Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sehnsucht

2023; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 97; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2023.a904255

1945-8134

Veronica Esposito,

Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior

Sehnsucht Veronica Esposito (bio) What is sehnsucht, and why hasn't it taken root in US culture? Veronica Esposito explores the meaning of the word and its use across international culture in her continuing column on untranslatable words. The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer, describing the feelings of homesickness experienced by mercenary soldiers. It entered English in 1756 as a byword for homesickness, and it has since come to possess the following definition: "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition" (Merriam-Webster). Throughout the nineteenth century, nostalgia caught on across Europe as Romanticism swept the continent, perhaps because the dislocation inherent to modernization made it more and more common for people to long for unattainable things, like bygone times or the places they originally came from. Coined from the Greek, nostalgia is readily translatable to major European languages, and it usually features in these languages as a cognate extremely similar to the English. Thus it is a widely understood concept and something that unites English speakers with our cousins throughout Europe. However, while nostalgia is broadly disseminated, that has not prevented many European languages from developing words that are roughly similar to nostalgia but that differ from it in very important ways. Including words like the Portuguese saudade, the Welsh hiraeth, and the Romanian dor, these words tend to be very strongly tied to a national consciousness and have no good English translation. One such word is the German sehnsucht, which derives from sehnen (to yearn) and sucht (addiction, craving). I have seen this word translated simply as "yearning" or "desire," or elaborated to add that the yearning is painful, and that it is a yearning for a particular thing that is unattainable. The term is often used in relationship to homesickness, particularly the desire of Germans to return to their homeland. German scholar Susanne Scheibe and her colleagues describe it as "captur[ing] individual and collective thoughts and feelings about one's optimal or utopian life … an intense desire for alternative states and realizations of life" ("Toward a Developmental Psychology of Sehnsucht [Life Longings]"). C. S. Lewis has been widely discussed for using the term to denote spiritual longing, also conflating it with the joy that can come from longing for something that cannot be had. Although sehnsucht is possibly derived from the German language of the Middle Ages, which would date its origins around 1100 to 1350 AD, the word became truly predominant in the Romantic period, when many renowned writers, musicians, painters, and philosophers harnessed their creative powers in attempts to capture its essence. For instance, in the great German playwright Friedrich Schiller's proto-Romantic poem "Sehnsucht," he explores the desire that yearns toward creative expression; he posits an adventurer pulling toward some idealized, beautiful land of eternal sun. For Schiller, it is the feeling of wonder that gets us there. Schiller's poem is one of the first attempts to explain just what sehnsucht means and why it is so compelling. The concept also features quite centrally in the work of Schiller's contemporary, Johann Wolf-gang von Goethe, as well as in the art of German painter Caspar David Friedrich; the latter's iconic piece Wanderer above the Sea of Fog—showing a man firmly standing on a jagged boulder while facing a churning, misting sea—is probably one of the most famous depictions of sehnsucht ever made. The list of creatives who explored the concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries goes on and on, including the likes of Novalis and E. T. A. Hoffmann as well as celebrated poets like Joseph von Eichendorff and Detlev von Liliencron. This list also includes many musicians. Both Schiller's and Goethe's sehnsucht poems have been set to music numerous times by composers like Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky, and indeed sehnsucht has provided much grist for musicians over the ages. This includes the contemporary era: the word inspired German and Swiss metal bands—Rammstein and Lacrimosa, respectively—in the 1990s and 2000s, both of whom titled an album after it. Judging from the success of their...