Berlin Secession / Degenerate Art: Käthe Kollwitz
Death with Woman in Lap (Tod mit Frau im Schoß)
1920/1921
Woodcut, 24 × 28.5 cm
© Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, Germany

This woodcut was created in the aftermath of personal tragedy. In 1920, Kollwitz’s cousin Else Rautenberg took her own life, an event she described in her diary as “the saddest of that year.” The following year, she confronted this loss through an image of death not as a violent force but as a figure of refuge and care.

In Death with Woman in Lap, death crouches, enveloping the woman in his wide cloak. His head bends toward her with grave tenderness, his face serious yet kind. She rests against his chest, her mouth open in the final exhalation of life. At the left margin, her wooden shoes lie discarded, a quiet sign of release from earthly burdens. Before them, a thin crown of thorns recalls Christ’s suffering, here transformed into a secular allegory: the relinquished pain of earthly existence. Kollwitz herself noted, “The woman has left behind the crown of thorns of life.”

The composition was preceded by powerful charcoal and chalk studies, in which Kollwitz explored the balance of intimacy and solemnity before arriving at the stark clarity of the woodcut. In this distilled final version, she reduced the image to its essentials: two figures bound together in silence, death as consoler rather than aggressor.

This work marks a turning point in Kollwitz’s iconography of death. Earlier depictions often showed him as the one who seizes life; here, he offers rest to the weary. The image resonates not only as a memorial to Else Rautenberg but also as a universal vision of release, created in a Germany still reeling from the devastation of war. Within the broader history of the Berlin Secession—later condemned under the Nazi regime as “degenerate art”—Kollwitz’s uncompromising humanism shines through. Her art remained rooted in empathy, grief, and social critique, resisting ideological appropriation and speaking directly to the shared human condition.

The woodcut was first exhibited at the Berlin Secession in 1921 and has since been shown in retrospectives at the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne. It belongs to her cycle of “Death” images which trace her evolving vision of mortality from violent rupture to consoling embrace.