The Downtrodden was originally conceived as the left-hand section of a triptych that Käthe Kollwitz had created several years before. Inspired by an 1893 production of Gerhart Hauptmann's play concerning the brutal repression of a workers' revolt, Kollwitz spent the next five years laboring over a six-part cycle of prints called The Weavers' Rebellion. The series was to have ended with this triptych, the form and content of which clearly allude to the traditional Italian Renaissance altarpiece, with a central, Christ-like figure laid out on a slab and mourned by two allegorical female figures. Kollwitz later rejected these religious references, reworking the portrait of a grieving proletarian family as an independent image.

Kollwitz further strengthens the emotional power of this etching by contrasting its rich, dark, unarticulated background with the careful cross-hatching in the parents' clothing and the startlingly pale face of the dead child. As is typical of her work, here the artist provides just enough details-including the dramatic gesture of the father's left hand and the mother's stolid facial expression-to tell a story that, although it is rooted in nineteenth-century Silesia, still has resonance for working-class families the world over.