McCord 2026 | The Windmill

FALL 2026

Mother Death: a Symbol of Agency in the Context of Twentieth-Century German Feminism

Isabella McCord

University of North Texas

Isabella (Bella) McCord is an Honors student and Terry Scholar at the University of North Texas, double majoring in Art History and German Studies and minoring in English. As an Undergraduate Research Fellow, her work addresses Germanic prints and illustrations of the early-twentieth century with an emphasis on women artists. Her current research uses an interdisciplinary lens to place the work of artist-mothers in the context of contemporary gender discourse, allowing for the reinterpretation of their work.

INTRODUCTION

Violently, Death descends on an unsuspecting monk. He who should be mostly ideally positioned to receive God’s generosity shakes with fear as he realizes the immediate reality of his fate. This is the image of death Hans Holbein the Younger presents to us in his print of Der Münch (The Monk) from his 1523 Totentanz series (Dance of Death; figure 1). A series deeply rooted in German artistic tradition since the Middle Ages, the Totentanz depicts members of different social classes—from laborers to monarchs—as they encounter a masculine Death.1 As noted by the historian Judith M. Bennett, these images “sought to give moral meaning to hard reality: death could come at any time to snatch away the living, rich as well as poor, young as well as old.”2 As a printed series, the Totentanz could disseminate easily and enact the Christian-moralizing goal of confronting mankind with their inevitable death.3

Although Holbein’s Death assaults Der Münch with as much ferocity as he does Das Altweyb (The Old Woman)—brutishly attacking both in the midst of day—Death’s descent on the young duchess in Die Hertzoginn stands apart (figures 1-3). He invades the privacy of her room and wakes her from her tranquil rest as he drags her from the bed by her feet. Death’s approach to the young maiden evokes voyeurism and violence, suggesting a forthcoming sexual assault.4 Inspired by their troubling encounter, artists of all disciplines extracted the encounter between Death and the young woman from the series of the Totentanz, creating a motif symbolic of masculine desire. Hans Sebald Beham’s engraving in 1547, Matthias Clausius’s iconic 1774 poem, Franz Schubert’s subsequent composition from 1824, and Alfred Hering’s 1900 oil painting each seem to capture the uncomfortable eroticism seemingly embedded in the name they share: Der Tod und Das Mädchen (figure 4). The unsettling fixation on a male Death’s predatorial encounter with a young—often nude—woman by these artists imbues the motif with an undertone of chauvinism.5 As do they firmly attest to the assertion of Karl S. Guthke, Professor Emeritus of German Art and Culture at Harvard, in The Gender of Death: in Germany, “Death is the male, not the female reaper, the man, not the woman with the scythe, the male, not the female skeleton”—that is, until the turn of the 20th century.6

In the late 1800s, Germanic artists began to—radically—imagine a feminine Death. Guthke notes how “this female personification keeps gaining ground and becomes clearly dominant in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century.”7 Egon Schiele’s 1915 Death and the Maiden and Jeanne Mammen’s 1916 Death each demonstrate feminine personifications of Death by artists from German-speaking nations. Though the medium, tone, and gender of theartist varied, the frequency with which a female Death began to take shape around the turn of the century confirms that Germany now knew Death as a woman.8

Possibly, as scholar Kate Elswit argues, these artists aimed to defer death—their own or that of their loved ones—by “aestheticizing it in the corpses of beautiful women.”9 If so, why does only a feminine Death allow for such deferral? Present scholarship—including contributions by Kate Elswit, Karl S. Guthke, and Elisabeth Bronfen—attempts to rationalize the sudden shift from a masculine to a feminine Death according to contemporary psychological publications, especially those by Sigmund Freud. In his 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes the Death Drive as an instinctual desire to return to an “old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return.”10 Furthermore, Karl S. Guthke references Freud’s 1913 essay on “The Theme of the Three Caskets” to argue that illustrations of a feminine Death by male artists suggest a “primordial woman,” who reigns over the passage of the deceased.11 If Death is understood as a woman, specifically a mother, then she must necessarily welcome back those to which she first granted life. A female Death is the only Death who can achieve the aims set out by Freud, the only Death who allows one to physically return to and reinhabit their “pre-life form” in the womb. Bronfen concurs, explaining that “the mother assumes the status of trope for death because she recalls the position anterior to life so immediately connected with her body.”12

