Taking a stand. Käthe Kollwitz, Mona Hatoum

Käthe Kollwitz portrayed herself again and again in the course of her life. She was born in 1867 and died in 1945, shortly before the end of the Second World War. She was 77 years old. She lived through two major wars and lost a son early in the First World War. She made the poverty of Berlin’s workers the subject of her art. But also again and again: crises in their own lives.

In 1910, her son Hans falls ill with diphtheria. Back then, before the invention of penicillin, it was a life-threatening infection. In “Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead”, she seems to be recording a snapshot of this time of nights spent awake: Thoughtful and exhausted, she looks out at us. The left eye almost disappears in the shadow of the hand. During this time, Käthe Kollwitz was very preoccupied with the threat of death.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Käthe Kollwitz, née Schmidt, knew early on that she wanted to become an artist. But women were not allowed to study at art academies in Germany until 1918. Käthe Kollwitz’ father made it possible for her to receive artistic training at special schools for women artists in Munich and Berlin. He imagines his daughter devoting herself to history painting. This was the most highly regarded form of art in the German Empire in the 19th century. Naturally a male domain. And men were the favorite subjects. You can see such a work on your display: Anton von Werner’s painting The Proclamation of the German Empire (January 18, 1871).

We will not go into the details of this historic event here. However, the contrast to the works of Käthe Kollwitz could hardly be clearer. She rejects conservative Wilhelmine painting. She is interested in the everyday lives of ordinary people and their worries and hardships.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

An armed crowd charging forward with determination: riot!
This newspaper was originally entitled ‘Peasants’ War’. They are farmers with their scythes and hoes, ragged and scarred by a hard life.

In the years 1524 and 25, these peasants fought for more rights, especially against serfdom, in the south of what is now Germany and in parts of Austria. In this commentary, we look at how the motif, its technical realization and the message are interrelated.

The square sheet is divided by the horizon into an upper light and a lower dark area. The action takes place in the lower half. She is accompanied by an allegorical female figure that appears to be floating in the sky. Her attribute, i.e. the object she carries with her, makes it clear who she is: with a burning torch in her hand, she leads the crowd of peasants as a kind of goddess of revenge. Such symbolic figures have existed in art for a long time. This sheet may remind you of the famous painting ‘Liberty Leading the People’, painted by Eugène Delacroix about the French Revolution. You can view it on your display.

Another artist who used such figures a lot in his works was Max Klinger. This German sculptor, painter and graphic artist had a strong influence on Käthe Kollwitz. He was convinced that the technique of printmaking, in contrast to painting, was particularly suitable for showing the darker sides of human life. In his opinion, this technique also had a proximity to revolutionary aspirations, as it had been heavily used for the aims of the Reformation.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

This sheet is a preliminary stage to a work from the Peasants’ War cycle, which we will look at in more detail in a moment. Here, an allegorical figure gives the poor peasant woman the idea of revenge in an intimate gesture. She whispers it in her ear, while at the same time her right hand grasps the woman’s hoe from behind over her legs. The drawn studies for this sheet show how much effort Käthe Kollwitz put into the final realization.

Now look at the sheet ‘Beim Dengeln’ on the other wall on the right. It is the third sheet from the Peasants’ War cycle.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

This farmer’s wife no longer needs anyone whispering revenge in her ear. While sharpening the scythe, the thought of revenge comes to her all by itself.

The scene gets its eerie and threatening effect from the dramatic use of light and shadow: the room looks dirty, the farmer’s wife looks dirty and overworked. She leans on the scythe as she guides the sharpening stone along the blade. It almost seems to snuggle up to the tool. She has almost closed her eyes, only the whites of her eyes flash out very slightly: this is the moment of revenge.

It took a long time for Käthe Kollwitz to arrive at this solution for her motif. You have probably already seen the two works entitled ‘Inspiration’ on the left-hand wall. But the artist also reworked the printing plate, the result of which you are now standing in front of, several times. You can view an earlier version of the sheet on your display.

