You too are a Weltschmerz-German

Back when I studied philosophy, I noticed something unexpected about the reality of German Philosophy. Something that, you could say, went against my “intuition”.

I would have expected that most, and the most interesting, papers on German thought and philosophy were written in German, in Germany, by Germans.

But again and again I stumbled on Americans explaining Kant, Marx or Schopenhauer deeper and with way more enthusiasm than I ever heard or read a German do.

Each and every unapologetic Nietzsche-Fan I ever met spoke English, and was rooted in an English-speaking country. (Of course, it doesn’t help that “Übermensch” could be and was misinterpreted in Germany. The word “über” invites a vulgar, a-historic and therefore plainly wrong interpretation.)

When I think of Hegel – and I am surely not the only one – I think of Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher, who too was explaining Hegel and Marx and the like in English – at least his unique variant of English.

Or take the Austrian and therefore German-writing psychiatrist Carl Jung. Let’s be honest about it: He would be less known among the social-media-population without the English-speaking Canadian Jordan Peterson.

Or Kafka – don’t even get me started … but you get what I mean, I could go on.

German ideas – or: ideas firstly formulated in German – have co-created modern thought. Concepts originating in Germany or German-speaking communities have permeated the current not only American, but global Zeitgeist.

Of course, you noticed it: “Zeitgeist” is one of those many German words and concepts, that people can’t really and also do not want, or need, to translate.

Zeitgeist, literal translation: spirit of the time, could be described as the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, and political climate of a particular era. But yeah, Zeitgeist is Zeitgeist. Either you feel the meaning, or you should learn to feel it.

One could – and it would be fun – write essays, books or movie-scripts on each of these untranslatable German words.

Another one is: Weltschmerz – the sadness, melancholy and existential despair, when you realize that life will never satisfy all your emotional needs – and yet, hopefully, you want to cling to this life.

By the way, a beautiful illustration of Weltschmerz is a joke that Woody Allen, speaking to the camera, tells in the opening monologue of Annie Hall: “There’s an old joke — two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions.’”

Woody contextualizes that joke then: “Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

That sounds roughly like Weltschmerz.

I would maybe add some regret to the recipe for Weltschmerz. Regretting the chances you missed, of course. The better roads, you were too timid or too blind or plainly too stupid to take. Today’s youth may add a yet to be named pain, experienced when they think about the chances that their parents had, but they never will.

There is a Weltschmerz-German in all of us, in you too. Sometimes the German in you feels Fernweh, sometimes Gemütlichkeit, sometimes Schadenfreude.

And sometimes we stumble on concepts that we feel should have an established German word, but we can’t think of one.

And then we could make these words up. Rose in “Two and a Half Men” explains Schadenfreude to Charlie. And then she makes up Glaukenstucken, which according to Rose means “feeling guilty for having felt Schadenfreude”.

I myself, I think, have come up with the German word Zukunftsweh (even came up with a T-Shirt for “Zukunftsweh”). The word is inspired by Fernweh and Heimweh.

Fernweh is the sometimes beautifully painful longing for far away places, for travelling, and new experiences.

Heimweh, that actually translates to English: homesickness, is the painful longing for home, for returning to safety and the known – sometimes experienced while scratching the Fernweh-itch.

What I call Zukunftsweh is maybe a kind of counterpart to nostalgia. Nostalgia is the painful longing for a better past, that may or may not have happened.

Zukunftsweh, then, is the longing for our belief in, or hope for, a future that now no longer seems feasible. Yes, I feel a pain, a painful nostalgia for the time when I believed that a better future awaits.

I am expressing these thoughts in English, as a German of Czech origin. Germany is attempting suicide – again –, as a democracy, as an economical powerhouse and as a society.

The people of Germany are bombarded with propaganda messages, telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for. And if they still dare to vote in a way that the current de-facto-one-party doesn‘t approve of, the German power-oligarchy finds a way to ignore the election results.

Germany, as is well known, is deindustrializing itself, for example by turning off reliable sources of energy, forcing absurd laws and regulations on existing industry, forcing one of the highest tax and deductions rates worldwide on its workers, et cetera. For years now, companies are moving their production abroad – currently, even the über-german Volkswagen is considering this step.

You might want to point out, that Germany is still selling billions in export, et cetera. I consider the cup, that has fallen off the table, to be broken, well before it hits the ground. (And to stay in this metaphor, I don’t see anyone catching the German cup, while parts of Germany already have hit the floor and shattered.)

And to all that come the societal changes in Germany, due to open borders and plainly insane and globally unique Willkommenskultur (literally: welcome culture), rising crime levels, loss of public spaces, and the slow collapse of the educational system.

So in these times I wonder what will remain of “the German” – “das Deutsche”, when there is no more Germany.

Well, for one thing, we will still have all the German writers and musicians of the past. And we will have many beautiful, untranslatable words and concepts.

In the last decades, Germans have practised a lot of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – another very German word.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung means coming to terms, and dealing, with your past.

As modern Germany is transforming into a propaganda-state, Vergangenheitsbewältigung has come to mean that anybody who disagrees with the official narrative – any Abweichler – is labelled a “Nazi”. This automatically confers upon the institutions of the propaganda-state the quasi-authority to combat the Abweichler with any means and weapons it deems necessary.

It is fortunate that German ideas and insights have fans and scholars outside of Germany.

Thoughts written in German, by German thinkers, have been among the most precise, and yes: human (menschlich) thoughts ever thought. I believe there is beauty and happiness to be found in precise thinking.

Beauty and happiness – or, as you would say in German: Schönheit und Glück – and isn‘t that what it is all about?