The Hearse on Potsdamer Platz

Edvard Munch's 'The Hearse on Potsdamer Platz' (1902) depicts a scene from Berlin — his extended period in the German capital in the late 1890s and early 1900s gave him an urban environment quite different from his Norwegian homeland, and the hearse passing through the Potsdamer Platz (then one of the busiest intersections in Europe) created a specifically modern urban death subject. The medieval memento mori imagery of the death's head and the grim reaper transplanted to the modern metropolis was characteristic of the fin-de-siècle Symbolist engagement with mortality.

Munch renders the Berlin street scene with the hearse with his characteristic expressionist approach — the urban environment and the death symbol of the passing hearse integrated within a composition that used the modern city's spatial complexity to amplify the mortality theme. His handling of the Berlin street atmosphere and the specific character of the Potsdamer Platz created the urban context for the traditional death subject's modernization.