The right arm, supported in the crook of the arm, hangs limply from the blade. In the last version, Käthe Kollwitz has sharpened the depiction: It is not an implement that is being sharpened here, but a murder tool.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

The crowd storms off. Here it is not a loose cluster – as the peasant groups were called during the Peasants’ War of 1524/25 – but a wedge tapering from right to left. The entire picture pushes to the left: The farmers together with the landscape in the background, perhaps also the clouds with their jagged structure in the sky. In any case, the female figure standing in front, dressed in black, bends to the left and raises her arms. For us as viewers, she is a figure of identification. We could be the ones cheering the farmers on. You can find out more about them in our other article on this work.

Käthe Kollwitz artfully combined more than six different intaglio printing techniques on this sheet. Take a closer look: the background of the picture bears traces of the surface texture, of woven fabric. The process used for this is called Vernis mou, which we have explained for you in our Art A to Z.

This fabric-like effect is perhaps meant as an imitation of a canvas. This would be a self-confident allusion by the artist to the ‘competition of the arts’: in the academic tradition, oil painting was considered more valuable. With her masterful command of printmaking, Käthe Kollwitz proves that this technique is at least on a par with painting.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

The peasants’ revolt is crushed. At night, a farmer’s wife searches for her dead son on the battlefield, which is littered with corpses.

Käthe Kollwitz also produced this work very elaborately. To achieve the desired effect, she combines five different techniques, e.g. vernis mou, drypoint and emery. This gives the background a washed-out, foggy effect, the bodies lying on the ground are outlined and attention is drawn to the dead son. You can find out more about the techniques in our Art A to Z.

But it wasn’t just a long technical journey, finding the motif also took several steps. On the narrow wall on the right you can see a preliminary stage: the woman with a dead child.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Käthe Kollwitz’ love of experimentation can be seen in this sheet. The motif is serious and terribly sad: a mother holds her dead son in her arms, clutching him tightly. But how does the artist achieve this devastating effect?
During the period in which this sheet was created, Käthe Kollwitz was intensively occupied with the famous Pietà by the Italian artist Michelangelo, which stands in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. You can view them on your display.

Michelangelo’s sculpture is one of the most famous depictions of this theme: Mary mourning for her son Jesus, who has been taken down from the cross. She is fully clothed, but Jesus is naked except for a loincloth. Its body is particularly finely crafted: Muscles, tendons and blood vessels are clearly visible. Michelangelo was able to achieve such an exact depiction because he undertook numerous anatomical studies and knew the human body very well.

Käthe Kollwitz also studied her models precisely, as can be seen from the numerous nude studies that have survived. In contrast to Michelangelo, however, she sticks to her depiction of the rural world. The muscular, strong body of the mother sitting cross-legged bears witness to this. You have probably noticed the background: It is a gold background. Traditionally, it is only used for Christian motifs. In this print, the artist thus elevates the peasant woman and her son to the Mother of God with the Crucified.

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

“When he was seven years old and I made the
etching
The woman with the dead child, I drew myself holding him in my arms in the mirror. It was very tiring and I had to groan. Then his little child’s voice said comfortingly: “Be quiet, mother, it will be very nice too …”
This is what Käthe Kollwitz wrote in a letter about the creation of this drawing.

Compare it with the final result, which is placed further to the left on the narrow wall. What has changed, what has the artist adopted? What was emphasized more, what was apparently less important?

Text: Matthias Albrecht
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Short summary of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens

The story is set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution. While the oppressed French people begin to rebel against the nobility, Lucie takes her father to England. He had been innocently imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years. On the ferry to Dover, she meets her future husband Charles Darnay, a young nobleman who wants to make a fresh start in England. During a stay in Paris, however, he was later captured by revolutionaries and sentenced to death. His English friend, the lawyer Sydney Carton, saves his life. He looks very much like Darnay and voluntarily takes his place on the scaffold. He does this out of love for the unattainable Lucie, Darnay’s wife.

