Berlin Secession / Degenerate Art: Käthe Kollwitz
Call of Death (1934/37) (Ruf des Todes), from the series Death (Tod)
Lithograph on thin wove paper
63.8 × 53.6 cm
© MoMA, USA

Death was a recurring theme in Käthe Kollwitz’s work, and in the final years of her life, it became the central focus of her last print cycle. A decade before completing the series Death [Tod], she wrote in her diary: “I must do the prints on Death. Must, must, must!” Lithography—her preferred medium for conveying emotional intensity—was chosen for its expressive potential, though she initially struggled to give form to the concept.

The series comprises seven lithographs, each depicting Death as a quiet, inevitable presence among society’s most vulnerable: impoverished women, grieving mothers, and children. These were subjects Kollwitz had long portrayed with empathy and urgency. In the final print, Call of Death [Ruf des Todes], the artist herself appears to surrender to the same force that claimed so many before her. Death does not threaten—it simply reaches out. The atmosphere is hushed, almost tender, as if the moment of departure were a release rather than a rupture.

Kollwitz’s lifelong engagement with death was deeply personal. Her son Peter was killed in World War I, and her grandson fell in World War II. These losses shaped not only her themes but her tone: grief in her work is never abstract, never distant. It is lived, endured, and drawn with compassion.

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was a leading figure in the Berlin Secession and is remembered as one of the most powerful voices in German Expressionism. She studied art in Munich and Berlin at a time when women faced severe barriers to artistic education and recognition. Her work—primarily etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts—was marked by a deep engagement with social justice, grief, and resilience.

Her unflinching portrayal of human suffering served as a stark critique of the social and political conditions in Germany. In 1936, the Nazi regime labeled her work “degenerate” and removed it from public collections. She endured repeated threats of arrest and deportation by the Gestapo, yet remained committed to her art and convictions. Kollwitz died in April 1945, just sixteen days before the end of World War II.

In the decades that followed, her work was quietly reclaimed—by museums, by historians, and by those who saw in her prints a kind of moral clarity. Not celebrated in grand gestures, but returned to, studied, and held close. Call of Death remains one of her most intimate works: not a farewell, but a final gesture of recognition.