Fremdschämen

What it means

A best man reads a speech that was funny at the bachelor party. Nobody laughs. He reads the next joke anyway, and you study the tablecloth. That is Fremdschämen: shame you feel on someone else’s behalf, for something they did and you only watched.

The feeling needs two conditions. The other person has to be exposed in public, and they have to be unaware of it, or at least unable to stop. English Wiktionary’s gloss of the verb includes exactly that clause: embarrassed because someone else has embarrassed themselves and does not notice. If they notice and laugh at themselves, it dissolves. It needs no relationship at all. The 2011 study that took the feeling into a brain scanner opened with television talent shows such as Pop Idol, where millions watch strangers fail.

The verb is reflexive, sich fremdschämen: er schämt sich fremd, he feels it; er hat sich fremdgeschämt, he felt it. Duden marks it colloquial. The noun is the verb with das in front, and a related noun, die Fremdscham, names the same feeling as a state rather than an act.

Where it comes from

The word joins fremd, “foreign” or “belonging to someone else”, to schämen, “to be ashamed”. The parts are old; the compound is not. German Wiktionary dates its use to the first decade of the 21st century. Duden notes that it first appeared in its spelling dictionary in 2009. A year later, in December 2010, a jury led by a Graz professor named fremdschämen Austria’s word of the year.

German had no single word for this before. Spanish did: sentir vergüenza ajena, to feel someone else’s shame. Swedish uses a phrase, skämmas å någons vägnar, to be ashamed on someone’s behalf. English settled for “secondhand embarrassment” or “vicarious embarrassment”, and Wiktionary also offers “to cringe”.

How to use it

Ich habe mich beim Firmenkaraoke so fremdgeschämt, dass ich früher gegangen bin. (I felt so much secondhand embarrassment at the office karaoke that I left early.) Casual German; the past participle is fremdgeschämt, with ge- inside the compound.

The second season is pure Fremdschämen, and I watched every episode. Casual English with the German noun as a borrowed label, capitalised like a German noun.

What it is not

Schadenfreude. Duden defines Schadenfreude as malicious joy at another’s misfortune. Fremdschämen suffers through the misfortune instead. The same scene can produce both, in different viewers: the rival smiles at the failed speech, the friend looks at the tablecloth. The tell is the body. Schadenfreude leans in; Fremdschämen turns away.

Ordinary embarrassment. Embarrassment is about your own exposure. In Fremdschämen you have done nothing, nobody is looking at you, and you blush anyway. The 2011 study found that watching others’ social blunders activated the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula, regions also involved in processing other people’s pain, and more strongly in people who scored higher on empathy.

In the wild

• Sören Krach and colleagues, Philipps University Marburg, “Your Flaws Are My Pain: Linking Empathy to Vicarious Embarrassment”, PLoS ONE, 2011. The paper names the German concept, Fremdscham, in its introduction.
• Stromberg (ProSieben, 2004 to 2012), the German adaptation of The Office. Its star, Christoph Maria Herbst, liked to describe the viewer’s relationship to his character with the word fremdschämen, and in 2014 Moviepilot credited the series with making the word common.