“In a photograph a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow,” Siegfried Kracauer wrote in Photography, his essay about the medium and its relationship to memory (and history). His concern was mostly with photographs that originated in the past (however distant it might be), with one showing a grandmother as a prominent example.
What about photographs from just a few days ago, though? Can they be connected to memory? One would imagine that by construction, that cannot be the case. After all, memory mostly concerns itself with something that has long receded.
Memory typically becomes a lot more charged, emotionally or otherwise, if it deals with a past long gone. Yesterday, the day before, even last week: not enough time has passed for those points in time to have taken on special meaning (even if events were in fact quite special).
The other day, I came across a newspaper headline that stated that a child had died after what was now presumed to be arson in the town where I was born, Wilhelmshaven. The newspaper, a well-known left-wing daily, wrote that a fire had been started and that the intense smoke had left the child dead. The mother and her other children were being treated in a number of hospitals (some, possibly due to the seriousness of their injuries, rather far away).
The article noted that there had only been people with migratory backgrounds living in the apartment building in question. The family had somewhat recently arrived from West Africa, they had previously been subjected to racist abuse, and they were about to move to a new home.
Contemporary Germany being contemporary Germany, what should have made national news beyond that one newspaper did not — for all the reasons that you can easily imagine. Germany’s new government features a right-wing populist interior minister who is more concerned with trying to limit immigration than with dealing with crime against immigrants, and Germany’s media largely follow that model (the newspaper featuring the story is an exception).
There was a photograph of the building on top of the article (you can see it if you click on the link above). Somehow, the locale felt familiar to me. By now, I have not been back to Wilhelmshaven in over 25 years. I moved away when I went to university in 1989, and in the years after, I went back maybe once a year for a little while before stopping altogether. I have memories of the city, but they’re hazy.
Why then would a photography made in 2025 look so familiar to me? After all, the kind of building in the photograph could be found in many spots all over the city: a mixed-use building, with a store in the ground floor and three floors with apartments on top.
And yet, I was so convinced that I knew the place, the particular locale in question. At first, it was merely a guess. I looked more closely, and then it struck me: I knew the building to the right. I recognized it — after all these years — because of the tiles used to clad its second floor. This would have been the building that in the city’s main shopping area had the Woolworth department store in it when I lived in Wilhelmshaven.
But there was something strange about this: if my memory was correct, then the store that had burned would have been a toy store that also sold bicycles. I had gone to that store a lot (in part because they sold model trains), but I had never realized that there were apartments on top of the store.
Was all of that correct, though? It actually wasn’t difficult to find out. In the photograph, one can read the name of the store immediately to the left of the burnt building. A quick Google Maps search confirmed my hunch: yes, this is exactly the locale I had been thinking of. Reading through a few local newspaper article confirmed a detail: the name of the toy store (whose name, oddly, I still remembered).
The toy shop had closed some time ago, and there had been household refuse piled up in its entrance area. This is where the fire had been lit. How or why migrants were essentially housed on top of what sounds like a garbage dump to me was not explained in the papers.
Finding these details solved a question I was grappling with for a few hours: why was I so convinced that I was familiar with the location of the photograph? If you had asked me to describe the place, I would not have remembered much about the Woolworth, and I am certain that I would not have remembered that there were apartments on top of the toy store.
Somehow, the photograph had made me remember details that I had forgotten. Unlike in the case of the grandmother discussed in Siegfried Kracauer’s essay, even though my memories are part of a personal rather distant past, they brought me to a very specific moment, a very specific incident today — and all of that through a photograph taken, well, not today, but a few days ago.
If I had not found the details that confirmed what at first I thought I was guessing I would not have known what to make of the certainty that arose from looking at the photograph. I knew the locale — or rather, I knew the locale from the past, but I immediately felt connected to the present.
Instead of pulling us into a past (that might or might not have been remembered), photographs can also pull us out of our own past into a very real present, a present that through the visceral fact of a dead four-year old migrant child can make us feel ashamed of both the past and of our own inability for that present to arrive in the first place.
And therein, I’d argue, lies photography’s real power: it is one thing to come to a judgment of a past long gone, a past that will never change. It’s quite another to be reminded of one’s own inadequacy regarding preventing the past repeat itself today.
In 2020, my first photobook, Vaterland, was published, in which I looked at the re-emerging German nationalism and its many ugly side effects. At first, I wanted to dedicate the book to the victims of a right-wing killing spree. But the more I looked into far-right violence, the more names kept popping up.
Starting in the 1990s, dozens and dozens and dozens of people had been killed through far-right violence — many of them immigrants or people born to immigrant parents. A 2020 article documented at least 187 people murdered between 1990 and 2020 in Germany.
Just a few days after the Wilhelmshaven arson, Germany’s right-wing populist government decided to stop allowing families to join refugees and asylum seekers already living in the country. The government has its own priorities: taking care of those who are most vulnerable certainly isn’t one of them.
I suppose that if it had not been for that photograph in the article I first came across, I might not have been triggered by what just happened in Wilhelmshaven the way I did.
If many photos are stains that have long congealed and that have little or maybe only symbolic effect today, this photograph from Wilhelmshaven burns inside me, and I suspect that it will do so for a long, long time.