At the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1898, a jury nominated a print cycle for a gold medal and Kaiser Wilhelm II personally vetoed it, declaring that medals belong on the breasts of worthy men. The artist was Käthe Kollwitz. This episode traces her life from a Königsberg household of radical thinkers, a childhood shadowed by a brother's death and severe anxiety, and a possible case of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, to her decision to abandon painting for the sharp line of etching, lithography, and woodcut.

We follow her move to a working-class Berlin district where her husband Karl ran a clinic for the poor, the Weavers and Peasant War cycles, and the etching After the Battle, which depicted a mother searching a battlefield for her dead son a decade before her own son Peter was killed in Flanders in 1914. The conversation covers her appoint ...