Memorial Print for Karl Liebknecht

1920

Woodcut on Japanese paper, image 35.5 × 50 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main

Working people bend over the body of the politician Karl Liebknecht, whom right-wing paramilitaries killed together with Rosa Luxemburg. The print turns a political murder into a scene of shared grief.

A separate strip under the image carries a German dedication from the living to the dead, recalling 15 January 1919.
The artist disagreed with his politics but respected his stand against the war.
She drew him in death and tried other printing methods before settling on woodcut.
Solid black and rough white cuts reduce the mourners to bowed heads, worn faces and hands, so gesture, not likeness, carries the image.
A separate pencil note marks this sheet as a trial proof and dates it (1919); it came to the museum in 1964 with a private Kollwitz collection.

Image: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main · Public Domain Mark 1.0