it is not a matter of whether or not the Nazis persecuted Kollwitz—that has certainly been confirmed as we have seen with Nagel’s testimony. Rather it is the specifics of these circumstances that have largely been ignored. By disregarding Kollwitz within the context of Nazism, scholars are not only neglecting an important point of her biography, but also a more complex way to view this artist’s stylistic choices.

76 Ibid., 123. 77 Bachert’s stance on Kollwitz, especially her claim that Kollwitz remained untouched by Nazi persecution, is entirely unique when compared to other scholars, who tend to agree that Kollwitz’s forced resignation, removal from museums, and “degenerate” label indicate Nazi discrimination. 78 Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz, 76. Ullrich 34

Kollwitz’s Contested Legacy

It is important point out that Zuschlag was the first scholar to comment on Kollwitz’s inclusion in “Entartete Kunst,” a fact he gleaned from a 1938 review of the exhibition that commented specifically on the removal of the artists he lists.79 The fact that the Nazis removed Kollwitz from the exhibition upon arrival in Berlin indicates that she must have appeared in the Munich exhibition initially. Yet such information runs contrary to other scholarly interpretations of

Kollwitz, who typically maintain the stock facts: she was forced to step down from her professorial position, forbidden to work and from exhibiting her work, and was considered

“degenerate.”

That there is no consensus on Kollwitz’s treatment during the Third Reich speaks to her complex treatment within the scholarly discourse. Her political ambiguity is partially responsible: the fact that many of her images are not directly associated with the specific political movements of Wilhelmine or Weimar Germany allowed them to be easily assimilated into a variety of contexts. The Nazis’ appropriation of Kollwitz, on the other hand, seems contradictory due to her socialist sympathies and their fascist objectives. It is perhaps just as remarkable that this same artist was an icon appropriated by far left artists, such as the Dadaists.

Her very portrait from the journal announcing her appointment to the Prussian Academy of Arts can be found in the middle of Hannah Höch’s photomontage from 1919-20, Cut with the Kitchen

Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (Fig. 16). Höch’s use of Kollwitz portrait is very telling: though Kollwitz did not stylistically align with the

Dadaists, Höch perhaps looked to the older artist both as an icon of politically-motivated art and

79 Paul Westheim, “Ein Rückzieher: Corinth, Marc, Macke, Lemhbruck, Kollwitz nicht mehr auf der Ausstellung ‘“Entartete Kunst”,” originally published in the Pariser Tageszeitung of March 27-28, 1938, and reprinted with explanatory notes in Tanja Frank, ed. Paul Westheim: Kunstkritik aus dem Exil (Hanau: Müller & Kiepenhauer, 1985), 97, n. 46. Ullrich 35 as a fellow woman in a still male-dominated art world.80 To use Kollwitz’s image as a symbol of such distinctions attests to the high regard Kollwitz experienced in her lifetime.

Yet if Kollwitz’s own contemporaries, from across political spectrums, can appropriate her work to their own ends, what makes her treatment in current scholarship any different? The ambiguity surrounding Kollwitz’s art that allowed both its effortless appropriation by the Nazis as well as their difficulty in categorizing it as “degenerate,” has consequently caused a misunderstanding of her work in the current art historical discourse. Though her universality is a quality that has made her work beloved both in Germany and around the world, it has also cause somewhat of a disservice to this artist. As a result, scholars have scrambled to place Kollwitz within neatly defined artistic movements, with Expressionism being the most cited.

Simultaneously exploring Kollwitz’s hasty categorization as an Expressionist and the Nazis’ difficulty in classifying her as “degenerate” reveals an important issue within art historical discourse, itself: art historians’ obsession with taxonomy—placing artists within specific movements, regardless of the personal or political circumstances that may motivate their art.

Does this not eerily resemble the Nazis’ fixation in categorizing certain art and artists as

“degenerate”? This preoccupation with categorizing Kollwitz means that much of her individual circumstances—in this case her reception in Nazi Germany—has fallen to the wayside. It is quite unbelievable that what happened to Kollwitz during the Third Reich has reached such levels of uncertainty; yet rather than trying to set the record straight, scholars have seemed to ignore this aspect of Kollwitz’s career altogether.

A more in-depth and clear discussion of Kollwitz’s reception amidst Nazi Fascism is much needed and will build a more complete understanding of her artistic career. This will

80 Maud Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 30. Ullrich 36 require art historians to perhaps reconsider their static use of naming in the discourse.

Expressionism and “degenerate” are just two terms that need to be reconsidered—for their utility is not absolute, as my study of Kollwitz proves. Rather, paying more attention to the individual circumstances of this artist and the environment of the art world at the time is a step in the right direction towards a more complete understanding of Kollwitz and her career. In turn, a study of her reception also provides a new lens in which to view art during the Third Reich: it reveals the complexities and contradictions of Nazi ideology.

