Forgotten Land (9 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Five months later that anxiety boiled over. In June 1914, Knox took his leave, planning to return to St Petersburg at the end of July. In Berlin, on his way to Britain, he read of the murder in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife: then reports came of Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia. Knox thought that the European tension would soon slacken, as it had in 1908 and 1912, but on 27 July, at breakfast in his home in Ulster, he
received a telegram ordering him back to St Petersburg. After a morning on the golf course, he crossed that night from Belfast. The talk on the ferry and later in London was about the possible coercion of Ulster into a new Ireland under Home Rule, which he strongly opposed.
received a telegram ordering him back to St Petersburg. After a morning on the golf course, he crossed that night from Belfast. The talk on the ferry and later in London was about the possible coercion of Ulster into a new Ireland under Home Rule, which he strongly opposed.
At Berlin, on the train, Knox read of Russia’s partial mobilization. Further east, the railway bridge at Marienburg, beside the huge castle of the Teutonic Knights, was guarded by troops, some in the combat uniform of field grey. Deeper into East Prussia, the atmosphere became more tense – and not until they were across the frontier, into their homeland, did the Russian passengers speak of their hatred for Germany. The train reached St Petersburg on 31 July; the following day, at 6 p.m., Germany declared war on Russia. With patriotism bursting out all around him, Knox felt isolated until 4 August when Britain, after the German violation of Belgian neutrality, entered the war alongside the Russians and the French.
To Alfred Knox, that time seemed ‘wonderful’ – the start of a ‘great adventure’. The innocent enthusiasm of August 1914 is part of the myth of the old world; and when Fritz Gause, the historian of Königsberg, wrote of his own memories of that time, he showed nostalgia for a patriotic unity as yet untainted by Nuremberg rallies or racial hatred. Even French restaurants, Gause noted, changed their names to German, attesting to the proud Germanness of these descendants of Huguenot immigrants. It was known that East Prussia was at risk. No one knew what might come across the Russian frontier – and the war revived the sense of a land on the edge.
To the Junkers – the landowners – patriotism was essential. They ranged from those struggling on a few sandy or boggy acres to families with vast estates such as the Dohnas or the Dönhoffs. Prominent supporters of the Hohenzollerns in the old Prussia, admirers of Bismarck in the new German Reich (although doubtful about his liberal social welfare reforms), they saw themselves as pioneers, living and working on a tough if beautiful land. In a
country still fumbling for a national identity their position was of symbolic importance, as representatives of the historic mission in the east. Through the Emperor and the army, where their families filled the officer corps, the East Prussian landlords could influence these two powerful extra-parliamentary parts of the German state. In August 1914 one of their leaders in the Reichstag was the extraordinary figure of Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau.
country still fumbling for a national identity their position was of symbolic importance, as representatives of the historic mission in the east. Through the Emperor and the army, where their families filled the officer corps, the East Prussian landlords could influence these two powerful extra-parliamentary parts of the German state. In August 1914 one of their leaders in the Reichstag was the extraordinary figure of Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau.
Through inheritance, marriage and purchase, Januschau had collected estates in the east (south of Königsberg) and west of the region (centred on the village of Januschau where he lived when not attending parliament in Berlin). A loud and forceful campaigner against lower food tariffs (which would give cheaper food to workers in the new industrial Germany), he believed passionately in agricultural protection – the only way, he thought, that the German east could survive. There was an imperial edge as well; the Poles in Germany, in his view, resembled the Irish in the United Kingdom (to whom he felt the British were being too indulgent in offering Home Rule) and they must accept German domination or leave.
Januschau had fought duels in his youth, recalling these with pride although he had been briefly imprisoned for one of them. He had been eight years in the army – the best time, he thought, of his life. Large, bluff, with a small goatee beard and pockmarked skin, ready to use his fists at election meetings, he loathed democracy. Should Germany be ruled from above or below? he asked. To him the voice of the people was like the lowing of cattle; the Emperor, Januschau said in a famous parliamentary speech, should be able to disband the Reichstag with a lieutenant and ten men. When another member feared for Germany’s future, Januschau struck the table and said that the country was secure as long as it had a large army. In 1908, when Germany supported Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia against the protests of other European powers, he wanted a preventive war against France. He was sure that neither Britain nor Russia was prepared. Three million German soldiers could take Paris within days.
Junker leader: Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau in Berlin.