Short biography of Charles Dickens

His father was sent to debtors’ prison in London in 1823. The 11-year-old Dickens therefore began working as a laborer in a shoe polish factory. He later became a paralegal and worked as a parliamentary reporter for a newspaper. Eventually he was able to get a job as a reporter at the Morning Chronicle and made sketches that were published in book form as the Pickwick Papers and made him famous. He began to write novels, which were very successful, partly because he was a resourceful businessman. Dickens died in 1870.

Transcript of the audio track

What could have fascinated Käthe Kollwitz so much about Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities that she was inspired to create this painting? And why did she choose this particular scene?

Kollwitz saw how the advancing industrial revolution was leading to hunger and financial hardship among workers and wanted to stand up for the weak. With this pictorial motif, Kollwitz reminded contemporary viewers of the widely known themes and demands from Dicken’s novel and the revolutionary song. By giving her characters contemporary clothes and setting them in a place in the German Empire, she predicts a revolution that will bring the socialist state if nothing changes. She was not alone in this among the social democratically-minded young educated people of her time.

And what exactly is the novel and the song about?
[Melodie von La Carmagnole erklingt]

This is the melody of the revolutionary song “La Carmagnole”. The text mocks the ousted King Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette and celebrates the successful resistance against them. The song was reused in later revolutionary movements and some of the lyrics were adapted to suit them. The name of a certain plain jacket, which was modeled on workers’ outerwear, also goes back to the revolutionary song. It was worn by some representatives of the radical revolutionaries in France, often together with long pants without knee breeches, the sansculotte, which also originated from workers’ clothing. Both clearly distinguished the wearer from the nobility, who mainly wore knee breeches, the culotte.

It is therefore not surprising that Dickens incorporated this song into his novel about the French Revolution. The book was written in a changed European society after the March Revolutions of 1848 and 1849. More and more people were advocating communist ideas, for example. Dicken’s story fits this mood very well. She urges us not to underestimate the revolutionary potential of the proletariat and puts forward the following thesis: A system that systematically disadvantages a section of the population inevitably leads to escalation.

You can find more information about the novel and its author on your display.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Short summary of Germinal (1885) by Émile Zola

This was the thirteenth of 20 novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. It presents a comprehensive picture of the French Empire under Napoleon III (Belle Époque) based on a widely ramified family history. In Germinal, Émile Zola included personal notes on how he experienced the miners’ strike in northern France in 1884.

The heroic protagonist of this novel is the young mechanic Étienne Lantier, a member of the Rougon-Macquart family. He works in the coal mines of northern France, where he experiences hunger and misery. When a wage reduction and increase in working hours was announced, Étienne organized a month-long strike. The workers destroy shafts and attack the well-paid middle classes. When the military finally intervened, many of the workers died and the others began to work again out of desperation. But Étienne does not lose the will to resist. He is convinced that he has sown the seeds for the revolution/rebellion, travels to Paris and starts organizing its trade union.

Short biography of Émile Zola

When Zola is 7 years old, his father dies and his mother feeds them both in Paris as a cleaner and seamstress. After becoming unemployed, he later worked as a clerk at customs and as a journalist. In 1877, he achieved success as a writer with the novel Der Totschläger. Zola also became directly involved in politics, writing an open letter to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, in 1898. In J’accuse (I accuse), he criticizes the treatment of the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was convicted as a traitor on the basis of falsified evidence. The consequence is a one-year prison sentence, which he evades by fleeing to England. He was able to return to France in 1899 after an amnesty and died in 1902.

Transcript of the audio track

Can you find the two works in the room that look similar to this one? Compare them with each other. Do you see the similarities and differences as they develop apart?
Together, the three works show a five-year graphic exploration of a scene from the novel Germinal (1885). At a so-called composition evening, Käthe was able to gain recognition for the first time in the circle of Munich ‘Malweiber’ and students at the art academy.