Yet, the complete dependency of existing literature on Freudian theory to explain the re-gendering of Death in Germanic visual culture contends with both the diversity of these female personifications and the tumultuous context of Europe at the turn of the century. Such overlapping contexts include the greater accessibility to society provided to women, the emergence of the Femme Fatale, and the proliferation and radicalization of literary and visual art by first-wave feminists. In response, this project brings contemporaneous German feminist discourse into the discussion in order to better understand why and for what purpose(s) Death underwent re-gendering. After exploring the origins of the relationship between Death and women in Germany and examining reactionary literature by turn-of-the-century female authors, this research cites case studies of works on paper by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) and Else Meidner (1901-1987) to suggest how women artists not only responded to gender discourse through their feminization of Death, but also—in reappropriating an artistic motif seeped in misogynistic tradition—established the new ‘Mother Death’ as a symbol of agency.

Stefanie Knöll, “Death and the Maiden: A German Topic?” in Women and Death: Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500-2000, ed. Helen Fronius and Anna Linton (Camden House, 2008), 11.
Judith M. Bennett, “Death and the Maiden,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 269, 10.1215/10829636-1571885.
“Victory of Life,” Museum for Sepulchral Culture, accessed October 27, 2025 at https://www.sepulkralmuseum.de/EN/research/library-collections/insights-into-our-collection/the-victory-of-life.
Knöll, “Death and the Maiden,” 17.
Bennett, “Death and the Maiden,” 270.
Karl S. Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13.
Guthke, The Gender of Death, 15.
Other scholars who discuss this phenomenon include Kate Elswitt in “Berlin…Your Dance Partner is Death,” Stefanie Knöll in “Death and the Maiden,” Sandra Gilbert in “The Supple Suitor: Death, Women, Feminism, and (Assisted or Unassisted) Suicide,” and Elisabeth Bronfen in Over Her Dead Body: Death Femininity and the Aesthetic.
Kate Elswit, “Berlin…Your Dance Partner is Death,” The Drama Review 53, no. 1 (2009): 80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25599453.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey, (W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), 32. https://ia902907.us.archive.org/17/items/SigmundFreud/Sigmund%20Freud%20%5B1920%5D%20Beyon d%20The%20Pleasure%20Principle%20%28James%20Strachey%20Translation%201961%29.pdf.
Guthke, The Gender of Death, 192.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester University Press, 1992), 32.

Women and Death at the Turn of the Century: Man’s Perspective

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, women’s rising demands for equality were widespread and a part of public discourse, prompting the emergence of the so called ‘woman question.’13 Across Europe, and in the work of predominately male artists, one response to this question was the birth of the Femme Fatale—a dangerous woman who, with access to greater social mobility, threatened to transform into a destructive force.14 According to the art historian Reinhold Heller, the Femme Fatale was a woman whose “very existence seems to threaten the life of men.”15 Images of Judith and Salome—cultural figures who supposedly exemplified the Femme Fatale—rapidly increased in popularity, as did the undertone of horror and violence associated with them. German-speaking artists found these women especially attractive, as evident in Max Klinger’s 1903 The New Salome (figure 5).16 As she looms over two decapitated male heads, Salome gazes at the viewer with a slight smile and arms crossed in defiant success. Klinger’s depiction of the biblical woman seems to reflect a perceived “demonic power” and a “necessity of violently subduing that power” in order to protect the safety of ‘endangered’ men.17 Both Judith and Salome were, as women, seen as naturally life-giving, yet their association with murdered men motivated male artists to appropriate them as symbols of destruction, horror, and death. Their images became overtly seductive as they alluded to the new, modern women with more sexual freedom given her access to such services as contraception and sex counseling.18 Conservatives feared women’s newfound freedom would prompt them to abandon all traditional responsibility over the home and children.19 Consequentially, in targeting images of seductive, free women, male artists positioned the new woman as a symbol of death—both for themselves and for the nation at large.