With this public belligerence went an amiable manner and a bantering charm. Januschau was close to General Paul von Hindenburg, who shared his origins in eastern Germany; less predictable were his friendly relations with opponents like the Social Democratic leader August Bebel, the Jewish businessman and politician Walther Rathenau and, later, Joseph Goebbels. In August 1914, he was helping with the harvest at Januschau, the estate with its manor house where he lived, near Deutsch Eylau (now the Polish Iława). Although almost sixty, he wanted to fight but, as a reserve officer, was called to join the staff of the Emperor’s eldest son, the Crown Prince. Januschau had no doubt of a quick German victory.
When Januschau’s grandson came to the manor house, in the winter of 1945, the battles that had begun in August 1914 were long over. Hans von Lehndorff, a surgeon in Königsberg during the city’s last days, had escaped and was now depending for his survival on working as a doctor for the new Russian and Polish rulers of East Prussia. Amid the danger and suffering, he felt consoled, even partly protected, by the sense of the land’s power, of its possession of him – quite different to the idea of ownership and control that had been so strong in his grandfather. Lehndorff’s feeling was outside time, beyond the world’s reach.
He sensed this timelessness on a moonlit winter journey, through the Finckenstein forest and the woods of the Januschau lands, full of memories that were so strong that they seemed like a companion beside him. The manor’s lodge had been burned down; the graves were still there but had been ransacked. When Lehndorff reached the park and saw the house with a lamp on the veranda and lights inside, he watched from a distance and heard doors slamming, the noise of the Russians. He met a wagon with some muffled workers on their way to the fields who gave him the news: last winter’s trek to escape the Red Army had reached no further than Stuhm, some twenty-five miles away, where Lehndorff’s mother and brother had been shot by the Russians. A man in the village might shelter him, the locals said, but he should watch out, for the place was guarded. Ten minutes later he was taken in by the German who had been recommended to him. It was now 30 degrees below zero, but his excitement and anxiety were so great that, even in his thin clothing, Lehndorff did not feel the cold.
A year earlier, the trek with his mother and brother had left Januschau. At Stuhm they sent a cyclist to Marienburg to see if there was any chance of getting over the River Nogat; the man returned saying that the large crowds there made it doubtful. So they stayed at a farm, waiting for the Russians – who came on the evening of 25 January 1945. There was a fracas, involving assaults on women. Hans’s brother was wounded by a knife, and
his mother bandaged him up. The Russians left, then came back to ask who they were – and then shot the two Lehndorffs, mother and son. Another sixteen people were shot or burned alive; the women were raped and the young men carried off; others walked back to Januschau and to captivity. Lehndorff was relieved to hear that the end had been quick, as his family’s imagined fate had haunted him.
his mother bandaged him up. The Russians left, then came back to ask who they were – and then shot the two Lehndorffs, mother and son. Another sixteen people were shot or burned alive; the women were raped and the young men carried off; others walked back to Januschau and to captivity. Lehndorff was relieved to hear that the end had been quick, as his family’s imagined fate had haunted him.
The land had been turned into a collective farm by the Russians, whose commander seemed affable – and hundreds of Germans were still in the area. Food was a mixture of sugar-beet peelings, potatoes and corn left over from the last harvest. The German survivors had developed an uneasy understanding with the Russians and they urged Hans von Lehndorff to tell the commander that he was a doctor, to demonstrate his worth. Over the wooden gate to the courtyard, near the manor house at Januschau, hung a portrait of Stalin. The fat, elderly commander agreed that Lehndorff should live with an old estate ranger and tend the sick. Januschau was changing as the Junkers’ world went up in flames, many of its rituals already in ashes. The Russians fired two thousand cartridges to kill one red deer and a wild boar and fished the lake by using explosives.
Tending his family’s graves became Lehndorff’s way of restoring some kind of order to his shattered life. He recalled his youngest brother, who had been killed in France, a delightful, humorous boy; his body had been brought back to Januschau (although this was not allowed) by another brother. The next brother had died six weeks later after a brain haemorrhage; another brother had been killed on the eastern front – someone, Hans von Lehndorff felt, who had found his true self as a soldier. Absent were his mother and his eldest brother – the inheritor of Januschau, also a wartime soldier – both of them thrown into a mass grave after being shot on the trek. He thought of his strong mother, of how her occasionally wounding power had been mixed with healing, of how depressed she had been after her children’s deaths.