If the novel didn’t let go of her for five years, it must have made quite an impression on Kollwitz, right? Why?
The book is indeed said to have had a great influence. It was first published in the feature section of a daily newspaper and workers were able to recognize their own life situation in the story about the northern French miners’ strike. This was rare at the end of the 19th century. In the last section of the novel, Zola also predicts the emergence of a social revolution, the liberation of the proletariat. Hence the title Germinal, the name of the spring month of the French revolutionary calendar, the ‘germination month’.
“Under his feet, the dull thuds of the pickaxes continued incessantly. His comrades were all there; he felt them following him at every turn. […] Men arose, a black army of avengers, slowly germinating in the furrows, growing up for the harvests of the century to come, whose sprouts would soon break through the earth.”
(Quote from the last paragraph after https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/zola/germinal/ch40.html )

While the novel is said to have persuaded Käthe’s brother to join the Social Democratic Party, Kollwitz was more interested in the gender issues in the book.
Her drawings focus on a drama of jealousy that is not central to the novel: two men fight in a pub over Catherine, who watches anxiously from the doorway. Kollwitz’ engagement with contemporary women’s issues, the discussion about women’s rights and freedoms, is particularly evident in her works from the early 1890s. But even later in her work, Kollwitz often focused on women and their living conditions.

You can find more information about the novel and its author on your display.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht, Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Short biography of Wilhelm Zimmermann

He was a politician, historian, writer and theologian. Although he was born into humble circumstances in 1807, he received a good education. After leaving grammar school, he was active as a writer and parliamentarian. He later became a pastor in Württemberg. He belonged to the democratic circles during the Vormärz. He was active on the democratic left in the Paulskirche and from 1849 in the Württemberg state parliament. However, his convictions slowly changed after the revolution of 1848. After the foundation of the German Empire, he became a supporter of Bismarck. Zimmermann died in 1878.

Transcript of the audio track

Who is the woman who turns her back on us but can obviously arouse strong emotions in her fellow human beings? What fighting words does she use to get all the bent, emaciated and barely armed figures to charge into battle full of energy?

This is Black Anna, a historically documented woman who achieved fame as a peasant leader during the Peasants’ War. Wilhelm Zimmermann writes about them in his General History of the Great Peasants’ War:
“Black, oppressed woman, from the hut on the Neckar, with a strong, feral soul full of passion, equally strong in hatred and love, with your ‘God willing’ in your mouth and with your spirit of freedom and revenge […]. ‘The enemy’s guns will do you no harm’, she had shouted to those approaching the Weinsberg, making her signs in the air.”
Kollwitz chose this courageous woman as the protagonist for Losbruch, the largest and at the same time best-known sheet in the cycle. But how did Kollwitz come up with the book in the first place?

Wilhelm Zimmermann’s General History of the Great Peasants’ War (published in 1840-1843) was also still part of the In the 20th century, it was one of the most widely read and best-selling accounts of the Peasants’ War. For a long time, it was the most thorough overall presentation on this subject and the first to meet historical standards. Zimmermann was the first historian to assess the Peasants’ War as a legitimate struggle for freedom by the disadvantaged against their oppressors. The Peasants’ War was thus reinterpreted as a positive point in German history and became a central event in German historiography. In this classification, Zimmermann was not entirely free from the influence of contemporary discussions in the Vormärz period at the beginning of the 1840s. But it was precisely this that later made his book popular in Käthe Kollwitz’ social-democratic environment. Through Zimmermann, socialist theorists such as Friedrich Engels saw the historical Peasants’ War as the origin of the revolutionary tradition in Germany and a model for movements in the 19th century. Käthe Kollwitz shared this view and used the Peasants’ War to demonstrate the causes and justification for the contemporary freedom and workers’ movements.

You can find more information about Zimmermann on your display.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

You can discover more posters by Käthe Kollwitz here: https://www.kollwitz.de/plakate-und-flugblaetter-uebersicht

Transcript of the audio track

This is one of the first two posters Kollwitz created. Both caused scandals and were eventually banned. Considering the images we are confronted with every day, this exhausted and tired woman staring into space doesn’t seem particularly scandalous, does it?

