The drawings of hands by Käthe in this part of the exhibition were made towards the end of her life (1938, 1938, 1940/42). Many have expressed their regret that she didn’t live to see the end of the second world war. Her drawings of folded hands, as if they’re asking for something, praying or hoping for something, were made as part of a study for tomb stone of Kurt Breysig, a sociologist and German historian who was married to a Jewish woman, Gertrude Breysig. While the two drawings of hands being held tightly were made as part of a study for tomb stone for German of Jewish descent, Frank Levy (1938). These drawings are accompanied by a letter in which she states how ‘hurt, ashamed and furious’ she was towards the Nazis who had killed Levy only for being a Jew. These three emotions, which Käthe expressed in her letter, are present in doubtful lines, in the drawings of the meeting of hands; both individual and intertwined.

In the figures that are present in Käthe’s works, selfhood is often not important –neither is identity nor self-representation. What matters is the body, and its embodied experience. The gesture of the figures in Käthe’s works are present to trigger certain emotional responses from the viewers of her works. The art historian Ann Murray considers her graphic works not just as expressions of anti-war sentiment, but also that which has become a tragic consequence of the war. The three sketches in this section are studies from her body of work, following her writing, as a process of developing ideas, compositional experimentation and pictorial strategy. Käthe’s studies are an effort at uniting form with subject, starting from the dramaturgical search for a composition, a careful exploration until achieving the exact form. “The more I work, the more I realise how much work I have to do,” she noted while making a poster about the lack of food in post-war Vienna.