Elizabeth Guthrie Guthrie and Dr. Robert McFarland, Germanic and Slavic Languages

In my original ORCA proposal I described how I wanted to research a number of different women of the World War I era and describe how their respective art forms defended women and especially the importance and value of motherhood. I wanted to compare all of their works to the proposal presented by Eleanora Kalkowska, which argued that women were only necessary in order to raise strong soldier sons eager to fight in defense of the Fatherland. However, I quickly realized that this would have been too great a task to take on and decided to concentrate my research on the artist Käthe Kollwitz.

While in Berlin I was able to visit the Käthe Kollwitz museum and see her original pieces of artwork, at least those pieces that weren’t destroyed by Hitler’s censorship projects. I was also able to obtain many of her own journal entries and writings in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, and some more prints of her art in the Unter den Linden Library, also in Berlin. I fell in love with her art and even her personality as I got to know her through her own writings, records, and most of all through her honest artwork.

While in Berlin, I took an advanced writing course which required a final research paper, and I decided to use my ORCA research for this assignment. My final paper focused greatly on Käthe Kollwitz and how her works inspired a new kind of art and portrayed powerful messages against war and inequality. I was able to explain how her art created a new politicized and defiant aesthetic of motherhood by showing the reality of war’s aftermath through the change in her style of artistic expression.

Käthe Kollwitz began her career by depicting strong women who gathered and urged peasants and all others who were suppressed to fight against their oppressors. I used a few of these early paintings to portray her strong and defiant style before World War I. In the war, Kollwitz lost her son, Peter. This was a devastating blow and had a great impact on her art. After Peter’s death, Kollwitz began to portray mothers as protectors, not of their land or country, but of their families and children. Kollwitz showed the world another horror that resulted because of war. The aftermath and effect that war has on women and children is almost worse than the war itself, and Kollwitz attempted to send this message through her stark contrast in art style and content.

I am now in the process of revising my paper so that I may use it as my capstone paper for graduation this April. I also intend to fashion my paper into a conference paper, which I will submit for possible presentation at the BYU Humanities Conference this spring. I am continuing my research on German women as I am now employed with the BYU Sophie Mentored Learning Project. The Sophie Digital Library enables anyone to see or even hear works by German women from all time periods. These works include anything from music and art to literature and biographies. I am excited for the new opportunities that my trip to Berlin has presented me with. I am planning to return to Berlin to begin work on my Master’s Thesis this summer. I am considering research on something similar to what my ORCA paper has discussed and perhaps research other female writers and artists during this time period in order to further disprove Kalkowska’s assertion about the position of mothers and women.