ABSTRACT
Among their myriad of powers, images may become propellants of memory - dynamic, even explosive materials that force the bullets of remembrance and imagination into motion, conscious or unconscious. 1 One particular photograph so triggered the flights of my thought as I encountered it, quite accidentally, whilst browsing through the Yad Vashem photo archive online. 2 The photograph affected me strongly and has obsessed me since, causing a sort of historical reverie – or nightmare – that I will unravel in what follows. Perhaps the photograph acquired in my eyes the status of what the art historian Aby Warburg called an ‘emotive formula’ (Pathosformel): a temporal and psychic force that with particular affective and corporeal intensity compels the recognition of something that has been buried in oblivion, the return of the repressed. 3