Masculine anxieties toward the emancipated women as a “symbol of disorder, decadence, and physical and psychological disease” were, however, if not baseless, at the very least misplaced. 20 Women became a symbol of death, in part, as a consequence of the rampant spread of venereal disease that resulted from a sudden increase of prostitutes and unwed mothers, especially after 1918.21 In the same year, during the November Revolution, German women gained the right to vote.22 Thus, men’s fears of women became two-fold: they feared women’s encroachment on socio-political spheres from which they were once barred, as well as the haunting possibility that an encounter with a women would result in death (though this was, of course, exaggerated). George Grosz’s Lustmord (Sex Murder) images exemplify this symbolic association between death and women. Specifically, his 1922 Sex Murderer, Self-Portrait depicts a glorified Lustmord standing victoriously over the dismembered body of a women, whose pieces lie scattered across the room (figure 6). He—Dix—wields a knife in one hand and a leg of the women in the other, grinning at his success in conquering this death-tainted woman. Dix’s work, and others like it, confirm how early-twentieth-century male artists often responded to the ‘woman question’ of the time with images that, despite their attempts to reassure men of their authority, only reflected the anxieties of the men who made them.

13. Beth Irwin Lewis, “Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (University of Cambridge Press, 1997), 206. Lewis cites Brockhaus’s 1898 definition of the ‘woman question’ as “‘the totality of problems and demands

that have most recently been called forth by the transformation of society and its ways of life, with respect to the position of the female sex among modern peoples.’”

14. Reinhold Heller, The Earthly Chimera and the Femme Fatale: Fear of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Art

(The University of Chicago, 1981), 5.

15. Heller, The Earthly Chimera, 9.

16. Nadine Sine, “Cases of Mistaken Identity: Salome and Judith at the Turn of the Century.” German Studies Review 11, no. 1 (1988): 22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1430832.

17. Lewis, “Lustmord,” 213.

18. Anita Grossmann, “The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review Press, 1983), 154.

19. Heller, The Earthly Chimera, 9.

20. Anna Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Motherhood in Germany and in International Perspective 1800-1914,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Products of a Nation, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Berghahn Books, 1997), 121.

21. Lewis, “Lustmord,” 224.

22. Lewis, “Lustmord,” 211.

Women and Death at the Turn of the Century: Feminist Rebuttals

In response to their masculine counterparts’ distortion of women’s new freedom as an ominous omen and her transformation into a vision of Death—literal and symbolic—feminist authors attacked the male-supported social structures that trapped women in nearly unlivable circumstances. They argued that male desire and greed encouraged the prevalence of prostitutes and brothels, whose existence only served to imprison sexually active and disadvantaged women.23 Women confined to these systems suffered from a “triple burden of overexertion in work, indigence, and motherhood.”24 Rather than condemning women for conforming to the roles a masculine oriented society assigned to them, feminist author Adele Schreiber advocated for “rectifying the conditions and the institutions that make [unwed mothers] legally ambiguous and socially disadvantageous.”25 Likewise, the magazine Die Frau argued that “men should be taught to exercise self-control and educated to the same moral standards as women.”26

Additionally, a rising acceptance of female sexuality as a natural drive prompted “many feminists to reject traditional religious and cultural constraints on female behavior and to exult the power of female sexuality as a life-giving force.”27 Lily Braun, in her 1908 “Manifesto to Germany’s Women,” establishes the image of a female Death as a reactionary figure spurred on by the injustice of these systems as she describes how “the goddess thus desecrated takes fearful vengeance on” those who wronged her.28 The feminine Death, then, becomes a direct product of patriarchal social injustice as she seeks retribution on those men who orchestrated the death and ruin of so many young women.

Many arguments dispersed by feminist of the period also took on a maternalistic focus, thereby isolating the mother as the figure responsible for directing and repairing social morality. Women glorified “motherhood as the basis of women’s claim to dignity, equality, [and] a widened sphere of action” within their community.29 In her 1919 essay, “The German Woman and Her Tasks in the New Republic,” Alice Salomon comments on the “maternal destiny of women” as evidence for her responsibility to care for society as a whole.30 Even the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF, or Federation of German Women’s Associations), a major organization throughout the first half of the twentieth century aimed at increasing the role of women in society, likewise praised “biological motherhood” and the “life-giving instincts” of women as making them more suited to the long-term care of society.31 Mothers, collectively, became figures of authority and autonomy as they assumed responsibility for the physical, mental, and moral care of all humankind. In feminist literature, the icon of The Mother acted as a kind of supreme being, to whom the natural order bestows all responsibility for life-giving and caring.

23. Grossmann, “The New Woman,” 155.

24. Adele Schreiber, “Unwed Mothers (1912)” in German Feminist Writings, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 211.

