Never Again War

A hand rises almost to the top of the sheet. Below it, a young figure throws back their head, opens their mouth and presses their other hand to their chest. Three handwritten words cross the space around the lifted arm. The last, Krieg, is underlined twice. In Käthe Kollwitz’s 1924 poster Nie wieder Krieg, the arm gives the slogan the force of an exclamation mark, while the hand at its tip makes the cry an oath. At the bottom left, in much smaller letters, the Leipzig printing tells anyone who stops to look where and when to gather. ^{[1] [2]}

How the poster turns a cry into an oath

At almost a metre high, the Leipzig image gives the gesture room to unfold. The head and shoulders sit low on the right, leaving a long stretch of paper above the face for the arm to traverse. The head tips back and turns left. A dark wedge opens at the mouth, while the uneven edge of the hair makes the upward thrust of the head visible against the bare paper. The lifted arm carries that motion higher. The other arm folds across the body, bringing the hand flat against the chest. One movement opens the body outwards and upwards. The other draws attention back to the person making the promise. ^{[1] [2]}

The words take a different route through the image. Nie begins at the upper left, wieder picks up on the other side of the raised arm, and Krieg pulls the eye down to the left, towards the level of the face. The arm cuts across the space in which a reader might expect to follow a single line of text. The two strokes beneath Krieg run towards the arm, bringing the word and the body into contact. The composition asks the eye to cross that boundary and then return to it. By the time the reader reaches Krieg, the open mouth is close enough to make the printed word feel spoken. ^{[1] [2]}

The different sizes of lettering give the sheet two reading distances. Across a street or room, the arm and the three big words supply the image’s basic rhythm. Up close, the strokes vary from dense black to grainy grey, especially across the face and clothing. The small Leipzig notice comes into focus at this second distance. A passer-by can absorb the appeal and keep walking. Someone who comes closer can find the information needed to take part. Kollwitz gives the slogan and the invitation different amounts of space, in proportion to how quickly each has to be read. ^{[1] [2]}

The raised hand makes the nature of the appeal specific. The palm faces out, the thumb and first two fingers extend, and the remaining fingers curl inwards. Ann Murray identifies the gesture as the Schwurhand, used to affirm a spoken oath in German civic and legal settings. A familiar form of public obligation lends weight to a sentence with no explicit speaker. The poster supplies the implied “I” through the hand against the chest, while the raised hand makes the pledge visible to others. A crowd could give the same words a collective voice without changing them. ^{[1] [3]}

Murray also proposes a precedent within the youth movement. At the national youth gathering in Weimar in 1920, Max Westphal, who had lost an arm in the war, reportedly raised his remaining arm and cried out the same slogan. The surviving accounts differ over the hand. Murray describes an oath gesture, while the German Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, in its biographical account of Westphal, describes a clenched fist. The shared elements are the public declaration and the raised arm. The episode shows that the words and an emphatic bodily gesture already belonged to the movement’s repertoire, while the link to Kollwitz’s particular design remains a possibility. ^{[3] [12]}

The figure’s gender has elicited similarly different readings. Cologne describes a young man. The French Institut national d’histoire de l’art sees a young woman, and Murray reads the figure as androgynous, observing that Kollwitz’s written accounts leave the question open. The crop helps explain why the gesture has proved easier to agree on. The viewer sees the face in profile, a sweep of hair and just enough clothing to register the pull of one arm and the pressure of the other. What comes through most clearly is a young person making a public commitment, an apt figure for an organisation asking young people to speak for themselves. ^{[1] [3] [4]}

From the figure alone to the Leipzig poster

Cologne catalogues the finished impression as a crayon and brush lithograph made by transfer, or Umdruck. In transfer lithography, the artist works on a separate support and transfers the drawing to the printing surface. The process can carry both the broken texture of a crayon stroke and the more continuous mark of a loaded brush into the impression. That range is part of what makes the figure work at poster scale. Dark masses establish the shoulder and head at a distance, while softer marks let a viewer at close range see the planes of a cheek or the folds around a wrist. ^{[1] [2]}

Cologne’s Kn 205 II b proof, inv. 70300/97004, is catalogued at 940 × 435 mm. It already carries the lithographed signature and has no printed lettering. Its narrower format makes the figure’s vertical reach particularly apparent. The open mouth still suggests a cry, but the proof leaves the viewer to imagine the words. In the wider finished state, the words give the gesture its object and occupy the space the body seems to address. The difference between the two records concerns what was printed and how the image is arranged, as well as the recorded width. ^[1]

An impression in Washington shows another way words could enter the image. The National Gallery of Art’s 1943.3.5213 is a crayon lithograph on thin wove paper, with charcoal and lithographic ink, or tusche, applied by hand. Its record identifies the slogan faintly written across the centre in charcoal, and signatures in graphite and lithographic crayon at lower right. The gallery cites Nagel 1039 and gives the sheet as 97.3 × 74.8 cm. The faint hand-added wording belongs to that particular object. The Leipzig event inscription and the broad printed slogan can be checked against a finished impression such as the Städel’s. ^{[2] [13]}