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, such direct and unembellished depictions of poverty and its physical consequences were not commonplace. Kollwitz was probably commissioned to design the posters because her weaving cycle was one of the few that impressively depicted the misery of working from home. This fitted in with the aim of the bourgeois social reformers and trade unions. The venue they chose for their German Homeworking Exhibition was also provocative. Unter den Linden was Berlin’s boulevard at the time. The catastrophic working and living conditions of the proletariat were to be made as clear as possible to the rich people walking around. It is said that the German Empress refused to visit the exhibition as long as Kollwitz’ poster was on display. That would be possible, because political posters were generally banned in the German Empire until 1914.

This combination of image and text was therefore attributed great influence. And whether it’s advertising or political messages: To this day, posters can successfully make us think when they suddenly and unexpectedly cross our paths and insert their striking images and catchy phrases between our everyday thoughts.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

Summary of The Weavers (1892) by Gerhart Hauptmann

The factory owner Dreißiger and his employee Pfeifer run their business with little sympathy for/regard for the plight of their weavers. When the workers present the fabrics they have woven by hand at home, wages are reduced for quality defects and missing weight. When additional wage cuts are announced and the weavers are forbidden to sing their protest song ‘Blood Court’, it becomes too much for the weavers. They storm Dreißiger’s house and trash it. The weavers now decide to move on to the neighboring village to the entrepreneur Dittrich and destroy his mechanical looms, because they are the source of all evil. This storm is described from the perspective of the Hilse weaving family, who are initially uninvolved. Luise Hilse immediately joins the insurgents against the wishes of her father-in-law. In the meantime, the military intervenes, but is pushed back by the weavers. Old Hilse remains God-fearing to the end and goes back to his work until he is shot through the window in the chaos.

The factory owner Dreißiger, whose house the weavers first stormed in the fourth act, is an allusion to the real cotton factory owner Zwanziger, who employed weavers in the Owl Mountains.
The anonymously written hymn Blood Court had also become a symbol of revolt in historical reality and was banned. Anyone who sang them was imprisoned.

Transcript of the audio track

When Käthe Kollwitz saw The Weavers at the Neues Theater Berlin (today’s Theater am Schiffbauerdamm) in February 1893, it was a private event organized by the theater association Freie Bühne. The censors feared that Hauptmann’s drama might tempt the social democratic audience to imitate him and banned it from being performed. After legal disputes, the ban was lifted a few months later. The risk of a revolt was low anyway because theater was too expensive for the proletariat. The public premiere took place at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Kaiser Wilhelm II is said to have announced that he would never visit it again. The censors had thus achieved the opposite of what they wanted: The back and forth quickly made Hauptmann’s drama known and aroused interest in the performances. Kollwitz was also immediately fascinated by the play. She began work on the weaving cycle in the same year.
Look at the sheets one after the other. They look like a movie or comic, don’t they? Together they tell a story that follows the structure of a classical drama: The first two sheets show the causes of the revolt, the miserable living conditions of the weavers, with ‘Misery’ and ‘Death’. The uprising is then planned in the third sheet. After the outbreak and climax, the cycle ends in the collapse of the revolt. Kollwitz uses the power of pictorial narration to convince us of her assessment of events. Have you already seen the Peasants’ War cycle? It follows the same principle.
You will find a short summary of the play on your display. And in the articles on the individual sheets, you can get a more precise impression of the similarities and differences between Hauptmann and Kollwitz’ narrative by means of quotations and additional information.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

To the quotes

The quotes in the article are from Act Five of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He first wrote the play in Silesian dialect and then published a linguistically softened version so that the play could be disseminated more widely. As our speakers do not speak the dialect in question and in order to keep the language understandable for a modern audience, the dialect has been softened further and some words translated. In the transcript below, however, the text of the play is quoted unchanged from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hauptmag/weber/weber.html.

