Her mother, Katherina Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp,[8] a Lutheran pastor who was expelled from the official Evangelical State Church and founded an independent congregation.

[10] Recognizing her talent, Kollwitz's father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts on 14 August 1879 when she was twelve.

[15] The proximity of her husband's practice proved invaluable: "The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.... People from the bourgeois sphere were altogether without appeal or interest.

But what I would like to emphasize once more is that compassion and commiseration were at first of very little importance in attracting me to the representation of proletarian life; what mattered was simply that I found it beautiful.

[17] More recent research suggests that Kollwitz may have suffered from a childhood neurological disorder dysmetropsia (sometimes called Alice in Wonderland syndrome, due to its sensory hallucinations and migraines).

[15][19] Kollwitz was inspired by the performance and ceased work on a series of etchings she had intended to illustrate Émile Zola's Germinal.

However, the initial source of Kollwitz's interest dated to her youth when she and her brother Konrad playfully imagined themselves as barricade fighters in a revolution.

[22] When completed, the Peasant War consisted of seven etchings: Plowing, Raped, Sharpening the Scythe, Arming in the Vault, Charge, The Prisoners, and After the Battle.

In all, the works were technically more impressive than those of The Weavers, owing to their greater size and dramatic command of light and shadow.

[22] Kollwitz visited Paris twice while working on Peasant War and took classes at the Académie Julian in 1904 to learn to sculpt.

Although Kollwitz completed no work there, she later recalled the impact of early Renaissance art she experienced during her time in Florence.

"[30]In 1917, on her 50th birthday, the galleries of Paul Cassirer provided a retrospective exhibition of one hundred and fifty drawings by Kollwitz.

As the war wound down and a nationalistic appeal was made for old men and children to join the fighting, Kollwitz implored in a published statement: There has been enough of dying!

[36] Kollwitz wanted to show the horrors of living through a war to combat the pro-war sentiment that had begun to grow in Germany again.

[37] In 1924 she finished her three most famous posters: Germany's Children Starving, Bread, and Never Again War ("Nie Wieder Krieg").

In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste following her support of the Dringender Appell.

"[30]In July 1936, she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a Nazi concentration camp; they resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable.

On her 70th birthday, she "received over 150 telegrams from leading personalities of the art world," as well as offers to house her in the United States, which she declined for fear of provoking reprisals against her family.

She moved first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony.

[46] Käthe Kollwitz is a subject within William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, a 2005 National Book Award winner for fiction.

In the book, Vollmann describes the lives of those touched by the fighting and events surrounding World War II in Germany and the Soviet Union.

[citation needed] An enlarged version of a similar Kollwitz sculpture, Mother with her Dead Son, was placed in 1993 at the center of Neue Wache in Berlin, which serves as a monument to "the Victims of War and Tyranny".

[citation needed] A statue of Kollwitz by Gustav Seitz was installed in Kollwitzplatz, Berlin in 1960 where it remains to this day.

[55] An exhibition, Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz was held at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, from 13 September – 26 November 2017, and is intended to be shown subsequently in Salisbury, Swansea, Hull and London.