25. Schreiber, “Unwed Mothers,” 212.

26. Sefana Lefko, “‘Truly Womanly’ and ‘Truly German’: Women’s Rights and National Identity in Die Frau,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Products of a Nation, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Berghahn Books, 1997), 133.

27. Allen, “Feminism and Motherhood,” 122.

28.Lily Braun, “A Manifesto to Germany’s Women (1908),” in German Feminist Writings, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 195.

29. Allen, “Feminism and Motherhood,” 113.

30. Alice Salomon, “The German woman and Her Tasks in the New Republic (1919),” in German Feminist Writings, ed. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 154.

31. Lefko, “‘Truly Womanly,’” 131.

Reimagining a Mother Death

If women, specifically mothers, bear all responsibility for life in this way, would one not naturally conclude that women also bear responsibility for life after death? As Guthke argues, “to speak about life and its possible significance is to speak about death,” because they are inherently intertwined.32 In visual culture, the entanglement between life and death in the body of the mother is most evident in the work of Käthe Kollwitz and Else Meidner. As they reframe Death as a mother, Kollwitz and Meidner not only reclaim the destructive feminine Death first imagined by anti-feminist artists such as Klinger and Grosz, but also extend the qualities of comfort, care, and security assigned to The Mother to characterize Death’s lasting embrace. Further, in the context of the long-tradition of Der Tod und Das Mädchen, where “the woman always seems to be defeated by death,” Kollwitz and Meidner reappropriate a motif tainted by misogyny and transform Death into a symbol of female agency.33 Each of the proceeding case studies, after confirming their subject’s interest in social advocacy and feminist literature, closely examine a selection of works by each artist depicting a ‘Mother Death’ to propose how these women re-gender Death as an act of empowerment.

Käthe Kollwitz

As many scholars have noted, Kollwitz’s interest in socio-political topics derived from her upbringing on a dissentient Christian commune, her father’s active role in the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SDAP, or Social Democratic Workers Party), and her husband’s operation of a clinic for the underprivileged.34 In her diaries, Kollwitz recalls how she was perpetually surrounded by reminders of the “unsolved problems [of] prostitution and unemployment” and wanted desperately to advocate for their correction.35 The artist’s familiarity with these issues—advocated for by the likes of Schreiber, Salomon, and Braun—is reflected in many of her stand-alone drawings from the first three decades of the twentieth century. Her 1926 Schwangere, ins Wasser gehend (Pregnant Woman, Drowning Herself) may be read as a commentary on those unwed “victims of motherhood,” who, with no hope for marriage nor support from their families, chose to give up both their life and their coming child’s (figure 7).36 In highlighting the heart-wrenching decision of the young mother, Kollwitz both calls viewers to share in her sympathetic awareness and captures the desperation of these women left with no other option. 37 Adele Schreiber’s essay, Unwed Mothers (1912) evokes parallel imagery:

Then at last the wandering about without a home to call one’s own, the flight to the city in order to disappear in the masses, fear of the child to come, the worry that suffocates every emotion of motherhood—all of these would end, and the voices that in the dark hours give desperate women the idea of killing themselves and the germs of a new life within them would cease. We of a newly enlightened age must make reparation for so much unexpiated human guilt.38

Further evidence to indicate Kollwitz’s use of her works on paper to engage in feminist discourse reveals itself through her political posters. For example, in 1923, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KDP, or German Communist Party) entrusted Kollwitz to illustrate a poster against Paragraph 218—a law seeking to criminalize abortion (figure 8).39 This image again recalls the “victims of motherhood” described by Schreiber, who might not think to take such destructive action if allowed access to adequate healthcare.40 As Henriëtte Kets de Vries asserts in Women of War, Kollwitz’s positioning of women in both Poster against Paragraph 218 and Schwangere, ins Wasser gehend reveals how she was “clearly interested in using the female figure as a symbol of revolution.”41 These works indicate “her larger socio-political project and the ways in which she sought to reveal the hardships of those limited by gender and class”—a project that extends to influence her work exploring death as well.42

