Aerial Bomb, 1924/1925

Brush and black ink, NT 960

Käthe Kollwitz, Aerial Bomb, 1924/1925, brush and black ink, NT 960, Cologne Kollwitz Collection © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
The Fight of Women against the Hell of Poison and Fire, published by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1927, Cologne Kollwitz Collection © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln
The Fight of Women against the Hell of Poison and Fire, published by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1927

For this drawing, Käthe Kollwitz focuses on the motif of a mother protecting her children.
Aerial Bomb was created in 1924/25 in connection with a commissioned work for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) against the background of an American gas manoeuvre in which a member of the WILPF, the chemist Dr Gertrud Woker, participated in 1924. 
Horrified by the effects of the smoke and incendiary bombs and other explosive devices demonstrated, Woker initiated the formation of a commission within the WILPF with the aim of educating the masses about the devastating effects of modern methods of warfare.
A variant of the drawing thus appears in 1927 as the cover motif of Frida Perlen’s pamphlet The Fight of Women against the Hell of Poison and Fire and is used repeatedly for leaflets, publications, and petitions until 1929.


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