Kollwitz (who is famous among other things for powerful anti-war artworks, as well as memorial sculptures for soldiers of the First World War) experienced both World Wars from Berlin, lost her son Peter in WWI, and her grandson (also Peter) in WWII.
On the end of the First World War
Saturday, 9. November 1918
Today it is real. At midday after 1pm I came through the Zoo to the Brandenburg Gate, where the flyers with the abdication were being distributed. Out of the gate a march of demonstration. I joined it. An old invalid came up to the march and called “Ebert is Chancellor, pass it on!” Assembly in front of the Reichstag. From a window Scheidemann calls out the republic. Then from the ramp a soldier spoke, muddled and excited. Beside him a sailor and a worker. Then a young officer joined them, shook the soldier’s hand, turned to the crowd and said that the four years of war were not as bad as the struggle with prejudice and survival. He yanked his cap off and called “up with free Germany!”
[…]
I saw soldiers who tore off their cockades and threw them laughing on the ground.
That’s really how it is now. You experience it, but don’t really understand it.
I always have to think of Peter [her son, who was killed in action 1914]. I think if he were alive, he would be part of it. He, too, would rip off his cockade. But he is not alive, and when I last saw him, and he looked his most beautiful, he had his cap with cockade on and his face was glowing. I can’t imagine him any other way.
Writing of losing her home in Berlin to Allied bombs in November 1943:
It was my home for more than fifty years. Five persons whom I have loved so dearly have gone away from those rooms forever. Memories filled all the rooms…. But there is also some good in the total annihilation of the past. Only an idea remains, and that is fixed in the heart.