Kollwitz’s attraction to death first arose with the loss of three siblings as a young child, and persisted with the loss of her son, Peter, in the first world war.43 Her 1903 etching, Frau mit totem Kind (Woman with Dead Child), her 1924 portfolio, Abschied und Tod (Farewell and Death), as well as her Tod (Death) series completed a decade later affirm Kollwitz’s obsessive interest in death throughout her artistic career. Kollwitz’s granddaughter, Jutta, even remarked of her grandmother that “Life was significant for [Kollwitz] only in that it had a relationship to death.”44

Following her son’s death in 1914, Kollwitz’s reignited faith motivated her to draw from Christian imagery to establish a symbolic language through which she positions Death as a mother.45 As art historian Tom Fecht acknowledges, the “iconography of the Lamentation [and] the Mother of Sorrows… is newly conceived and recast” in Kollwitz’s personifications of Death.46 For instance, in Tod (Death) from her 1924 Abschied und Tod portfolio, Kollwitz references the Christian Pietà, in which a mourning Mother Mary holds the dead Christ in her lap after he is taken from the cross (figure 9). Rather than the expected figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary, however, it is Death who stops to cradle the limp body of the deceased child in Kollwitz’s work. The significance of an allusion to Mary in terms of this project is presupposed by the medievalist and feminist historian Judith M. Bennett: “The virgin Mary was understood not only to have uniquely combined motherhood with intact maidenhood, but also to have never fully succumbed to death.”47 In positioning the skeletal figure of Death as the Virgin Mary, Kollwitz affirms Death’s embodiment in motherhood while simultaneously bestowing her with a degree of authority as a kind of supernatural heroine.

Similarly, the Deaths presented in both her 1924 Der Tod tröstet (Death Giving Comfort) from the same portfolio and her 1934 Tod hält Mädchen im Schoß (Young girl in the Lap of Death), are identified as mothers through the robes that adorn them (figures 10 and 11). These cloaked Deaths evoke the German-Christian Shutzmantelmadonna (Sheltering-cloak Madonna or Virgin of Mercy), a motif that emphasizes Mary’s role as protector and caretaker of humanity as she envelops figures within her mantle (figure 12).48 Kollwitz’s Mother Death grasps the young girls closely against her body, seemingly pulling them into her cloak just as Mother Mary embraces her charges in the Shutzmantelmadonna. Her allusion to this motif, in addition to those to the Pietà, allows Kollwitz to reassign the authority inherent to Mary because of her miraculous motherhood to the motherly Death she presents.

Moreover, as Kollwitz’s death imagery exists within the long tradition of Der Tod und Das Mädchen, her reimagined Mother Death offers a new, restorative relationship between Death and the Maiden—one built on a foundation of love and trust rather than an unwelcome pursuit and invasion of privacy. In Der Tod tröstet, Death holds the mourning woman close to her chest while applying a handkerchief to her face to wipe away her tears. Likewise, the shadow cast from Death’s robe onto her face in Tod hält Mädchen im Schoß serves to further tame the Death figure and mark her as a source of comfort. Whereas the maiden appears to tremble in Der Tod und Das Mädchen works of old, the maiden shies away from Death’s touch in neither of Kollwitz’s prints. Through their willing embraces, Kollwitz characterizes Death as a tender figure who cares for the women in her arms and assures her that her—Death’s—presence is not one to fear. In stark contrast to those masculine Deaths of the preceding centuries, and through her allusions to the Virgin Mary as mother of Christ, Kollwitz offers a Mother Death who is devoted to consoling the departed.

Through Kollwitz’s work, Death transforms into a benevolent being who waits patiently to receive all those to whom she once gave life, so that she may care for them again. As a mother, Death provides greater comfort to those she embraces in the afterlife, thus mirroring the mother exalted by the likes of Schreiber, Braun, and Salomon, who “takes on all the direct care for and protection of tender and helpless life.”49 This gendered Death embodies the relationship between woman, life, and death as it positions a Mother Death who exerts authority over and takes on responsibility for all those who once lived. Furthermore, Kollwitz’s use of a dispersive medium—prints—to position Death as a mother accomplishes the same informative and persuasive aims as the manifestos and pamphlets published by feminist authors and discussed above, as members of the working and middle classes could readily encounter her lithographs. Understanding Kollwitz’s Mother Death in the context of contemporary gender discourse and recognizing the artist’s own engagement with feminist literature asserts the quasi-rebellious nature of her prints. Kollwitz’s Death offers an answer to the ‘woman question’ of the early-twentieth century that radically opposes the views of her male counterparts. More, she does so by reframing the association between Death and women they first conceived as a means of condemnation; rather than terror, her Mother Death inspires hope as she signifies the unique authoritative agency of the mother.

