Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 68

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Popular Culture Review

and minority studies, all encompassed within the realm of German
culture and/or German Studies. All of the aforementioned have been
given too little, if any, attention on the undergraduate level as well
as the graduate level. Such blindness, coupled with the events of the
first half of this century and those events of more recent years into the
present, during which Germany became and has again become
submerged in violent tendencies in opposition to otherness, signals
Germany's apparent inability to deal with change within itself and
the worlds within it and about it, as well as a failure to recognize its
interconnectedness and nonlocality within and about the world.
These problems are, as one can imagine, perceived at and pervade
thought on not only socio-economic and political levels, but also on an
academic and a scientific levels.
Hence Germany and Germanistik seem to be suffering from a
personality disorder or fractured self-identification which manifests
itself in a need to isolate and remove itself from its past and in doing
so seriously cripples its ability to deal with the present and move
forward into the future. This neurosis (j.e., the assertion that
Germany then and Geimany now are two separate subjects to be dealt
with as such, thus creating a general schism between German history
and German culture), in conjunction with the notion of locality within
time and space, have further served to prevent Germany and
Germanistik programs (as all things must be perceived on multiple
levels at any given point in realization) from moving forward. In
other words, German brutality and aggression in our own time cannot
be treated as an aberration any more than the extremely enlightened
writings of Lessing or Goethe. Neither instance is an exception to
normalcy; they are all part of the same history. Hermann Hesse
explains this concept very clearly in Siddhartha:
Von den Geheimnissen des Flusses aber sah er heute nur
eines, das ergriff seine Seele. Er sah: dies Wasser lief
und lief es, und war doch immer da, war immer und
allezeit dasselbe und doch jeden Augenblick neu!. . .
. . . dafi der Hufi iiberall zugleich ist, am Ursprung und an
der Miindung, am Wasserfall, an der Fahre, an der
Stromschnelle, im Meer, im Gebirge, iiberall zugleich,
und dafi es fur ihn nur Gegenwart gibt, nicht den Schatten
Vergangenheit, nicht den Schatten Zukunft. .