Kollwitz spent her working life on a single proposition, that an artist's job is to bear witness, accurately and unflinchingly, to the experience of the people who suffer most in their time, and the body of work she produced across more than fifty years is one of the most morally serious projects in the history of European printmaking.
Kollwitz came to art from a family that took her seriously. Her grandfather had been a prominent Lutheran minister and her father a builder and politically engaged member of the East Prussian liberal middle class, and the household she grew up in encouraged the artistic vocations of its daughters at a moment when such encouragement was rare in Europe. Her early painting training in the women's art schools then available to her gave her the academic foundations of European drawing, and her decisive encounter with the prints of Max Klinger redirected her toward etching, lithography, and woodcut as the primary media of her career.
Her marriage placed her in the working-class Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, where her husband's clinic served the urban poor and where she had unmediated daily access to the bodies, faces, gestures, and conditions of the people she would spend her life depicting. The decision to take social subjects seriously, labor, hunger, illness, the particular weight of poverty on women and children, was not theoretical but rooted in the practical observation of the lives around her own home.
Her first major print cycle, drawn from Hauptmann's drama of the 1840s Silesian weavers' uprising, established her vocabulary almost fully formed: massive, simplified figures rendered in heavy black, dense with grief, exhaustion, and political force. Its sequel, drawn from the German peasant uprisings of the sixteenth century, extended that vocabulary across seven plates of furious historical reconstruction. The cycles brought her national attention and entered the collections of the leading German museums almost at once.
The death of Peter in Belgium in October 1914 turned her work decisively toward the subjects that would dominate the rest of her life. The long graphic sequence on war and the subsequent woodcut and lithograph projects on motherhood, mourning, and revolution carried her work through the 1920s, and the granite memorial sculpture The Grieving Parent, depicting Käthe and Karl as kneeling figures, was installed at the German military cemetery in Vladslo, Belgium, near Peter's grave. The work is one of the most moving public sculptures of the twentieth century and one of the few major pieces of postwar European public art entirely focused on private grief.
The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 ended her institutional career. She was forced from the Prussian Academy and her work was banned from exhibition; her late years were spent in increasing isolation, evacuated from Berlin late in the war, and she died in Moritzburg, near Dresden, two weeks before the German surrender. Her position today is at the highest level of European art history, the most important graphic artist of her generation, the leading woman artist of pre-war Germany, and the artist whose name remains most closely associated with the moral conscience of European modernism.