Or, on beyond Schadenfreude und Angst!
photo credit: only point five
I’ve always been an admirer of the German language if not exactly a proficient speaker/understander of same. The problem, as I see it, is that way back in junior high school when we began to take our foreign language studies seriously, my German teacher was a rather gravely voiced Romanian gentleman named Mr. P. Now you’d think, as my jr high school was actually in Germany we could have had a German teach us the language, but it was what it was.
Now although Mr. P was a very nice man with a good heart, he had two major strikes against him when it came to teaching me. One, he insisted on using terms like “dative” and “transitive” and “noun” as if I were supposed to know what those meant and secondly, for some reason he had a cassette tape recording of him telling the story of Vlad the Impaler that he’d play for his classes around Halloween, which scared me so badly that I never did get up the courage to ask what a nominative case was lest I find my head up on a fence pole somewhere.
Oh yes, and I forgot, he recorded video of me being completely chicken shit and refusing to cross this bridge with my classmates during a class trip to Garmisch and I will never forgive him if it shows up on YouTube.
Marienbrucke in the Bavarian Alps
So, while I did learn some of the essential German phrases like “Scheisse” and “noch ein bier, bitte” my German skills are shaky and it takes me forever to say anything because I’m scared to death I’ll nominate the dative and somehow wind up insulting somebody’s mother. Even still, I have a deep love for the German language because of artists like Falco and because of words like these:
Weltschmerz
Weltschmerz translated into English means world-pain or world-weariness.
As I contemplated the existence of Nickleback, Weltschmerz washed over me like so many cliches over the lead singer’s lips.
Sehnsucht
Sehnsucht is a kind of longing or yearning , or as C.S. Lewis put it an “incurable longing”
Every week I wander the grocery store aisles, heart heavy with Sehnsucht, knowing that I will never find anything that tastes as good as the anticipation of Twinkies did in my youth.
Gemütlichkeit
Gemütlichkeit is a feeling of sort of cozy happiness such as one finds when surrounded by friends in a familiar environment.
My life could be summed up as a fruitless search for Gemütlichkeit; when then would I find my Carla? My Norm? My Woody?
Futterneid
Futterneid is a feeling of jealousy about food, particularly that feeling one gets when one feels the food of another is superior.
I’d grown used to the Futterneid of my coworkers and learned to ignore the greedy looks that passed from their ham and cheese on wheat to my homemade spam musubi.
Groll
Groll a resentment or grudge.
I guess you could say I have a Groll against Ice Cube for “Are We There Yet?”
Konkurrenzeid
Konkurrenzeid - professional jealousy, as in you are jealous of/begrudge another’s career achievements, not that you are so good at jealousy that people pay you to do it.
My suspicion is that a lot of rappers had Konkurrenzeid against Biggie Smalls, being as how they were broke and he so paid, and that is one of the reasons he was shot.
I hope these examples help you to add more sparkle and flair to your writing by throwing in a bit of the Deutche Wortzschatz into your writing and speech. Do you think we would have considered Tim Gunn so darling had he not thrown Sturm und Drang into every other episode of Project Runway? Probably not, meine lieblings, nicht nein Frankenstein.
