`titrebBeing Blind`/titreb Otherness lies at the heart of language, and most particularly in an intimacy which can only be experienced within the mother tongue. This intimacy is also a constitutive part of otherness in that it resists translation and forms a nodal point of strangeness, which can neither be assimilated nor appropriated in another language. In other words, the bridges between one culture or linguistic territory and another are difficult to establish and the process of translating always leaves behind it a remainder that slips through its nets and which is the mark of this paradoxically strange and impregnable intimacy lying beyond translation and which cannot be transported into another textual sphere. It is this aspect of the untranslatable that lies at the heart of this article and I shall examine the ways in which this notion becomes a specific object of attack by the Nazis in their onslaught against language and against the basic constituents of the primary factors of identification of the human condition.