Zwei Selbstbildnisse

1890

Back in Königsberg: her first studio

In 1890 she returned to Königsberg, rented her first studio and went on depicting the harsh labour of the working class, a subject that inspired her work for years.

1890

Her first etchings

Her first etchings date from 1890, the technique in which she would later make sheets of The Weavers and the whole Peasant War cycle.

1891

Marries the physician Karl Kollwitz

She married Karl Kollwitz, a doctor who tended the poor of Berlin; the couple moved into a large apartment that remained her home until it was destroyed in the Second World War. Her husband’s nearby practice supplied motifs from the lives of workers, which, in her own words, she found beautiful.

13. juni 1891

Married: Karl Kollwitz

1892

Birth of her son Hans

In 1892 Käthe and Karl Kollwitz’s elder son, Hans, was born.

1892–1896

Hauptmann’s “The Weavers” inspires a new cycle

Between the births of her sons Hans and Peter she saw Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The Weavers, about the failed revolt of the Silesian weavers in Langenbielau in 1844. It inspired her to drop a series of etchings she had planned to illustrate Émile Zola’s Germinal and to produce a cycle on the weavers instead.