Karl Kollwitz

Johannes Carl August Kollwitz was born in to a large family where he and his sister Lisbeth were the only his parents' nine children. After the father's early death his mother sent her nine-year-old son to one of the Königsberg orphanages, from which Karl Kollwitz later attended the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium in Königsberg. Despite his mother's death and him becoming an orphan at the age of fifteen, Kollwitz was able to graduate from high school, enter the University of Königsberg, receive a medical education and a doctorate degree.^[1]

After his marriage in 1891 to the artist Käthe Schmidt, Karl moved with her to Berlin, where he opened his medical practice in the Prenzlauer Berg area. According to his wife, his home reception room was filled with the poor proletarian strata of Berlin.^[2]

Karl Kollwitz ran his statutory health insurance practice as a doctor for the poor. In 1913, Kollwitz and his colleagues Ernst Simmel and Ignaz Zadek founded the Social Democratic Association of Doctors (later the Society of Socialist Physicians).^[3] He was a member of the youth welfare committee in the Prenzlauer Berg district and in the German League for Human Rights. After the November Revolution in 1919, he became involved in Berlin local politics as a city councilor for the SPD and later as a member of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund.^[1]

After his death in 1940, Karl Kollwitz was buried in the family grave at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, next to his brother-in-law Conrad Schmidt and his wife Anna. Käthe Kollwitz also later found her final resting place there.