Faith & Spirit Quote by Kathe Kollwitz

Kollwitz frames faith less as creed than as a pressure in the chest: a force you can’t quite name, only obey. The line is almost disarmingly provisional - “to this day,” “I do not know,” “something related” - and that uncertainty is the point. She’s refusing the tidy artist’s bio where spiritual conviction becomes a brand. Instead, she treats inspiration as an invasive energy that can’t be domesticated by doctrine, yet won’t stay safely outside it either.

The subtext is a quiet argument with institutions that want to own suffering. Kollwitz spent her career drawing grief, hunger, working-class hardship, war’s mutilations - scenes that demand moral attention but don’t offer the comfort of redemption. In that landscape, “religion” can sound like an explanatory shortcut or, worse, a veneer. Her sentence keeps the door cracked: maybe what drives her is adjacent to religion (compassion, reverence for human dignity, a sense of witness), or maybe it is religion stripped to its rawest element - not sermons, but obligation.

It also doubles as an ethical self-check. By admitting she can’t categorize the source, she avoids claiming prophetic authority. The work isn’t “inspired” in a decorative sense; it’s compelled, almost accountable to something larger than aesthetic ambition. For an artist who lived through the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar years, and Nazism, that vagueness reads less like indecision than strategy: a way to name the sacred without letting it be co-opted, sentimentalized, or made safe.