Many of the local Germans now called themselves Masuren to stress their new Polishness – and gradually the district was handed over to the Poles. In July, in the scorching heat, Hans von Lehndorff fell ill, with a high fever and a sense that he was losing his mind. Recovering enough to move to the nearby town of Rosenberg and work in a hospital there, he found a place in ruins. It was now called Susz by the Poles who were arriving by train and lorry from parts of the old Poland that had been taken by the Soviet Union, undecided about where to settle. The luckiest were the first-comers, immediately behind the Red Army, because they found the best houses. Already, there was a priest, a doctor, a mayor, a lady dentist, a solicitor, a forester, a postmaster, a station-master, a chimney sweep, a hairdresser, a shoemaker, a tailor, a butcher, a baker, an inn-keeper.
In the course of visiting the sick, Lehndorff passed Neudeck and Langenau, the two Hindenburg estates, once owned by the man who had symbolized revival and reassurance as a victorious field marshal in the First World War and then as President of Germany; both houses had been burned down, while Neudeck village lay damaged among uncultivated fields. The Poles were kind to him when he attended them or delivered their children – and, going to mass in the Catholic church, he felt shame that they seemed already prepared to forgive the Germans. In October, he and a German nurse walked in the Januschau forest and he spoke to her about his grandfather, feeling joy in talking about the past; how this old man was always with him when he made a moral decision. The place brought back childhood memories of Hindenburg, how the whole village had welcomed the victor of Tannenberg, coming up to the house to see the giant, ponderous figure sitting in the dining room.
By December the snow was back. Lehndorff was sent to the hospital in Marienburg to help cope with the aftermath of a train crash, to find the wrecked skeleton of the castle. At Christmas he visited the graves at Januschau again. Some strange normality had come to the place, with dinner parties, even games of bridge, and
the Russians moving out, which made things more difficult for the Germans under the Poles. Not until May did the transports leave for the west, and Lehndorff was allowed to take very little luggage. The journey into the new Germany was often terrible for the dispossessed East Prussians, with harassment, starvation, overcrowding, many deaths and long, long delays.
the Russians moving out, which made things more difficult for the Germans under the Poles. Not until May did the transports leave for the west, and Lehndorff was allowed to take very little luggage. The journey into the new Germany was often terrible for the dispossessed East Prussians, with harassment, starvation, overcrowding, many deaths and long, long delays.
Lehndorff was lucky. He went by train, passing three days in a camp on the way where he was quite well fed, although the refugees were reminded by the commandant of what the Germans had done to the Poles. The train trundled on, thirty people in each goods wagon, through Thorn, Bromberg and Posen, across neglected fields and bombed-out towns. After two days, it reached Kohlfurt, going slowly over a narrow river – and at the next stop they were in Germany. At a camp in Hoyerswerda, Lehndorff worked in a makeshift hospital, feeling as if he were back in Königsberg, before, a few days later, he left for Berlin, anxious to tell everyone what had been happening in the east.
In the museums in Duisburg and Lüneburg, you see photographs of pre–First World War calm – those evocations of a gentle, bourgeois, dressed-up world. In fact there was turmoil and pioneering energy. In August 1914, Germany had the world’s largest socialist party and its industry, science and welfare and education systems were powering ahead of the rest of Europe. But what other nations saw and heard in Germany – the Emperor’s outbursts, the military strength and naval expansion, the demand for colonies, an adventurous foreign policy – seemed to point to international conflict. Militarism was identified with Prussia; it was what had turned the country into a great power. In the east of the country, it flourished in men like the Junker Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau with his distrust of democracy and the sense that, ultimately, only force and subsidy could protect his land.
Radicalism still had its place in Königsberg, where two representatives of the Socialist Party, Hugo Haase, a Jewish lawyer, and Otto Braun, a former printer, represented the city in the Reichstag. Both were sons of cobblers; both had opposed Austria’s provocative ultimatum to Serbia after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand; both feared the Russian Empire. Haase opposed the war; Braun unenthusiastically supported war credits, stirred by the idea of a preventive war against Russia. That August, a couple who agreed with Haase and Braun were staying at one of the city’s hotels. Käthe Kollwitz, an artist whose portrayals of an underclass – victims of Germany’s rapid industrialization – had infuriated the Emperor, was with her husband
Karl, who worked as a doctor in Prenzlauerberg, a poor district of Berlin. They were on their way back to the capital after a holiday in their birthplace when they heard soldiers singing in the street. Karl ran out to see what was happening; it was war. Back in the room, she ‘wept and wept and wept’.
