The blurring effect also serves as a strong visual metaphor for the German nation's will to obscure its Nazi history. In some paintings the blurs and smudges are severe enough to disrupt the image. It becomes hard to understand or believe and the subject is wiped out. .
Decades later, Richter was flying to New York on September 11th, 2001, at the time of the attacks on the World Trade Centre. A few years later he made one small painting specifically about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Richter's 2005 painting "September" shows how the ever-present photographic documentation of the September 11th attacks affects the uniqueness of one's distinct remembrance of the events. The painting, whilst it carries an overwhelming sense of the enormity and significance of the event, it instead evokes an existential numbness, sadness and incomprehension. The twin towers loom into view, out of a gorgeous light-blue background, before disappearing, in clouds of billowing grey, while small metallic streaks – denoting planes, or media, or violence, or perhaps just paint – blur as they race across the canvas. Described by critic, Bryan Appleyard, for The Sunday Times as "the closest you will get to a great 9/11 work" he goes on to assert that "It reclaims the day, leaving it exactly where it was, exactly when it happened." Richter's blurring, serves to distance the reality by several stages-as if it is only through distancing that we can deal with horror and devastation of events in our lifetime. The blur seems to cover up the truth and subdue the shock of the events. Richter's main purpose of his photo-paintings and his "blur" is to obscure and change the memories and knowledge people have of life-changing events. Richter explains, "I blur to make everything equal, everything equally important and equally unimportant." Beyond reflecting his own situation, the blur serves as a perfect general metaphor for memory, its degradation, for the deterioration brought out by time.
