I stood in front of Mother with Two Children, a bronze sculpture crafted by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I stood there for a long time, gazing. I wanted to reach out and hug the mother hugging the children. I knew that if I so much as extended my finger, the guards would come running. At the entrance to the museum, security personnel stood with dogs, apparently to deter any would-be soup-throwing activists.
But I loved the sculpture so deeply. A crouching mother, her arms muscular and protective, clutches and cuddles two small children, a toddler and a baby. The children are, presumably, Kollwitz’s two sons: Hans, who was born in 1892, and Peter, born in 1896. Kollwitz (1867–1945) a German printmaker and sculptor who dedicated her art to the poor and oppressed, lost the younger of these two boys during the opening months of the First World War.
Just 18 years old, Peter was shot dead on the night of 22nd October 1914 while heading to a trench on the Flemish front. Kollwitz’s grief and depression in the wake of her son’s death quashed her ability to create art for the next four years of the war, as the slaughter continued unabated.
Peter’s death “initiated a long and painful period of mourning and self-examination,” writes Starr Figura, curator of MoMA’s department of drawing and prints; a period during which Kollwitz came to question “the validity of war and the moral and nationalist imperative of sacrifice.”
Like Kollwitz, I too lost my son—not to a war but to a malignant form of brain cancer, APXA. My smiley 12-year-old Aryeh, a bright, friendly and optimistic boy, died on 23rd March 2023, just over a year after he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Cancer took him with lightning rapidity, despite his year-long ordeal of multiple surgeries and radiation treatments.
Just over six months after Aryeh died, Hamas terrorists attacked and killed 1,195 people, Israeli citizens and Thai workers, in villages alongside the border with Gaza and at a nearby music festival, and abducted 251 people into Gaza, some of whom are still held captive. The pogrom triggered a war by Israel on Hamas in Gaza that is still ongoing, with no end in sight. Like Kollwitz, I constantly question the validity of this war, in which more than 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been reported killed by Israeli air strikes and other attacks, thousands buried beneath the rubble of ruined buildings, and almost two million Gazans have been forcibly displaced from their homes, and countless numbers injured or sickened by water-borne diseases.
When I looked at Mother with Two Children at MoMA last July, I saw myself, cuddling my two children in my arms, shielding them from the dangers of the world. In all the early photos of my girl–boy twins, born nine weeks prematurely in December 2010, I too am clutching my babies, as if they would float away if I eased my grip. When I look at Kollwitz’s sculpture, I too wish that I could recreate, in real life, the feeling of enfolding them both in my embrace.
It took Kollwitz five years to sculpt Mother with Two Children, from 1932 to 1936. She did so in the shadow of Adolf Hitler’s rise. Less than a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, on 30th January 1933, Kollwitz, her husband Karl and other German intellectuals signed an urgent petition demanding that two left-wing political parties unite in opposition to the Nazi party. As a result of her opposition, her work was included in the huge Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition staged by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 to mock “subversive” modern art.
After the end of the First World War, Kollwitz embraced pacifism. She created a portfolio of woodcuts, entitled War, which was designed to “undermine sacrifice as an ideal”. In one plate, The Mothers, (1921-1922) a group of women, their eyes fearful, form a close circle in which they enfold their children, two of whom peep out from between their arms.
Kollwitz, writes Figura, “often made art by looking inward to confront deeply emotional private experiences.” Her themes were “suffering, resistance, grief, love [and] death,” painful images that carry an “almost paradoxical beauty”.
As a bereaved mother tormented by the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and by the thought of the remaining 100 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza in dire conditions, I think often about other mothers who suffer. I think about Rania Abu Anza, who gave birth to girl-boy twins after 10 years of fertility treatment, only to lose them when they were five months old after an Israeli strike hit the home of her extended family in the southern Gaza city of Rafah in March 2024. The strike killed her children, Naeim, a boy, and Wissam, a girl, as well as her husband and 11 other relatives.
I think about the mother of 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi, taken hostage by Hamas on 7th October 2023, then shot in the back of the head in a tunnel after 11 months of captivity, along with five other Israeli hostages. At her daughter’s funeral, her mother Sarit said, “this is not how I imagined your end. I wanted you back alive. I apologise that we were not able to save you.”
A report published in August by Ground Truth Solutions, set out to talk to Palestinians in Gaza to find out “what the humanitarian situation looked like from their perspective”. Many felt that the world has forgotten about them, “and perceive the international community as a silent partner in the atrocities”. The first page of the report listed the words of individual interviewees: “We even lost our dignity”; “For nine months, you watch us in silence”; “The world is aware of the tragedy of Gaza, and remains unmoved”; “If we do not die from war, we will die from diseases”; “In the blink of an eye, I lost everything.”
In Israel, families of the hostages held in Gaza by Hamas continue to go out onto the streets every day, demanding a ceasefire deal that will bring their children, parents, siblings home from captivity. On 7th October 2024, Niva Wenkert, whose son Omer is still held captive in Gaza, stood outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and said, “Omry, my life, I miss you like crazy. I miss you every second, in every cell in my body, with every breath Omer.”
One of Kollwitz’s most famous lithographs, dating to 1941, is titled Seed for sowing should not be milled, a quotation from Goethe. In this crayon-drawing, a woman, her eyes brave and determined, protects a group of three children, who peer out from behind her powerful arms. On 28th October 1918, Kollwitz included the quote in a letter to poet Richard Dehmel, who, in an open letter, had appealed “for a final push to win the war”. Kollwitz was appalled. “Enough people have died!” she wrote. “No more people must fall!”
As I write this, over a year after the Hamas attacks of 7th October 2023, it seems to me that many Israelis are so focussed on the trauma of 7th October that they are inured to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. I dread to think that this war will continue and expand for another year, two years, three. We need a return of people to their homes. A return of children to their mother’s arms. An end to parents burying their children. To quote Käthe Kollwitz, enough people have died.
