Käthe Kollwitz turned a failed 16th-century peasant revolt into a powerful series of seven etchings

arts, ideas & societyThe Public Domain Review1901–1908 · Berlin, Germany

Käthe Kollwitz turned a failed 16th-century peasant revolt into a powerful series of seven etchings

the gist

Käthe Kollwitz made seven etchings between about 1901 and 1908 based on the German Peasants' War of the 1520s, a rebellion that ended in defeat because the landowners had horses and artillery. She was drawn to the underdogs and their dignity in failure. The first etching, Charge, shows a woman identified as Black Anna raising her arms as bodies surge forward, and Kollwitz said she was based on a real person. Black Anna returns in Battlefield, searching for her dead son with a lantern. Kollwitz made these prints while living in Berlin, close to a clinic for the poor where her husband worked.

so what

The series shows how an artist can use a historical struggle to speak about poverty and dignity in her own time. Kollwitz is one of the most important German printmakers, and this series is central to her work.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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