IS THERE A LANGUAGE STILL TO BE MADE, a language that will link the children of Holocaust victims and those of the perpetrators? This is the question around which a number of recent works by Israeli and German filmmakers turn. Circling around such a delicate question, the films tend to move indirectly about it, touching lightly and obliquely upon it. Yet, the films seem also to spiral ineluctably toward this question, addressing it only at their very limits in their clumsily tacked-on endings and patently forced moments of resolution. Such moments of closure no doubt concede in their strained, contrived sense of harmony the very intractability of the issues they address, leaving to the end something that cannot quite be entered into, something with which the films make contact but cannot quite articulate, something for which there is as yet no language.

Yet, what if this language still to be made, this language that would link the children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators, were to be conceived less as a new idiom per se than as a mode of articulation structured like that of the unconscious, a perpetually foreign discourse of the Other whose articulation would always involve a certain dislocation or Entstellung of the mother tongue, of any and all mother tongues?