"Atlas", the collection of images that the German artist Gerhard Richter has been sticking on hundreds of sheets since the Sixties, was often interpreted as the belated example of the “anti-subjective” gesture of the historical artistic avant-garde. A semiotic analyses of Atlas implies the shift from a mere “authorial” idea of subjectivity – largely based on the notion of “intentionality” – towards a semiotic subjectivity inscribed in the text itself. Atlas thus becomes the place of a discursive competence based on a device of visual enunciation that, according to Felix Thürlemann, is typical of the “plural image” or “hyperimage”, where a sort of “meta-enunciator” is responsible of “the choice of an ensemble of images and their spatial disposition”. Such a meta-enunciator is, in Atlas, the instance of a discursive competence that regards a specific aspect of the German post-war context, namely a missed mnemonic working-through. The paper explores that aspect through the analysis of a group of sheets and through the work of G.W. Sebald on the relationship between denied memory and “compulsion” of urban reconstruction in post-war Germany.