Karl, who worked as a doctor in Prenzlauerberg, a poor district of Berlin. They were on their way back to the capital after a holiday in their birthplace when they heard soldiers singing in the street. Karl ran out to see what was happening; it was war. Back in the room, she ‘wept and wept and wept’.
Years later, after the catastrophe, as she stood in her son Peter’s room, Käthe Kollwitz remembered how the boy had run with his elder brother by the Baltic at Rauschen, as if chasing after what he could become – a feeling or a dream – saying, ‘I want to be wild.’ Surely this will and urge must linger with those who had seen it; perhaps it was why he still seemed to be here among his possessions, like the cupboard with the glass door behind which you could see, among other things, a plaster cast of the head of Narcissus, brought back from Peter’s travels in Tuscany. On the wall was a silhouette of her son’s profile; a pair of skis stood in one corner and a guitar. Above the iron bed, he had hung a picture of the Rodin sculpture of a couple kissing.
A wooden table and a chair stood in the room’s centre; the books lining the shelves on another wall showed a modern young man’s collection – Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, Zola’s
Germinal
, Oscar Wilde, Wedekind’s
Spring Awakening
; there were also sketch books and drawings and, by the window, an easel. Like his mother, he had been an artist. Peter had seemed, Käthe Kollwitz thought, to be making a series of discoveries about what he could be: a billiard-playing dandy, a wanderer in a pure wild country, an idealist who sought knowledge and beauty and change, a yearning adolescent who felt world-weariness, a patriotic German thrilled by Italy or the Swiss Alps, a solitary dreamer with many friends.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
, Zola’s
Germinal
, Oscar Wilde, Wedekind’s
Spring Awakening
; there were also sketch books and drawings and, by the window, an easel. Like his mother, he had been an artist. Peter had seemed, Käthe Kollwitz thought, to be making a series of discoveries about what he could be: a billiard-playing dandy, a wanderer in a pure wild country, an idealist who sought knowledge and beauty and change, a yearning adolescent who felt world-weariness, a patriotic German thrilled by Italy or the Swiss Alps, a solitary dreamer with many friends.
A balcony looked out onto this impoverished part of Berlin where the Kollwitzes lived: a view of a brick water tower, a fountain in the square, a brewery in the distance, grey apartment blocks, some partly derelict houses. Swallows flitted through the summer; Käthe Kollwitz remembered also how the night sky had fascinated Peter with the feeling it induced of life’s smallness. Also
over the iron bed was a page from a calendar with Kant’s words: ‘Two things fill the mind, with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’
over the iron bed was a page from a calendar with Kant’s words: ‘Two things fill the mind, with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’
In 1867, the year Käthe Kollwitz was born there, Königsberg was a city of a hundred and fifteen thousand people, overwhelmingly evangelical (or Protestant), with about three thousand Jews and two thousand Roman Catholics, many of whom were Poles. The medieval centre was darkened by tall buildings, warehouses near the river and apartment blocks or houses. Seven stone and wooden bridges crossed the River Pregel. New warehouses were built for wheat and rye and other crops but also for textiles, glass and porcelain, tobacco and the amber from the mines on the coast.
Born Käthe Schmidt in 1867, the fourth child of Carl Schmidt, she grew up in a house near the Pregel, next to the yard of her father’s building business. It was her mother’s family – the Rupps – that displayed obvious rebellion. Frau Schmidt’s father, Julius Rupp, had been a teacher in Königsberg and an evangelical clergyman before he was disciplined for his unorthodox views. In 1846, he founded the Free Evangelical church, which welcomed like-minded Roman Catholics and was keen to accommodate secular philosophy, taking the side of the radicals in the revolution of 1848. Rupp remained its leader until his death in 1884, when his son-in-law Carl, Käthe Kollwitz’s father, succeeded him.
