"For her son's monument, Kathe Kollwitz decides the only thing she can do for this sea of crosses in the graveyard where he is buried is two figures.

"And she chooses this mourning, grieving father and the grieving mother who she places in the center of this graveyard, so that they encompass, they grieve for every young man who lay in that field. They are bowed in grief and they contain her face and her husband's face. But what is intriguing to me, or important, is she, it is about her grief. It's the grief of the parents who lost.

"And when she goes to install it in 1932, she describes in her letter home how she goes to look at it, then she goes to her son's grave, and then she walks back to her own image and she weeps, and she strokes the cheeks of the figure she's carved to look like herself with her own tears. And it seems to me that that reconciliation, that redemption, is what that statue is about."