Empathy and the Human Rights Historian
A visitor to the Neue Wache in Berlin examines Mother with Her Dead Son, an enlarged reproduction of Pietà (1937–38/39) by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945).
Kollwitz’s Pietà was an intensely personal sculpture, born of meditation on her son Peter’s death in the First World War, and her lifelong commitment to pacifism. In her diary, she wrote, “The mother sits and has the dead son lying between her knees. It is no longer pain, but reflection.”
Following German reunification, and a push by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a copy of the sculpture, by Harald Haacke, was placed in Berlin’s Neue Wache as part of a memorial to “Victims of War and Tyranny.” The sculpture sits alone in a room with an oculus above, exposing it to the elements.
Photo credit: Confronting the Past … Cautiously by Charles E. Stevens. Used by permission, all rights reserved. See Stevens’s Flickr Photostream.
Staff
