There are times when a vision of a beautiful life is as clear in our minds as is it unattainable in the world beyond our fantasies. These are the times of sehnsucht, an emotion known to the Germans, described to me as an “intimate desire for people, things, conditions or periods of time” that may never be realized.
Felt with too much intensity to be dismissed as merely wistful, sehnsucht wrenches at the heart with its power. It may accompany viraag, the suffering that comes from separation from a loved one, but is a step to the side of it, as a yearning itself rather than the pain that the yearning arouses.
Sehnsucht is associated with addiction, the desperate pursuit of a wonderful pleasure that slips through one’s fingers almost as soon as it is obtained, if it ever comes within grasp at all.
Sehnsucht overlaps with the French douleur exquise, the glorious pain that comes along with a romantic passion that will never be fulfilled. Both avoid the cynical alternative of sour grapes, the reassessment that one’s former object of desire turns out not to be desirable after all. Sehnsucht, like all addictions, is not so easily dismissed as a momentary hunger.
Speakers of the German language acknowledge that sehnsucht is similar to the emotion we know as longing, but insist that it is distinct from that feeling, and more specific.
Though sehnsucht contains some aspect of longing, can we then say that sehnsucht is merely one kind of longing? Emotions seem more subtle and tricky than such a definite conclusion would imply. Emotions are a kind of experience we sense directly, unable to measure with any external objective measurement.
Besides, the mixture of emotions seems to provoke some kind of transformation in their nature. They can’t merely be added together like numbers on a math worksheet. Just as green is a mixture of yellow and blue yet is qualitatively distinct from both yellow and blue, senhsucht has longing within it, but cannot be reduced to what speakers of English refer to when they use the word “longing”.
This is what Germans say about sehnsucht.
As I was writing this, my son asked “If this sehnsucht emotion is stronger than longing, isn’t it just the feeling that we in English refer to as craving?”
My first response to him was that German friends tell me that sehnsucht is not the same as craving. With every English word I offer that might get close to representing the feeling of sehnsucht, they say to me that no, these words don’t quite get to the essence of sehnsucht.
The fact that these German speakers insist upon this distinction is important in itself. I propose that, as a matter of principle, when members of a particular culture tell us that their language includes a concept that is not represented by any of our own words, we ought to believe them.
Emotion, after all, is about a person’s own subjective experience. How could anyone else tell someone else that they’re wrong in the way they describe the way they feel? How could they know whether another person’s emotions are genuine and valid?
Far too often, people sneer and judge those who feel emotions intensely, as if feelings are flaws of character that a strong, disciplined rationality would not allow. In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for example, Marianne Dashwood is ostracized for openly displaying a socially unacceptable level of emotional pain in response to her sudden estrangement from her beloved, John Willoughby. She is so consumed by her desire to regain the closeness she once felt with him that she disregards all other concerns, such as propriety and self-protection, as unworthy distractions from her passion. She begins to waste away as a result, becoming physically weakened to such an extent that she nearly dies of fever.
This is the emotional flavor that sets sehnsucht apart from mere longing or craving: A yearning so singular that nothing else seems to matter, leading to a neglect of other necessary hungers even to the point of self-destruction. Marianne Dashwood’s feeling is not really so dainty and abstract as the word sensibility implies. If Jane Austen had been willing to publish a book with a German word in its title, she might have more aptly called her work Sense and Sehnsucht.