The dark, northern city seeped into the young Käthe. Wandering with her brothers and sister through its narrow streets and yards, down to the river, where they once found a corpse washed up on the bank, she watched its life – the barges, the high warehouses, the waterside pubs, the fishermen, the dock workers and the sailors. She began to draw this world, which to her seemed more beautiful than the grace or refinement of prosperity; she wasn’t attracted to these people through social commitment, she said later, but because of their beauty. Königsberg was where
she first saw the poor, the dark side of Germany’s booming industrialization, and she began to depict them with romantic pity. Not surprisingly, religious imagery occurs often in Käthe Kollwitz’s work, an echo of the Rupp piety. With this came a preoccupation with suffering, a horror at what people could inflict on others, at how painful so-called progress could be.
she first saw the poor, the dark side of Germany’s booming industrialization, and she began to depict them with romantic pity. Not surprisingly, religious imagery occurs often in Käthe Kollwitz’s work, an echo of the Rupp piety. With this came a preoccupation with suffering, a horror at what people could inflict on others, at how painful so-called progress could be.
Having been barred from the civil service because of his radicalism, Carl Schmidt had started a successful building business. He educated his daughter privately, because women were often ignored in the state system, and even paid for his son Konrad to travel to England to meet Friedrich Engels. Käthe was a nervous child, a victim of stomach cramps and tantrums. Two of her brothers died in childhood; her mother seemed like a loved and revered Madonna; and she remembered wanting to die, to escape pain and loss. She disliked school but read Goethe and Schiller at home in her father’s library and became absorbed by the engravings of Hogarth that he had in the house. The high point of the year was the summer holiday in a fisherman’s cottage on the Baltic at Rauschen that the Schmidts had bought – but the creed of her grandfather Rupp and his circle dominated her childhood. She never forgot its idealism and sense of obligation, the belief that ‘Talent is a duty’.
Käthe went to study art in Berlin. Etching began to interest her more than any other medium, partly through the skill at it of her early teachers, and also because of its power not only as social comment, without the potential prettification of colour, but as a way of reaching more people. Studying in Berlin, Munich and Königsberg made her see that the eastern city’s years as a lively intellectual and artistic centre were past. Her work stayed essentially traditional but the naturalism of the etchings and lithographs was sharp with contemporary themes, avoiding rural life as a subject, with its inevitable nostalgia. An early self-portrait shows her laughing (a mood never drawn by her again), the joy perhaps coming from the discovery of her gifts. For her first narrative series, she went to literature – to the poverty and violence
in Zola’s novel of working-class life,
Germinal
, using as a background the riverside bars of Königsberg with their dark interiors, narrow benches and blackened walls of a romantic underworld.
in Zola’s novel of working-class life,
Germinal
, using as a background the riverside bars of Königsberg with their dark interiors, narrow benches and blackened walls of a romantic underworld.
Karl Kollwitz, an orphan and a socialist (and with the same evangelical background), was training to be a doctor in Berlin where he met a fellow medical student, Konrad Schmidt, who introduced him to his sister Käthe. Her father wanted her talent to be nurtured outside marriage – and also thought her too unattractive to find a husband – so he sent her away to study in Munich. When she and Karl did marry in 1891, at the end of a seven-year engagement, Herr Schmidt, moved by his concept of duty, urged her to give up art or she would not have time to be a good wife. For once, she ignored him – and Karl took her to Berlin, the imperial capital, to the working-class district of Prenzlauerberg. Here she felt liberated enough from the austere Schmidt household to let more emotion into her work.
Their home at 25 Wörther Strasse, on the corner of what was then Wörther Platz – where they lived for fifty years – and Karl’s practice as a doctor became the background to her life. Dr Kollwitz’s surgery and his wife’s studio were on the second floor, over the premises of a watchmaker, with the family’s rooms another floor up. A visitor would find the door opened by a maid who stayed with the Kollwitzes for years; a narrow, dark passage led into the living room where there was a broad green sofa and an oval table, a writing desk by the window and, in the corner, a large tiled stove. The family gathered at the oval table with their friends during the turbulent and exciting years before 1914. The Prenzlauerberg house was tidy, not bohemian: a place of order and work.
In this new world she abandoned the
Germinal
cycle for another naturalistic subject: a series of lithographs and etchings based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s
The Weavers
, about a workers’ revolt in Silesia in 1844. The play had been banned because of its contradiction of the official optimism of the time, and the Emperor objected to Käthe’s inclusion on a prize’s shortlist.
