Käthe Kollwitz, Bilder vom Elend VI (Ins Wasser). (Images of Misery IV (Into the Water)). In Simplicissimus, No. 38 (1909): 659. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (85-S1389)
“In 1908 Kollwitz was invited to contribute to the popular periodical Simplicissimus. Founded in 1896 in Munich, the journal was an important satirical weekly in the German-speaking world, with a distribution of 100,000 copies. Leo Tolstoi referred to it as “the most important and precious source (…) to know the state of contemporary society.”...
In her own print publications, Kollwitz explored the plight of the worker through a historic lens. For example, her Peasant’s War cycle is a modern interpretation of the 16th-century uprising of German laborers against aristocratic landowners. But in the images she contributed to Simplicissimus, which reached a broader audience, she turned to the tragedies of contemporary city life.
Between 1908 and 1911, the journal published fourteen of her images. These were reproductions of original drawings which she produced specifically for the journal. Images of Misery I-VI (Bilder vom Elend I-VI), published between November 1909 and January 1910, explore the struggle of motherhood experienced by proletarian women. Each image occupies a full page of the journal, and is published with a title that was supplied by Kollwitz...
Into the Water (Ins Wasser) represents the dire consequences of such unwanted pregnancies. A pregnant woman carrying her two young children walks down narrow steps to a canal. In her right arm, the mother clutches her child, who, in turn, pulls the mother’s face close. With her left arm, she holds her baby, her hand covering its mouth. The mother’s large right foot approaches the water.
“Into the water” was a well-known phrase signifying suicide by drowning, an increasingly common occurrence of the day. Overwhelmed by child care, badly paid labor, and a lack of birth control, some mothers saw ending their lives and those of their children as the only possible solution. ...
In the first years of the 1900s, when these images were published, birth control was the subject of heated public debates in Germany. Kollwitz’s images were thus widely understood as commentaries not only on the miseries of proletarian life but also on women’s reproductive rights.
In 1872, the infamous Paragraph 218 of Germany’s Imperial Criminal Code had come into effect. Commonly referred to as the abortion paragraph, it made abortion an offence punishable with up to five years in prison. In the Weimar Republic, the deletion of Paragraph 218 – or the legalization of abortion in the first three months of pregnancy – was demanded by socialist and communist parties. Notably, this challenge did not arise as a defence of women’s rights, but rather grew out of the fight for the struggling working classes.”
(excerpts from source text: blogs.getty.edu)
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