Else Meidner

A German-Jewish artist of the following generation and mentee of Kollwitz, Else Meidner was also an artist-mother. And, like Kollwitz, Meidner’s son, David, effectively abandoned Meidner as Peter left Kollwitz—he moved away from the Meidner family as a young adult and permanently ceased contact.50 Most importantly, however, Meidner also shared with Kollwitz an interest in contemporary discussions of women’s rights. 51 Though the height of her career occurred much later, Meidner responded to a society just as concerned with defining the place and authority prescribed to women as it was in the 1910s.52 In her notes from 1959, Meidner sympathizes with women who, after “reagieren sie ihre unbefriedigten sexuellen Triebe ab” (acting on their unsatisfied sexual urges), are condemned and persecuted by society.53 In her 1954 work, Karneval (Carnival) Meidner reflects on the degree of accessibility to society afforded to women, which increased significantly in the thirty years since Kollwitz’s Schwangere (figure 13). While the central woman, likely a prostitute, in Meidner’s work dons the mask of Death—indicating Meidner’s simultaneous interest in death scenes—the men who surround her appear as animalistic clowns. With their obstructed faces, disturbingly elongated noses, and encirclement of the woman, Meidner characterizes the contemporary man as a looming predator who lies in wait for the opportune moment to pounce. The woman embodying Death, who hides her skeletal face as she turns her back to the men, recalls Lily Braun’s description of the “goddess thus desecrated,” who takes revenge on the men who threatened to abuse her.54 Though choosing to parody misogynistic understandings of the relationship between women and death, rather than condemning the plight of women outright, Meidner nevertheless visualizes her dissatisfaction with the male-enforced social systems that continued to bar women from achieving genuine equality.

The art historian Josef Paul Hodin—who frequently wrote to the artist and collaborated with her to write her biography—recalls in Aus den Erinnerungen von Else Meidner (From the Memory of Else Meidner) how images of the Totentanz, Der Tod und Das Mädchen, and Skeletons were some of Meidner’s favorites.55 In 1958, Meidner even wrote a short “Zwiegespräche mit Tod” (Fictional Conversation with Death), wherein she imagines Death walking into her studio to sit as a model.56 Meidner’s obsession with death further reveals itself through poems she wrote in her diaries, including her 1923 Liebe und Tod (Love and Death):

Ist nicht Liebe immer das Gleiche?

Auch Gebären und Tod ist immer das Gleiche,

Ewiges Variieren nur Urmelodie!

Urmelodie ist Wogen und Rauschen,

Nur dem Genie gelingt es zu lauschen

Und festzuhalten.

Is not love always the same?

As birth and death are always the same,

Eternal variations, primordial tune!

Ancient melody, of waves and ecstasy,

Which only the genius may successfully hear and hold onto.57

Her references to “Urmelodie” (“primordial tune”) within a poem commenting on Death’s presence recalls the long tradition of Der Tod und Das Mädchen. Meidner, much like Kollwitz, conflates birth and death as “immer das Gleiche” (“always the same”), and further associates their unitary presence with love. As Meidner understands death, any personification of that figure would necessarily incorporate the themes of love and birth in some way. According to the rationale of the feminists previously mentioned, the kind of love most easily related to both birth and death is that of a mother. Meidner, in her visual work exploring Der Tod und das Mädchen, adopts the figure of a Mother Death accordingly to illustrate this synthesis of birth, death, and motherhood.

One such early example of Elsa Meidner’s embrace of a feminine Death, which also responds directly to Der Tod und Das Mädchen imagery, is a monochromatic watercolor of the same name (circa 1920; figure 14). Death is made once more into a motherly figure of comfort as she holds the young maiden close against her chest and rests one hand atop the girl’s head—a protective gesture. The maiden conveys a sense of pure bliss as she rests against Death, closes her eyes, and smiles slightly. Through her gentle yet expansive embrace that fills the picture plane, Meidner’s Mother Death echoes the belief in a “spiritual motherhood” held by many of the aforementioned feminist authors, which understood motherhood as a “chiefly moral and ethical function.”58 To Meidner, the mother’s most sacred and power generating responsibility to care for the lives of those on Earth appears to ripple outward, such that the all-encompassing Mother Death adopts the same responsibility for their eternal lives.

