Fernweh

What it means

You are at Frankfurt airport to collect your aunt from the Munich flight. The departures board lists Windhoek, Montevideo, Ulaanbaatar. For a minute you would trade her arrival for any of them. Fernweh is that pull toward a place you have never seen: an ache for the far away, where homesickness aches for home.

The object can stay vague. Fernweh needs no plan, no ticket and no named country, and it does not depend on having travelled before. It is strongest at home, among familiar things. A trip does not cure it for long. DWDS gives a sailor’s example: once you have been ashore a while, the Fernweh grabs you again. The verb there is packen, to grab.

Duden defines it as longing for distance and for faraway countries, and marks it “gehoben”, a high register rather than slang.

Where it comes from

Fern means far or distant. Weh means ache or pain, the same Weh as in Heimweh, homesickness. German Wikipedia states that the word was formed by analogy with the older Heimweh, with the direction reversed: one pulls you back, the other pulls you out.

The coinage is credited to Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, who used it several times in widely read travel books from 1835 on, beginning with Vorletzter Weltgang von Semilasso. Wikipedia’s source is Friedrich Kluge’s 1901 history of the word Heimweh. By 1843 another writer could report that Pückler claimed never to suffer from Heimweh, only from Fernweh. In an 1875 novel the word is still set in quotation marks.

How to use it

Jedes Jahr im Februar packt mich das Fernweh, und ich schaue mir Flüge nach Lissabon an. (Every February the Fernweh grabs me, and I look at flights to Lisbon.) Everyday German, with the verb from the DWDS example, packen.

Three weeks into the new job, with the office window facing a car park, I had Fernweh so badly I bought a world atlas. Casual English with the German noun as a borrowed label, capitalised as in German.

What it is not

Wanderlust. Wanderlust is also German, from wandern and Lust, and DWDS defines it as the desire to go walking or roaming. It is an appetite for movement: boots, a road, the next hill. Fernweh is an ache about distance itself, and the Weh keeps pain in it. English Wiktionary glosses Fernweh simply as wanderlust, and the two are easily swapped.

Hiraeth. The Welsh word looks backward. The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru defines it first as grief or sadness for the lost or departed. A Welshman in Toronto feels hiraeth for the town he left. A teenager in Bielefeld who has never left Germany feels Fernweh for Patagonia. One wants something back; the other wants something it never had.

In the wild

• Ferdinande von Brackel, Die Tochter des Kunstreiters, 1875: asked about Heimweh, a character answers that the truth is the opposite, »Fernweh«, and that the ground burns underfoot.
• Anna Seghers, Transit (Luchterhand edition, 1963; first published 1947): the narrator’s heart contracts with a “schmerzlich freudigem Fernweh”, a painfully joyful Fernweh.
• Bernhard Schlink, Die Heimkehr, 2006: Heimweh and Fernweh blow through the soldiers’ hearts.
• Wladimir Kaminer, Liebesgrüße aus Deutschland, 2013: a character tells Spaniards about Fernweh, a feeling they knew without having a name for it.