Transcript of the audio track

“Luise, outrageous: With your bigoted wheels . . . I haven’t even had my fill of them yet. That’s why all four of them were lying in filth and rags. There wasn’t even a single winder dry. I want to be a mother, so that you know! And that’s why, so that you know, I wave the light and the plague down a manufacturer’s throat. I’m just a mother. – […] I was born a little bitch until death took pity on me. […] What has such a child done wrong, eh? and has to come to such a miserable end – and drifting at dittrichen, they’re bathed in wine and washed with milk. No, no: when it starts here – not ten horses shall hold me back. And that’s what I say: storm Dittrichen’s building – I’m the first – and mercy on anyone who wants to stop me. – I’ve had enough, that much is certain.”

The mother in Kollwitz’s picture is not yet ready to resist, but sinks into mourning. But she shares the fate that Hauptmann’s Luise laments here. The deceased child in the bed refers to the high infant mortality rate among workers in the Empire. This was due to malnutrition and poor medical care. In 1890, the textile workers had also petitioned the Emperor for better living and working conditions. This and the accompanying press reports probably encouraged both Hauptmann and Kollwitz to devote themselves to the subject.

On your display you will find more information about the quotes from Hauptmann’s play and a summary of it. And in the other articles on the individual sheets you can discover even more information like this.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Submitted by: Nadine Kleinken, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

To the quotes

The quotes in the article are from Act Five of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He first wrote the play in Silesian dialect and then published a linguistically softened version so that the play could be disseminated more widely. As our speakers do not speak the dialect in question and in order to keep the language understandable for a modern audience, the dialect has been softened further and some words translated. In the transcript below, however, the text of the play is quoted unchanged from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hauptmag/weber/weber.html.

Transcript of the audio track

On this sheet, Death stretches out his bony hand towards the mother. As a sign of starvation, his second hand rests on an empty, upturned bowl on the table. The cramped and dark living spaces contribute to the oppressive atmosphere.

Kollwitz had seen the miserable living conditions, lack of food, ragged clothes and the starving, sick bodies shown in this and the previous sheet with her own eyes in her husband’s doctor’s surgery. Even Gerhart Hauptmann apparently did not want to rely solely on the press reports on the situation of Silesian weavers around 1890. While researching his drama, he probably spoke to people involved in the uprisings himself and saw the conditions in Silesia. Hauptmann incorporated this into the detailed scene description of the weaving room in the second act. It almost seems like a pictorial description of Kollwitz’ first two sheets.

“Two young girls, Emma and Bertha Baumert, are sitting at looms in a narrow room, not six feet high from the very dilapidated hallway to the black smoky beamed ceiling – Mother Baumert, a contracted old woman, on a stool by the bed, a spooling wheel in front of her – […] Through two small window holes in the left wall, partly covered with paper and plugged with straw, a weak, pinkish light of the evening penetrates. […] The old woman’s face, neck and chest are fully illuminated by the warm breeze: a face emaciated to a skeleton, with folds and wrinkles in a bloodless skin, with sunken eyes, reddened and watery from wool dust, smoke and work in the light, […]. Part of the right-hand wall with the stove and stove bench, bedstead and several brightly painted pictures of saints is also still in the light. […] The roar of the looms, the rhythmic heaving of the drawer, from which the floor and walls are shaken, the shuffling and snapping of the little ship as it races back and forth fill the room. Mixed in with this is the deep, steady sound of the winding wheels, which resembles the buzzing of large bumblebees.”

On your display you will find more information about the quotes from Hauptmann’s play and a summary of it. And in the other articles on the individual sheets you can discover even more information like this.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

To the quotes

The quotes in the article are from Act Five of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He first wrote the play in Silesian dialect and then published a linguistically softened version so that the play could be disseminated more widely. As our speakers do not speak the dialect in question and in order to keep the language understandable for a modern audience, the dialect has been softened further and some words translated. In the transcript below, however, the text of the play is quoted unchanged from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hauptmag/weber/weber.html.

