On July 8, 1867, Käthe Kollwitz was born in Königsberg, Prussia — now Kaliningrad, Russia — the daughter of a dissident pastor who was liberal enough to believe his daughter should study art.

She married a doctor who practiced in a Berlin working-class district, and for fifty years she lived among the people she depicted: workers, mothers, the dying, the grieving. Her lithographs and etchings of the 1890s — her Weavers cycle, her Peasant War series — were the first works by a woman to be recommended for the Gold Medal of the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. Kaiser Wilhelm II blocked the award because he considered her work politically unsuitable.

In October 1914, her youngest son Peter was killed on the Western Front at age eighteen. She spent the next eighteen years making a memorial to him. The Grieving Parents — two stone sculptures of a father and mother kneeling — was placed at the Vladslo German war cemetery in Belgium in 1932. The sculptures depict Karl and Käthe Kollwitz, not abstract grief. They have her face.

She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, in 1919. The Nazis forced her to resign in 1933. Her grandson, also named Peter, was killed in World War II in 1942. She died in 1945, weeks before the German surrender.