The Städel’s SG 4302 D is Kn 205 III b, the same catalogue state as Cologne’s finished impression. It is printed in black on brown wove poster paper. The catalogue distinguishes the signature printed at lower right from the pencil signature beside the figure’s left shoulder. It also transcribes the smaller notice at lower left naming Mitteldeutscher Jugendtag and giving Leipzig and the August dates. The printed elements identify the campaign design. The pencil signature is a feature of this sheet, which the Städel acquired from the collection of Helmut and Hedwig Goedeckemeyer in 1964. The record also gives the older Klipstein number, 200 III b, which explains the French INHA entry’s reference to Klipstein 200. ^{[1] [2] [4]}

Two Berlin records put the measurements in perspective. The Deutsches Historisches Museum lists its own lithograph, P 62/23, at 94 × 71 cm. MoMA’s 2024 exhibition checklist credits a separate loan to the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Berlin and its Association of Friends. On page 33, it lists the composition as 94 × 76.2 cm and the sheet as 94.5 × 71.8 cm. The listed composition is wider than the listed sheet, an inconsistency the entry leaves unresolved. Those figures establish what the checklist reports for the Berlin loan. The Städel’s separately labelled image and sheet measurements supply a firmer basis for describing the scale of its Leipzig impression. ^{[2] [14] [15]}

Leipzig in August and Anti-War Day in September

The Leipzig gathering marked ten years since the outbreak of the First World War. The Action Committee of the Nie wieder Krieg movement had called for demonstrations annually since 1920, and mass demonstrations took place across Germany in August 1924. The Leipzig inscription gives the dates of Central German Youth Day as 2–4 August. The anti-war rally on Augustusplatz took place on Sunday, 3 August, within that three-day gathering. The announcement and the date of the rally answer different questions about the same weekend. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

The anniversary also brought two generations into the same campaign. Veterans could speak from experience, as Westphal had done in Weimar. Young people who had been children in 1914 could decide what they were prepared to do if asked to fight. The poster puts that decision into the body of a single young speaker. It offers a stance someone could assume and words someone could repeat. The small inscription then gives that individual act a place in an organised public gathering. ^{[1] [2] [3] [12]}

Murray, drawing on Alexandra von dem Knesebeck’s catalogue raisonné, documents a further printing of Nie wieder Krieg for German Anti-War Day on 21 September 1924. It retained the slogan and added a line beneath it announcing the September date, with a smaller credit at lower left to the Internationaler Gewerkschaftsbund, the International Federation of Trade Unions. That added wording is the evidence for identifying the September printing. The reach of the arm, the cry and the large lettering could carry over from Leipzig because the information tying the image to a particular campaign occupied a smaller part of the sheet. ^{[2] [3]}

The federation had also commissioned a separate design. Cologne dates Die Überlebenden (The Survivors), Kn 197, to 1923 and traces the commission to a request made in 1922 for the international Anti-War Day of 1924. Its Danish-language impression, Kn 197 II b 4, inv. 70300/95011, measures 562 × 685 mm. Cologne records crayon and brush lithography with a scraping needle, made by transfer. The broad format lets a cluster of children and adults spread around the central woman. Faces, including those of people blinded by war, emerge at different heights. The group makes visible who has to live with the consequences once the fighting ends. ^[16]

Kollwitz’s letter to Beate Bonus-Jeep shows how the patron shaped both the image and its words. She had envisaged a dense group of women shielding their children, taking up the theme of The Mothers from her woodcut series. The proposed caption would have said that women had borne their children for a purpose other than war. The federation’s representatives in Amsterdam pressed for an image of survivors, and Kollwitz reconsidered the composition around parents, widows, blinded people and anxious children. In the same letter she described plans to distribute large anti-war posters across fourteen European countries. Cologne’s Danish impression is material evidence of the campaign’s use of more than one language. ^{[16] [17]}

The two posters give the viewer different tasks. The Survivors asks the eye to move through the group and reckon with several kinds of harm. Never Again War! concentrates attention on the effort of one person speaking. The federation’s appearance in the September history of both designs can make the records easy to conflate. The single raised arm identifies Kn 205, while the group of survivors identifies Kn 197. The printed wording on a particular sheet then identifies its audience, language or occasion. ^{[1] [3] [16]}

From the street to the newspaper and book jacket

On Saturday, 2 August 1924, the opening day of the youth gathering and the day before the Augustusplatz rally, the figure appeared on the front page of the Leipziger Volkszeitung. Murray reproduces the page and shows that the special issue drew material from a longer anti-war book published by the West Saxony branch of the Socialist Workers’ Youth. In the street the figure announced an event. On the newspaper’s front page it also introduced a selection of work that readers could take away, discuss and circulate. The same figure greeted them again on the jacket of the book from which the issue drew. ^{[3] [18]}