Meidner’s Frau und Tod (Woman and Death) from 1955 further affirms the way in which a motherly Death may embody the sensations of comfort, gentleness, and other ‘womanly characteristics’ assigned to the empowered mother of twentieth-century feminism (figure 15). Though Death is exposed from her shawl, she doesn’t hesitate to pull the young woman before her closely into her lap. Nor does the woman shy away from Death’s grasp; rather, she openly accepts Her willingness to provide consolation. In her suggestion of Death as a mother in both Der Tod und Das Mädchen and Frau und Tod, as well as the extension of the supernatural power of Death to motherhood, Meidner rejects the “tabooization of pregnancy and motherhood” in the ‘new woman’ by her anti-feminist contemporaries.59 Her maternal Death lovingly welcomes responsibility over all life, and therefore rejects both the demeaning association between death and women perpetuated by contemporary male anxieties and the trend of misogyny embedded, until then, in Der Tod und Das Mädchen.

In Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), Meidner provides a parallel to the relationship between death and motherhood explored in her other works (ca. 1950; figure 16). The concentric envelopment of the child, within the mother’s arms, within the cloak reveals formal similarities to both Der Tod und Das Mädchen and Frau und Tod, each of which likewise suggest repeating rings. This effect, combined with the consistent placement of The Mother’s hands in an embrace where their backs face the viewer, strengthen the suggestion of Death as a symbol of protective care—a similar effect to Kollwitz’s use of the Schutzmantelmadonna to empower Mother Death with the same protective care and authority recognized in Mother Mary. As a symbolic protective figure, Meidner’s Death parallels the maternalistic icon exalted by contemporary feminists as a figure of hope.

As she positions Death as a mother throughout these images, Else Meidner transforms her into a figure who provides comfort as she receives those recently departed. Simultaneously, Meidner echoes contemporary feminist discourse concerned with the agency of mothers over life and death and their authoritative role in moral and ethical development. Meidner’s Mother Death, understood in this context, morphs into a symbol of empowerment as she echoes the responsibilities held by all women who act as mothers—literal and metaphoric. Working within both the tradition of Der Tod und Das Mädchen and the cultural context of the destructive Femme Fatale, Meidner’s repositioning of Death functions as an active gesture to overturn a history of chauvinistic death scenes.

32. Guthke, The Gender of Death, 10.

33. Knöll, “Death and the Maiden,” 11.

34. See Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (The Feminist Press, 1976) and Elizabeth Prelinger,

Käthe Kollwitz (National Gallery of Art, 1992) for detailed biographical information on Kollwitz.

35. Käthe Kollwitz, The Diaries and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Hans Kollwitz, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Northwestern University Press, 1988), 43.

36. Schreiber, “Unwed Mothers,” 211.

37. Prelinger, Käthe Kollwitz, 50.

38. Schreiber, “Unwed Mothers,” 212.

39. Patricia A Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, eds. German Feminist Writings (The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 219.

40. Schreiber, “Unwed Mothers,” 211.

41. Henriëtte Kets de Vries, “Mothers’ Arms: Käthe Kollwitz’s Women and War,” in Käthe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany during World Wars I and II, ed. Claire C. Whitner (Yale University Press, 2016), 14.

42. Anjeana K. Hans, “Grief Reserved for the Mother: Käthe Kollwitz’s Krieg Cycle and Gender in the Weimar Republic,” in Käthe Kollwitz and the Women of War: Femininity, Identity, and Art in Germany during World Wars I and II, ed. Claire C. Whitner (Yale University Press, 2016), 129.

43. Prelinger, Käthe Kollwitz, 78.

44. Kollwitz, The Diaries and Letters, 197.

45. Kollwitz, The Diaries and Letters, 66.

46.Tom Fecht, Kathe Kollwitz: Works in Color, trans. A.S Wensinger and R.H. Wood (Schocken Books, 1988), 7.

47. Bennett, “Death and the Maiden,” 274.

48. de Vries, “Mothers’ Arms,” 16.

49. Salomon, “The German woman,” 154.

50. Sibylle Erle, “‘Blake was a phenomenon’: Artistic, Domestic, and Blakean Visions in Joseph Paul Hodin’s Writing on Else and Ludwig Meidner,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 55, no.3 (winter 2021-22): 2. https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.305.