Transcript of the audio track

The men at the table are determined, they want to act. The one on the right seems to be beating the table with clenched fists, ready for anything. All three lean forward conspiratorially. I wonder what they are talking about?

Perhaps about similar things to Hauptmann’s characters in the second act; about the reasons why something must be done to improve their situation.
“Ansorge: […] You have an education, so tell me yourself, can you make a living at that price? I have to throw in three thalers for house tax, one thaler for land tax, three thalers for house interest. I can calculate earnings of fourteen thalers. Seven thalers remain for me for the whole year. From that we have to cook, heat, clothe and shoe ourselves, we have to knit and sew, we have to have quarters and everything else. – Is it any wonder if you can’t pay the interest?

Old Baumert: “Someone should go to Berlin and see how we’re doing.

Hunter: It’s not much use, Father Baumert. He’s already talked about it enough in the newspapers. But the rich, they twist and turn, so … they are jealous of the best Christians.”

On your display you will find more information about the quotes from Hauptmann’s play and a summary of it. And in the other articles on the individual sheets you can discover even more information like this.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Nadine Kleinken, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

To the quotes

The quotes in the article are from Act Five of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He first wrote the play in Silesian dialect and then published a linguistically softened version so that the play could be disseminated more widely. As our speakers do not speak the dialect in question and in order to keep the language understandable for a modern audience, the dialect has been softened further and some words translated. In the transcript below, however, the text of the play is quoted unchanged from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hauptmag/weber/weber.html.

Transcript of the audio track

“Baker: Where is the manslayer?

Old Baumert: Know me to eat grass, you eat sawdust.

[…]

The old Baumert: Arm soll a wern wie ‘ne Kirchenmaus. Arm soll a wern.

[…]

Baker, who rushes ahead, […] Be done here, I’ll start right away. From here we go to Bielau, to Dittrichen, who has the mechanical looms. All the misery comes from a factories.

Ansorge comes in from the corridor. […] If you take my house, I’ll take your house. Always on it! Howling into the salon. Those present follow him with jeers and laughter.”

—-

“First young weaver: We want to live and nothing more. And that’s why we cut the rope we were hanging on.

[…]

Baker: “What I don’t get willingly, I take by force.”

At least that’s what the weavers shout in Hauptmann’s drama as they storm the houses of two factory owners one after the other.

Kollwitz follows the tradition of other depictions of strikes and also shows the women and children involved: like the men, they are fighting for their rights. Kollwitz also dresses her figures in contemporary 19th century clothing. In this way, she shows that she is not concerned with the historical weavers’ revolt but with the current plight of workers. Looking at this and the next sheet, it is noticeable that no physical confrontation is shown. This is another way in which Kollwitz consciously set herself apart from the highly regarded history painting of her time, in which the battle scene is often the central event.

In his play, Hauptmann also deliberately breaks with some of the conventions of the historical drama of the time in order to refer to the current social conditions of the 1890s. After the founding of the German Empire in 1871, bourgeois history plays were primarily concerned with themes that generated patriotism and a sense of community. This form of theater liked the spectacle and detailed decor. Hauptmann retained the latter, but not to show splendor and great personalities. His details were intended to depict misery as realistically as possible in order to create unease and hold up a mirror to society.

On your display you will find more information about the quotes from Hauptmann’s play and a summary of it. And in the other articles on the individual sheets you can discover even more information like this.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Nadine Kleinken, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

To the quotes

The quotes in the article are from Act Five of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He first wrote the play in Silesian dialect and then published a linguistically softened version so that the play could be disseminated more widely. As our speakers do not speak the dialect in question and in order to keep the language understandable for a modern audience, the dialect has been softened further and some words translated. In the transcript below, however, the text of the play is quoted unchanged from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hauptmag/weber/weber.html.

