In this paper, Motzkin sets the stage of the crisis in which we operate when he notes that otherness can now allegedly “be integrated into self without confronting the absolute otherness of the other.” This slippage in the term “the other” is virtually universal, the author believes, yet the German case of this slippage is uniquely abrupt. Since, he explains, “the self is constituted in such a way that its identity is mediated by the memory of the other,” “the absence of the memory of the other,” during and (in different ways) after the Holocaust, has alienated Germans “from their own recent past.” As result, they seek ways of “establishing continuity in memory around the gap in their history created by the Nazi years.”