“She—the great agitator”: Käthe Kollwitz and the Limits of Empathetic Spectatorship in Weimar Germany

In 1926, in the Soviet broadsheet Pravda, playwright and essayist Anatoly Lunacharsky lauded the political potential of the artist Käthe Kollwitz: “Kollwitz wants to strike grief into your heart, tears to choke the voice at the first glance of her work. She – the great agitator.” This power came, he asserted, from a combination of “physiological truthfulness” and “graphic vividness” through which she could rouse a viewing public to a state of electoral engagement. Lunacharsky’s description sketches a profoundly and violently involuntary material operation. As either a spontaneous constriction of the throat or an asphyxiation brought about by another, choking foregrounds issues of autonomy at the site of the body. In this conjured image, habitual patterns of (p)reception are overwritten through the force of the choke—functioning as a kind of physical rupture or glitch. To Lunacharsky, Kollwitz’s work was so moving that it had the potential power to provoke embodied political action.