Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 69

American German Studies

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So also, as Siddhartha makes the realization that his life is as
the life of the river, must we in German Studies come to the
realization that the survival of our field is dependent on our ability
to free ourselves from the confines of orthodox approaches to texts in
both historical and cultural contexts, the p>oint teing that contextual
locality is a misnomer propagated by orthodox science and
conservative capitalist politics as well as orthodox approaches to
literary criticism. Yet as we progress into a world which through
technology becomes increasingly smaller, our awareness of
intercultural and intercontextual relatedness within our own worlds
and our own personal histories expands, and we are forced to recognize
that nonlocalized interconnectedness exists between all events in
German history and the histories of all nations about it and about the
world. And most importantly for American German Studies must we
recognize Germany's connection to ourselves and its relation to our
histories and how we relate our histories back to Germany, German
Culture, and its surroundings.
As David Bohm has pointed out, there exists a state of
interconnectedness between apparently unrelated subatomic events.^
As is in physics, so too in literature and all things within the
universe. Danish physicist Niels Bohr notes, "if subatomic particles
only come into existence in