Mutter mit Kind auf dem Arm

October 1914

A long depression after the loss of her son

The loss of her child began a stage of prolonged depression in her life.

22 October 1914

Her son Peter is killed at the front

Her younger son, Peter, was killed on the battlefield of the First World War. He is buried in Belgium, in the Vladslo German war cemetery.

1917

A jubilee exhibition at Paul Cassirer’s

On her fiftieth birthday the galleries of Paul Cassirer mounted a retrospective of one hundred and fifty of her drawings.

1918

An open letter against Dehmel’s call to arms

When Richard Dehmel called for more soldiers to fight in 1918, she wrote an impassioned letter to the newspaper that printed his call, arguing that there should be no more war and that “seed corn must not be ground”. As the war wound down and old men and children were summoned to fight, she also implored in a published statement that enough had died and that not another man should fall.

1918–1919

The Working Council for Art and the Liebknecht memorial sheet

A committed socialist and pacifist, eventually attracted to communism, she expressed her political and social sympathies in her woodcut memorial sheet for Karl Liebknecht and in her involvement with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, part of the Social Democratic government in the first few weeks after the war.