Ullrich 37

Figure 1, Käthe Kollwitz, Bread!, 1924, Lithograph, 13 3/4" x 11", Staatliche Museen, Berlin Ullrich 38

Figure 2, Max Klinger, Into the Gutter!, from the series A Life, 1881-84, etching and aquatint, 7 3/8" x 6 5/8", Galerie St. Etienne, New York Ullrich 39

Figure 3, Käthe Kollwitz, The End, Plate 6 from A Weavver's Rebellion, etching and aquataing, 9 3/4" × 12", Philadelphia Museum of Art Ullrich 40

Figure 4, Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht, woodcut, 13 3/4 x 19 5/8", Museum of Modern Art, New York Ullrich 41

Figure 5, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dancer with Necklace, 1910, wood, 21 3/8 x 6 x 5 1/2", Private Collection Ullrich 42

Figure 6, Käthe Kollwitz, The Parents, from the series War, 1922-23, woodcut, 13 3/4 x 16 1/2", National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection Ullrich 43

Figure 7, Käthe Kollwitz, The Volunteers, from the series War, 1922-23, woodcut, 13 3/4 x 19 1/4", Philadelphia Museum of Art Ullrich 44

Figure 8, Käthe Kollwitz, The Mothers, from the series War, 1922-23, woodcut, 13 3/8 x 15 3/4", Philadelphia Museum of Art Ullrich 45

Figure 9, Käthe Kollwitz, Never Again War!, 1924, lithograph, 37 x 27 1/2", Galerie St. Etienne, New York Ullrich 46

Figure 10, Hans Schweitzer, To Freedom!, 1927, Poster from the Nazi Party Congress, Nuremburg Ullrich 47

Figure 11, Arno Breker, Readiness, 1937, bronze Ullrich 48

Figure 12, Image of "Aryan" Family, Neues Volk, 1938, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Ullrich 49

Figure 13, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Bathers at Moritzburg, 1906, oil on canvas, 5' x 6'5", Tate Liverpool Ullrich 50

Figure 14, Erich Heckel, Girl with Doll, 1910, oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 27 1/2", Serge Sabarsky Collection Ullrich 51

Figure 15, Käthe Kollwitz, The Sacrifice, from the series War, 1922-23, woodcut, 14 1/2 x 15 3/4", National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection

Ullrich 52

Figure 16, Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919, collage/mixed media, 44 7/8 x 35 7/16", Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Ullrich 53

Bibliography

Bachert, Hildegard. “Collecting the Art of Käthe Kollwitz: A Survey of Collections, Collectors, and Public Response in Germany and the United States.” In Käthe Kollwitz. Edited by Elizabeth Prelinger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Bachrach, Susan D., Edward J. Phillips, and Steven Luckert. State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009.

Barron, Stephanie. “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany.” In “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Edited by Stephanie Barron. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.

Berman, Russell A. “German Primitivism/Primitive Germany: the Case of Emil Nolde.” In Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. Edited by Richard J. Goslan. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992.

Comini, Alessandra. "Gender or Genius? The Women Artists of German Expressionism." In Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany. Edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.

. “Kollwitz in Context.” In Käthe Kollwitz. Edited by Elizabeth Prelinger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Grosshan, Henry. Hitler and the Artists. Holmes & Meier Publishers, Ltd., 1983.

Guenther, Peter. “Three Days in Munich, July 1937.” In “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Edited by Stephanie Barron. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.

Kearns, Martha. Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist. New York: The Feminist Press, 1976.

Klinger, Max. Painting and Drawing. Translated by Fiona Elliot and Christopher Croft. Birmingham: Ikon, 2005.

Kollwitz, Kaethe. The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Edited by Hans Kollwitz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

Lavin, Maud. Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993.

Lloyd, Jill. German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Mosse, George L. “Beauty Without Sensuality: The Exhibition “Entartete Kunst”.” In Ullrich 54

“Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Edited by Stephanie Barron. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.

Nagel, Otto. Käthe Kollwitz. Translated by Stella Humphries. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971.

Nochlin, Linda. “The Twentieth Century: Issues, Problems, Controversies.” in Woman Artists: 1550-1950. Edited by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin. New York: Knopf, 1976.

.“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power: and Other Essays, Edited by Linda Nochlin. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Paret, Peter. An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Petropoulos, Jonathan. Art As Politics in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Prelinger, Elizabeth. “Kollwitz Reconsidered.” In Käthe Kollwitz. Edited by Elizabeth Prelinger. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Reisenfeld, Robin. "Cultural Nationalism, Brücke, and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity." Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1997): 289-312.

Richardson, Annie. “The Nazification of Women in Art.” In The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, and Architecture in the Third Reich. Edited by Brandon Taylor and Wilifried van der Will. Hampshire, United Kingdom: The Winchester Press, 1990.

Rupp, Leila J. "Mother of the "Volk": The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology." Signs 3, no. 2 (1977): 362-379.

Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Taylor, Brandon. “Post-Modernism in the Third Reich.” In The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, and Architecture in the Third Reich. Edited by Brandon Taylor and Wilifried van der Will. Hampshire, United Kingdom: The Winchester Press, 1990.

Wagner, Monika. “Wood – “Primitive” Material for the Creation of “German Sculpture.” In New Perspectives on German Expressionism: Bridging History. Edited by Christian Weikop. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

Zigrosser, Carl. Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969.

Ullrich 55

Zuschlag, Christophe. “An Educational Exhibition: Precursors of “Entartete Kunst” and Its Individual Venues.” In “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Edited by Stephanie Barron. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.