Käthe Kollwitz
The Survivors
1923
Crayon and brush lithography and drypoint
Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin
What Kollwitz’s “mothers” silently convey to us as viewers in front of the picture is expressed as a demand on the poster. In view of the horrors that even the survivors of a war have to endure, there can only be one motto: War on war!
Kollwitz addresses this demand to the audience, to whom she assigns the power to act—much like the people standing before Oedipus and demanding that he put an end to their misery.