Transcript of the audio track

In The Weavers, Gerhart Hauptmann has the characters perform and describe what Kollwitz deliberately does not show here. The stage directions for the fourth act state:

“Windows shatter in the salon. A loud crash resounds through the house, followed by a roaring cheer and then silence. A few seconds pass, then you hear soft and cautious footsteps up the stairs to the second floor, accompanied by sober and shy exclamations. […]

Young weavers and weaver girls now appear in the hallway doorway, not daring to enter and trying to push one into the other. After a few seconds the shyness is overcome, and the poor, skinny, sometimes sickly, ragged or patched figures spread out in Dreißiger’s room and in the salon […].”

[Die Nachrichten verbreiten sich im nächsten Akt in den Nachbarort]

“Hornig. They demolished the factory owner’s house, from the cellar up to the ridge turret. They threw the porcelain out of the skylights – always under the roof. […] Not in the house … in the dye works … on a store …! ‘The banisters smashed, the floorboards torn up – mirrors smashed – sofa, armchair, everything torn and tattered, cut up and smashed – trampled and chopped up – nope! – you can believe it, worse than in war.”

As in the previous sheet, the opponent, the manufacturers, remains invisible here too. That is the clearest difference between Kollwitz and Hauptmann. He narrates almost an entire act from the perspective of the Dreißiger family of factory owners and lets other groups in society have their say in a bar scene. However, Kollwitz only gives her stage to the workers; she always remains with the perspective of the oppressed. She also does this in the Peasants’ War cycle.

On your display you will find more information about the quotes from Hauptmann’s play and a summary of it. And in the other articles on the individual sheets you can discover even more information like this.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Audio by: Matthias Albrecht, Nadine Kleinken
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.

To the quotes

The quotes in the article are from Act Five of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers. He first wrote the play in Silesian dialect and then published a linguistically softened version so that the play could be disseminated more widely. As our speakers do not speak the dialect in question and in order to keep the language understandable for a modern audience, the dialect has been softened further and some words translated. In the transcript below, however, the text of the play is quoted unchanged from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/hauptmag/weber/weber.html.

Transcript of the audio track

“Four men carry a wounded man through the “Haus”. Silence. You can clearly hear a voice saying. It’s the Ulbrichs Weber. The voice again after a few seconds. It’s going to be the end of the day; he’s got a bruise in his ear. You can hear the men walking up a wooden staircase. Outside suddenly. Hurray, hurray!

[…]

The old Hilse. […] To Mother Hilse with growing ecstasy. This is where my heavenly Father has placed me. Right, mother? Here we sit and do what we owe, even if all the snow burns. He begins to weave.

A volley crashes. Hit to death, old Hilse straightens up and slumps forward onto the loom. At the same time, shouts of “Hurrah! […]

Mielchen. Grandpa, grandpa, they’re driving the soldiers out to the village, they’ve spotted Dittrichen’s house, they’re doing it like they did when they were in their thirties. Grandpa! The child is startled, becomes alert, puts his finger in his mouth and carefully steps closer to the dead man. Grandpa!

Mother Hilse. Go on, man, and say a word, you can get really scared.”

Kollwitz and Hauptmann bring their stories to a close in slightly different ways.
Hauptmann has his weavers successfully storm the second manufacturer’s house and push back the military. But it also shows the individual costs of the revolt, leaving the viewer with an open question: Were they successful? Has their situation really improved?

With Käthe Kollwitz, it is clear that the weavers cannot escape the poorly paid homework in the last picture of the weaving cycle. They recover their dead. The mighty loom seems to bury them, while the smoke of fired guns still billows through the door. Change has not yet been achieved, more needs to happen.

On your display you will find more information about the quotes from Hauptmann’s play and a summary of it. And in the other articles on the individual sheets you can discover even more information like this.

Text: Nadine Kleinken
Submitted by: Matthias Albrecht, Nadine Kleinken, Charlotte-Sophie Laege
Recording and editing in cooperation with the Making Media Space in the Digital Learning Lab at Bielefeld University.