I have recently returned from a European vacation that included a river cruise and, instead of dwelling on all the marvelous sights I witnessed, I find myself thinking about Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream” — the work with a cartoonish looking character seemingly yelling at the top of his lungs. It had previously seemed comical to me but that is no longer the case.
One of our stops was in Prague in the Czech Republic. While visiting there, we took a side trip to Terezin which is a small town with a connecting prison that once housed GavriloPrincip, the teenager who had begun World War I by assassinating the archduke of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During World War II, the Germans had relocated Jews from all over central Europe into the town prior to their being shipped to places like Auschwitz. Our guide downplayed the repugnance of the situation by stressing that Terezin was not a concentration camp, and that Jews had the freedom to move about in the town. The palpable, overwhelming sense of sadness that permeates the place and the tragic story told inside the austere museum were in sharp contrast to his words. Although some people now live there, Terezin is basically a ghost town haunted by its ugly past.
We heard a more cogent story when we toured inside the prison with a different guide. That gentleman, a native Czech, said he had been born in 1977 and had never heard a thing about the use of Terezin throughout his education. He had taken it upon himself to tell the actual story. Among the horrors he mentioned were 100 people being forced into a small room where they could only stand upright, and the room had no toilet facilities. He showed us an area that was used by firing squads to execute people which was directly around the corner from an in-ground pool for the pleasure of the families of the German troops stationed there. The tour was quite devastating.
I had to wonder which of the two guides’ tales is better known in the Czech nation although I suspect it is the gentler one. After all, this sort of revision of history is happening in our own nation with many states passing laws moderating how the history of slavery should be taught and trying to deny that gay people even exist. It seems an attempt to return to some imaginary docile era and indicates an unwillingness to face the harsh reality of the past. Conservatives once derided liberals as “snowflakes” for their insistence on “trigger warnings” about certain types of speech but now it is conservatives who state they have a right to not be made to feel uneasy about much of the nation’s history.
Our next stop in Budapest indicated more of that attitude. Our guide said her father, while still a teenager, had fought in the ill-fated revolt of 1956 against the Russian occupiers of Hungary. She said that in all her schooling the fact of the revolt was never mentioned in any book or classroom. The totalitarian mind has no tolerance for dissent.
Another stop we made was in the charming town of Bamberg, Germany. There, the citizens have chosen to honor the former Jewish residents who went to their deaths with a series of plaques prominently embedded in the roadway. Each plaque named a local victim of the Holocaust. The idea is that to read the inscription one must bow their head in an act of respect to the deceased. I personally disagreed with that notion and found them disrespectful. It is easy to walk by them without any notice of their existence and, just as the Nazis would have liked, they are underfoot — something to be stepped on or driven over by bike and scooter wheels all day long. They are covered by rain, snow and dirt and I fail to see any honor in their placement at all.
Once back home, I kept thinking about what I had seen and heard in Europe. Those thoughts, combined with climate change denial, recent out of step Supreme Court decisions that have led to a surge of unbridled misogyny, anti-democratic sentiments of many elected leaders in our country and the refusal of most Republican congressmen to recognize the events of Jan. 6, 2020, as an insurrection, I found myself, despite all my introverted instincts, wanting to scream at all I see happening in the world around us. I suddenly realized that in his famous painting, Munch, more than a century ago, had captured the sense of existential dread that has become ever more pervasive on the planet.
I am fully aware of the nation’s history of slavery, lynchings, riots and mass shootings, but the arc of that history seemed to be inexorably upward. Even though that belief was often shaken, the election of Obama in 2008 seemed to confirm that faith. However, while liberals were celebrating the victory, the white supremacists and authoritarians in our society were organizing to change the course of the nation’s history and, for the moment, are succeeding.
I find Munch’s painting quite insightful for, while a scream may be briefly cathartic, notice that the clouds in back of the figure are red. The painting’s message for me is that behind the scream there is much anger. It is time to channel that anger into a constructive campaign to set us back onto an upward course. I remain optimistic that some dedicated citizens who believe in democracy have started that effort for, if not, I fear we could see our last democratic national election in 2024.
Richard Szlosek lives in Northampton.