Perhaps he recognized, and feared, her work’s powerful aesthetic beauty and romanticism, as in
From Many Wounds You Bleed O People
, with which she had wanted to end the
Weavers
cycle – a corpse of Christ with two naked women instead of the thieves, or the 1900 Holbein-like
Downtrodden
, which depicted a poor family. She shows the influence of Ibsen, Gorky, Zola and Hauptmann, of Goya and Hogarth, of Munch, and, as with the symbolists, frequent use of a figurative Death. It is the art of the gothic north, very emotional, expressionist in its reach into feeling.
Germinal
cycle for another naturalistic subject: a series of lithographs and etchings based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s
The Weavers
, about a workers’ revolt in Silesia in 1844. The play had been banned because of its contradiction of the official optimism of the time, and the Emperor objected to Käthe’s inclusion on a prize’s shortlist.
Perhaps he recognized, and feared, her work’s powerful aesthetic beauty and romanticism, as in
From Many Wounds You Bleed O People
, with which she had wanted to end the
Weavers
cycle – a corpse of Christ with two naked women instead of the thieves, or the 1900 Holbein-like
Downtrodden
, which depicted a poor family. She shows the influence of Ibsen, Gorky, Zola and Hauptmann, of Goya and Hogarth, of Munch, and, as with the symbolists, frequent use of a figurative Death. It is the art of the gothic north, very emotional, expressionist in its reach into feeling.
Käthe Kollwitz in a reflective mood.
Käthe Kollwitz used the younger of her two sons, Peter, as a model. She held him for hours while working on the 1903 etching
Woman with Dead Child
, and when she complained of exhaustion, he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, it will be very beautiful.’ Hans, the elder boy, was more difficult: moody yet
imaginative. She thought that Hans was like her and she found Peter easier. While not demonstrative, she spoke freely to her children and, in this time of Freud, talked about sexual feelings and early love, far beyond what had been discussed during her own Königsberg childhood.
Woman with Dead Child
, and when she complained of exhaustion, he said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother, it will be very beautiful.’ Hans, the elder boy, was more difficult: moody yet
imaginative. She thought that Hans was like her and she found Peter easier. While not demonstrative, she spoke freely to her children and, in this time of Freud, talked about sexual feelings and early love, far beyond what had been discussed during her own Königsberg childhood.
Her reputation grew with her technical skill in etching, drawing, lithograph and aquatint. On two trips to Paris, the art capital of the world, without Karl and the children, she met Rodin, visited museums, cafés and galleries and found the dance halls of Montmartre quite different to Rupp or Schmidt austerity or to industrial Berlin. Prenzlauerberg could give rise to a feeling of entrapment, with everyone dependent on her, but Käthe Kollwitz’s art was rooted irretrievably there or in her north-eastern origins – not in the bright colours and blurred boundaries between abstraction and realism that she found in Paris. In 1908 she followed the
Weavers
cycle with
The Peasants’ War
, inspired by a sixteenth-century revolution, where scenes of unforgiving darkness show human beings in beast-like conditions. Black Anna, leader of the revolutionaries, seems to lead her forces out of the earth in a great wave, doom and death etched into their raw, skull-like faces. Only the victims are shown, not the perpetrators of injustice.
Battlefield
has a peasant finding her dead son – for which the child Peter modelled, his mother weeping as she drew him.
Weavers
cycle with
The Peasants’ War
, inspired by a sixteenth-century revolution, where scenes of unforgiving darkness show human beings in beast-like conditions. Black Anna, leader of the revolutionaries, seems to lead her forces out of the earth in a great wave, doom and death etched into their raw, skull-like faces. Only the victims are shown, not the perpetrators of injustice.
Battlefield
has a peasant finding her dead son – for which the child Peter modelled, his mother weeping as she drew him.
It is a dark view. In
Carmagnole
, inspired by Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities
, French revolutionaries dance against what looks like the tall, dense buildings of medieval Königsberg;
Woman with Dead Child
has its black and white heightened with gold wash, the mother apparently devouring her child; in 1903 Hans had nearly died of diphtheria.
Female Nude from the Back
of 1903 is one of her few uses of colour, the green shawl an unashamedly aesthetic touch.
Carmagnole
, inspired by Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities
, French revolutionaries dance against what looks like the tall, dense buildings of medieval Königsberg;
Woman with Dead Child
has its black and white heightened with gold wash, the mother apparently devouring her child; in 1903 Hans had nearly died of diphtheria.
Female Nude from the Back
of 1903 is one of her few uses of colour, the green shawl an unashamedly aesthetic touch.
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