Die Pflüger (The Ploughmen)

In this image of two men hauling a plough across a field with the full force of their bodies, the merging of figures and landscape expresses not harmony with nature but the dehumanizing experience of backbreaking labor. Kollwitz produced this print as part of a series titled the Peasants’ War, a reference to a major revolt of the working classes against the nobility in sixteenth-century Germany. Brutally repressed, the uprising failed but would serve as a symbol for the class struggles and social justice movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, the overcast sky and insistent horizontal lines contribute to the sense of oppression.