![]() ![]() I yearned so hard – if that’s possible – that I could feel pangs of hunger and agony in my stomach. One of my early memories – maybe I was three or four – was standing on a hill in my neighbourhood in Dubuque, Iowa, surveying rolling streets and houses in the distance and yearning to see what was beyond. Without knowing it, many of us have probably experienced fernweh. ![]() Perhaps the rise of fernweh and the decline of wanderlust speaks to the emergence of the mass travel industry and the technological advancements that allowed us the ease of international travel. Its more than just a lust to be on the road it’s an actual aching or pain. Fernweh not only implies going beyond the borders of Germany, but journeying deep into other parts of the planet. No longer were wanderlust-fuelled jaunts into the forest enough for Germans. In the latter half of 20th Century, German travel agencies revived the word by using it in their advertisements to entice the German public to put their passports to use. But deep into the 20th Century, German usage of wanderlust faded, replaced instead by fernweh, a word that sounds decidedly unsexy compared to the word that begat it. Still, though the word wanderlust was a more popular part of the German lexicon at this point. In it, he uses the word fernweh several times, stating that he never suffers from homesickness, or heimweh, but instead suffers from the opposite affliction of fernweh.įernweh first appeared in English in Daniel Garrison Brinton’s 1902 book The Basis of Social Relation, in which the author described Fernweh as a deep desire or ache to travel or a “goading restlessness”. In 1835, Pückler-Muskau published The Penultimate Course of the World of Semilasso: Dream and Waking. A landscape gardener, Herr Pückler-Muskau also had been bitten by the travel bug and would end up publishing several books about his wanderings around Europe and North Africa (using the penname “Semilasso”). Most sources trace the word back to one Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau. What Japan can teach us about cleanliness.Fernweh actually grew out of wanderlust, a popular word in the 19th-Century German romantic movement which valued a love of nature that stemmed from a sudden Teutonic interest in exploring Central Europe’s forests and untrammelled landscapes. But these bland definitions are way off the mark. Often online English language dictionaries will define fernweh simply as “wanderlust” and then explain that it means a “desire to travel”. It’s an ache many of us have felt but hitherto we didn’t have a word to describe it. Think of it as the opposite of heimweh (homesickness). Marrying the words fern, or distance, and wehe, an ache or sickness, the word can be roughly translated as “distance sickening” or “far woe” – a pain to see far-flung places beyond our doorstep. Well, the Germans naturally have a word for that too. It’s a word so provocative to English speakers with a yen to see the world that we’ve borrowed it from the German and have taken it as our own.īut what if our lust for travel causes us a deep yearning pain, an ache that reminds us we have to get out and see the world? What if we’re trapped inside our homes because a virus has taken the Earth and its inhabitants hostage and we feel despair that we simply cannot travel at all? They gave us the word “wanderlust”, after all, which combines the German words wandern, meaning to “wander”, and lust, or “desire”. The more I traverse the globe, the more I realise that the Germans are the great travellers of the modern world.Īnd they have several words that reflect their love of exploration. Every time I feel like I’ve reached the most remote place I’ve ever travelled, I hear “Guten tag”, and see a German rounding the corner, nonchalantly strolling by like he or she went for a walk around in their Munich or Hamburg neighbourhood, got pleasantly lost, and somehow ended up here in the wilds of western Ethiopia or below the peaks the Bolivian Andes.
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