51.Joseph Paul Hodin, Aus den Erinnerungen von Else Meidner: Eine Wuerdigung ihres werkes mit einem Beitrag von Max Peter Maass und einem Nachwort von Heinz Winifried Sabais (Justus von Liebig Verlag, 1979), 36.

52. For more information on Weimar-era questions of sexuality and feminism, see Jost Hermand, “Neue Sachlichkeit: Ideology, Lifestyle, or Artistic Movement,” and Stephan Brockmann, “Weimar Sexual Cynicism,” in Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, eds. Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephan Brockmann (Camden House, 1994).

53. Hodin, Aus den Erinnerungen, 84. Author’s Translation.

54. Braun, “A Manifesto to Germany’s Women,” 195.

55. Hodin, Aus den Erinnerungen, 32.

56. Hodin, Aus den Erinnerungen, 103-106.

57. Hodin, Aus den Erinnerungen, 68. Author’s Translation.

58. Allen, “Feminism and Motherhood,” 116.

59. Brockmann, “Weimar Sexual Cynicism,” 178.

Conclusion

The preceding sections demonstrated how Käthe Kollwitz and Else Meidner, equally interested in death and motherhood, re-gender the traditionally masculine personification of Death within German-speaking cultures as a woman. In doing so, they simultaneously reflect an increased awareness of maternalistic feminist ideology, which allows for their images of Mother Death to embody the empowered mother, caretaker of all society, exalted in feminist literature. Furthermore, as artist-mothers, these women took on an “embodied perspective” as they negotiated their own role within a society that persistently questioned, and often condemned, their existence.60 That is to say, their position as women allowed them to project their own experience and values onto the illustrated women they created, including Death. A recognition of the empowered position bestowed on Mother Death through its parallels to feminist discussions of women and society might then extend to empower the artist who envisioned that figure in the first place.

Understanding these motherly Deaths as they were conceived by artist-mothers in the context of first-wave feminism allows them to act as revolutionary icons in and of themselves. As they responded to the words of Adele Schreiber, Alice Salomon, and Lily Braun, among many others, these visual artists reclaimed the relationship between femininity and death that first emerged from masculine anxieties in the form of the Femme Fatale at the turn of the century. Moreover, as they worked within the context of the long tradition of Der Tod und Das Mädchen, Kollwitz and Meidner overturned a precedent of misogyny and suffused Death with the intrinsic authoritative agency of motherhood.

60. Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, artists, and the body (Routledge, 1996), 18.

Figures

Figure 1. Hans Holbein the Younger, Der Münch (The Monk), 1523, woodcut illustration

Figure 2. Hans Holbein the Younger, Das Altweyb (The Old Woman), 1523, woodcut illustration

Figure 3. Hans Holbein the Younger, Die Hertzoginn (The Duchess), 1523, woodcut illustration

Figure 4. Hans Sebald Beham, Der Tod und Das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), 1547, engraving

Figure 5. Max Klinger, The New Salome, 1903, bronze with black patina.

Figure 6. George Grosz, Sex Murderer, Self-Portrait, 1922, oil painting.

Figure 7. Käthe Kollwitz, Schwangere, ins Wasser gehend (Pregnant Woman, Drowning Herself), 1926, charcoal.

Figure 8. Käthe Kollwitz, Poster against Paragraph 218 [law criminalizing abortion], 1924, lithograph.

Figure 9. Käthe Kollwitz, Tod (Death), 1924, lithograph.

Figure 10. Käthe Kollwitz, Der Tod tröstet (Death Giving Comfort), 1923, lithograph.

Figure 11. Käthe Kollwitz, Tod hält Mädchen im Schoß (Young girl in the Lap of Death), sheet 2 of Tod (Death) series 1934, lithograph.

Figure 12. Michel Erhard, Schutzmantelmadonna, 1480-1490, painted wood.

Figure 13. Else Meidner, Karneval (Carnival), 1954, gouache over charcoal on cardboard.

Figure 14. Else Meidner, Der Tod und Das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden), 1918-1925, watercolor, charcoal, and graphite on paper.

Figure 15. Else Meidner, Frau und Tod (Woman and Death), 1955, charcoal on paper.

Figure 16. Else Meidner, Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), 1945-1950, charcoal on paper.

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