A Winter Tale 

I painted this scene when I was about 11 years old. An introverted and shy girl, who translates her loneliness, quiet despair, and a hint of witty defiance into a peaceful snowy winter night. 

Karina’s painting of Karthauser Irrenanstalt (Mental Asylum), Regensburg, Germany, 1964 

 

What do you see? 

 

The painting is true to life: the wall of a centuries old cloister, a lonely street lamp – instead of a full moon – illuminating the curved street with a soft yellow sheen, centered one of the bare chestnut trees that line this road, buildings in the background behind the wall, all is covered in snow, still falling. We live just down the street.  

 

At night I can see this scene from my upper bunk bed through the window of the tiny room we three siblings share. It becomes a dream scene filled with yearnings. For the painting – I remember – I carefully chose the elements’ composition, simplifying real life to its essence, burying a tale underneath the soft snow. 

 

The wall separates the inhabitants of a mental asylum from the outside world. Sometimes the supposedly more “docile” patients are allowed to sweep the streets outside the wall. My alliance is of course with the insane. I am fascinated by those men and women who are ostracized and locked up – unfairly in my view – for being different. They are labelled crazy, dangerous, sick, but I don’t believe this. It seems a convenient lie* to my young mind. They are just different. 

 

Within the painting I hide all my young questions. What if the patients of the insane asylum know more than we? What if we are wrong, and really do not know much about human existence, nor them? What is the interior world of those “insane” really like? I wonder about their experiences: how do they see the world? 

 

Most importantly, I give the invisible inmates a ladder in my painted story – which is not there in reality. A way to escape the crazy prison,  a system more dangerous than the patients can ever be. This tale is also my own experience, trapped in a society – post-war 50’s Germany – that seems stifling with its arbitrary norms and strict rules, suppressed sorrow and grief, the ferocious need to control, box and label. The fear of anything different, and refusal to be curious. 

 

Throughout my life, I have used that ladder many times. And getting older I keep finding new inner realms where freedom can be explored, tasted and practiced. That ladder is utterly needed even now – or especially – here in the so called “land of the free.” 

 

*(About this I was right – now, more than a half century later, we know a tiny bit more about mental illness and its many variations and manifestations. But there is still a long way to go.)