With her cycle of works on the weavers' revolts and her memorials to the dead of the First World War, she found impressive images for suffering, grief and pain - in her written testimonies, the graphic artist and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) can be experienced as a person and as an artist who wanted to speak above all through her work. It was only at the insistence of her son Hans that she wrote her youthful memoirs and placed them on his birthday table in 1922.In a sensitive introduction, the painter and art writer Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann (1883-1973) drew a double portrait of the artist Käthe Kollwitz: with her claim "I want to have an effect in this time", he linked her artistic work with the commitment that was close to her heart, not least through her husband Karl Kollwitz, a doctor for the poor in the working-class district of Wedding in Berlin. Can a work be separated from the experiences of contemporaneity? Do wars and the social question compete with an artistic work? In the new edition, an approach to Käthe Kollwitz can be rediscovered that seems to pose these questions to the present.