Kollwitz was a German printmaker and sculptor, whose given name was Käthe Schmidt. She grew up influenced by the religious views of her grandfather and the radical socialism of her father. In 1885 she enrolled in an art school in Berlin and from 1888 she studied in Munich. At the age of seventeen she met the medical student Karl Kollwitz, whom she married in 1891. After their marriage they moved to Berlin into an apartment that was destroyed during bombing raids in 1943 along with much of the artist’s work. Her husband’s work as a doctor in a working-class area was a source of inspiration for her. Kollwitz often spoke about it and she was captivated by the character of the people, their lives and their courage to battle with their harsh living conditions, not to mention their strange beauty. Social themes became the mainstay of her oeuvre, which reflects the lot of proletarian women, such as in her work Woman with a Dead Child (1903).