The newspaper put the design in the company of other approaches to war. Its inside pages included Georg Kretzschmar’s images of the spectre of war and the trench, work by the Flemish artist Frans Masereel, and Honoré Daumier’s satirical Peace, an Idyll. In the accompanying literary supplement, Walter Mehring’s essay on departure for the front appeared on page two. The contrast between the front page and the material inside was productive. The figure’s oath could be grasped at a glance, while the rest of the issue allowed room for irony, recollection and argument. Daumier’s presence also gave the German anniversary issue a French precedent for using satire to question what passes for peace. ^{[3] [18]}

Fritz Kühn edited the West Saxony organisation’s 1924 book, Nie wieder Krieg!. Inside were reproductions of four sheets from Kollwitz’s War woodcut series, The Sacrifice, The Volunteers, The Widow II and The Mothers. Those four images were selections from a seven-sheet portfolio published by Emil Richter in Dresden in 1923 in several editions. Their appearance in the book put them into a new sequence of reading, beginning with the promise on the jacket. Reviewing the book, Dora Heinemann singled out the commitment of the young people who would be expected to form the next army. She also welcomed the way the publication brought pictures, poetry and political writing together. ^{[3] [17]}

The visual exchange between jacket and pages is especially sharp in The Volunteers. There, the line of young people presses forward behind a skeletal drummer. Their bodies take up the rhythm set by Death. The youth on the poster sets the rhythm of their own utterance, with the pauses around the arm and the double stroke beneath Krieg. In The Mothers, bodies draw together and turn their strength towards sheltering children. The poster takes that same capacity for deliberate action into public space. Kollwitz’s younger son Peter had volunteered and died in October 1914. The woodcuts and the poster give different forms to a question that his death made personal for her and that the youth campaign put to its readers collectively. ^{[1] [3] [17]}

Murray records a bilingual French–German edition in 1925, published in Leipzig by Roter Türmer Verlag, that retained the figure on the cover and the woodcuts inside. A separate publication shows how much further the image could travel. Kenyon College records a 1929 volume for the International Federation of Trade Unions with Kollwitz credited as cover artist and photographs drawn from Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege. Its text appears in German, English, French, Spanish, Dutch and Danish. The 1925 edition carried the image and woodcuts into a bilingual setting. The 1929 volume used the cover figure to introduce photographic evidence to a wider multilingual readership. Each has its own date, publisher or sponsoring body, and contents. ^{[3] [19]}

How peace movements used the image again

The figure also acquired a history away from organised campaigns. The University of Oxford exhibition In Times of Strife documents an early image formerly owned by the Berlin publisher and collector Salman Schocken and now in Oxford. The exhibition listed a photograph showing the lithograph in Schocken’s living room, a Leipzig poster, and the catalogue of the 1945 memorial exhibition organised by the Tel Aviv Museum and the National Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem. The catalogue listed the Schocken impression as item 111. The sequence records three settings for looking at Kollwitz’s image within a generation of its making: a collector’s home, a public campaign and a memorial exhibition. Cologne’s separately catalogued proof supplies its own evidence for the development of the design before lettering. ^{[1] [20]}

The difference between an image that travels and a work made for a particular place was already present in Kollwitz’s response to Peter’s death. While she was making the Leipzig poster, she was also rethinking the memorial that became The Grieving Parents. The original pair was carved in granite, installed at Roggeveld in July 1932 and moved to Vladslo in 1956. The shell-limestone figures at Cologne’s Alt St. Alban were carved later from casts taken from the originals. Her small Mother with Her Dead Son has a different history again. Cologne’s Seeler 37 I.B.6, inv. 70100/97007, is a zinc cast dated 1941–43 from a model of 1937–39. The bronze installed at Berlin’s Neue Wache in 1993 is Harald Haacke’s enlargement after the small work. The kneeling parents ask the visitor to pause in a particular place, and the seated mother encloses the dead son within her own silhouette. The poster throws its figure’s voice out towards whoever happens to pass. Its later versions could recover that address in a new street or a new crowd. ^{[1] [21] [11]}

Cologne records repeated use by peace movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Benjamin Ziemann identifies a specific West German example, a poster for Anti-War Day on 1 September 1984, preserved in the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie as 6/PLUA001875. He discusses Kollwitz’s oath-taker among images in which protesters themselves appear as people capable of acting for peace. The link back to Weimar was available through the gesture, even though the date and political circumstances had changed. The figure offered a way to picture what making a public commitment looked like. ^{[1] [22]}

In April 1999, a banner at the German Easter peace marches used the pose to address the war in Yugoslavia and NATO’s bombing. Mercedes Valdivieso describes a painted figure with the left hand against the chest, the right arm raised and the mouth open. The banner gave that mouth a single word, NEIN! The setting supplied the immediate object of the refusal. Seventy-five years after Leipzig, the same division of effort between the two arms could make a different word feel like something spoken aloud and meant. ^[23]