Theodoor van Gogh was born in The Hague on 23 July 1957, into a family whose name carried two ghosts. The painter Vincent was the famous one, the suicide whose canvases the world had finally learned to love. But Theo was named for a different ancestor: his paternal uncle Theo, a Dutch resistance fighter the Nazis captured and executed during the occupation. The boy grew up knowing that his uncle had been killed for what he wrote and believed. His father served in the Dutch secret service. The Van Gogh family did not retreat from danger, and as the boy became a man, he made provocation his profession. He dropped out of law school in Amsterdam, drifted through stage work, and finally found film. His debut, Luger, came in 1981. Two Gouden Kalf awards followed in the 1990s, for Blind Date and In het belang van de staat. He was good at what he did, even when the things he did made people loathe him.

Van Gogh's website was called De Gezonde Roker, the Healthy Smoker, and the title told you everything. He smoked. He drank. He insulted people in a country that prides itself on not insulting people, and he did it in language so coarse that even his defenders winced. He attacked politicians, actors, fellow directors, anyone he considered part of what he called the establishment. He warned that the Netherlands was sliding toward something Belfast-like, a country at war with itself. After 11 September 2001 he turned his fury on Islam with a particular intensity, publishing Allah weet het beter, Allah Knows Best, in 2003. Friends remembered a man whose private kindness sat strangely beside his public cruelty. He could be funny and generous one moment, vicious the next. He had a son, Lieuwe. He had, by the time the threats began, no illusions that everyone agreed with him, and no interest in pretending.

In 2004 he made a ten-minute film with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born politician who had fled an arranged marriage and won a seat in the Dutch parliament. Submission told the stories of four Muslim women trapped in abusive marriages. On camera, women's bodies were inscribed with verses from the Qur'an in henna, then veiled. Hirsi Ali wrote it. Van Gogh directed. After it aired on Dutch television in August, the death threats began. They came for both of them. Hirsi Ali accepted protection. Van Gogh refused. He was, he insisted, harmless, a clown, a fool. Nobody would actually kill him. He was wrong.

He was cycling to work. Mohammed Bouyeri, twenty-six years old, a Dutch citizen born in Amsterdam to Moroccan parents, stepped out and shot him. Van Gogh fell from his bicycle. He was shot several more times. Witnesses heard him say, "Can't we talk about this?" Bouyeri did not answer. He cut Van Gogh's throat. He pinned a five-page letter to the body with a knife, a letter that threatened Ayaan Hirsi Ali with the same fate, that named Jews, that invoked a militant ideology Bouyeri had absorbed through the Hofstad Network. He walked away firing at police, wounding bystanders, and was arrested after a chase in the Oosterpark, a few hundred meters from where the killing happened. He told the court he felt no remorse and would do it again. He was sentenced to life without parole on 26 July 2005. Both men's lives ended that morning, in different ways.

The grief was immediate and the rage that followed was uglier. Within weeks the Dutch Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia recorded over a hundred violent incidents against Muslim targets, including a bomb at a Muslim school in Eindhoven and an arson that destroyed a Muslim primary school in Uden. Churches were attacked in retaliation. A report for the Anne Frank Foundation tallied 174 violent incidents in the four weeks after the murder. Hirsi Ali went into hiding and eventually moved to the United States. The politician Geert Wilders has lived under armed protection ever since. The Netherlands, a country that had built its modern identity on tolerance, looked into a mirror it had not expected to see.

On 18 March 2007, a sculpture by Jeroen Henneman was unveiled in the Oosterpark, a short walk from the spot on Linnaeusstraat where the bullet holes were still visible in the bicycle lane a decade later. It is called De Schreeuw, The Scream. Pilgrims to political martyrdom find easy answers there; the place itself does not offer them. Van Gogh said cruel things. He also believed, with a stubbornness that killed him, that any idea could be argued with rather than silenced. The man who killed him believed the opposite, and was willing to die for it, and is still alive in prison, a fact that itself remains contested ground in Dutch life. Two men collided on a quiet street in Amsterdam. Both leave behind a country still trying to understand what their meeting meant.