Director: Ralf Kirsten, colour, 96 min., 1986-1987
Käthe Kollwitz is 47 years old and already a well-established artist in Germany and abroad when Peter, her youngest son, volunteers to join the German army in WWI and gets killed two weeks later. This painful tragedy changes Kollwitz’s life and art forever. She becomes a radical pacifist; in her art she reflects on her son and the meaning of war. After signing a petition against the Nazis, she is excluded from the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin and her art is labeled “degenerate.” Lonely and sick, Kollwitz spends the last days of her life near Dresden and she dies at the age of 78, before the end of WWII.
Ralf Kirsten—director of The Lost Angel, a homage to German artist Ernst Barlach—used episodes from Kollwitz’s unpublished letters and diaries to fit them together in a mosaic-like self-portrait.
(Source: Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg. DEFA-Spielfilme 1946-1992)
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