This article analyzes the poetic imagery of the bilingual, Polish-German, author Piotr (Peter) Lachmann. The key images of his poems bring into focus the problem of keeping up the ties between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Lachmann’s term for this kind of remembrance, made possible by the abundance of pictorial records (photography, fi lm) that transcend the linear axis of time, is ‘sepulchral humanism’. While examining the relations between sacrum and profanum in Lachmann’s verse, the article also notes their contamination by depictions that draw on the aesthetics of disgust and ugliness. Finally, the article discusses the German themes in Lachmann’s poetry and his intellectual bond with Tadeusz Różewicz, a poet and playwright with a better understanding of German culture than most Polish writers of his (post-war) generation.