Schadenfreude

What it means

Traffic is stopped on the highway. A car passes everyone on the shoulder and forces its way back in at the front. A mile later it sits on the verge with a police car behind it, and you smile until the next exit. Schadenfreude is that pleasure in another person’s bad luck, sharpest when they seemed to have it coming.

Duden calls it malicious joy at another’s mishap or misfortune; DWDS puts it more mildly, as pleasure in it. The size of the harm sets the limit. A rival spilling coffee on a white shirt qualifies. A rival in hospital does not. The feeling also prefers to stay hidden. DWDS quotes Die Zeit in 1996: in some situations Schadenfreude is better felt “klammheimlich”, on the quiet, than in public.

It has been measured. A 2011 brain-imaging study by Cikara and colleagues scanned Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees fans. When the rival team struck out, activity rose in the ventral striatum, a region tied to self-reported pleasure.

Where it comes from

Schaden means damage, harm or misfortune. Freude means joy. DWDS dates the compound to the 16th century, together with the adjective schadenfroh, and glosses it as joy over harm that befalls others. It is plain German with no known coiner.

English began quoting it in the 19th century. Wikipedia records mentions in English texts in 1852 and 1867 and the first use in running English text in 1895. Wiktionary’s earliest English quotation is from 1897, Thomas Bailey Saunders’s translation of Schopenhauer, which calls Schadenfreude the worst trait in human nature. English has a seldom-used equivalent, epicaricacy, borrowed from the Greek epichairekakia, which goes back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Wiktionary suggests that an episode of The Simpsons took the German word mainstream.

How to use it

Als der Angeber beim Einparken die Mülltonne umgefahren hat, konnte ich mir die Schadenfreude nicht verkneifen. (When the show-off knocked over the bin while parking, I could not hold back my Schadenfreude.) Casual German, said with a grin rather than an apology.

There was some schadenfreude in the newsroom when the rival paper ran the wrong photo on its front page. Journalistic English, where the word is lower-case and treated as an ordinary English noun.

What it is not

Fremdschämen. The same scene can produce both feelings in different viewers. Schadenfreude enjoys the failure and keeps watching. Fremdschämen, which Duden defines as shame felt on another person’s behalf, suffers through it and looks away. Schadenfreude is easiest toward someone you resent. Fremdschämen works on strangers and on people you like.

Envy. Envy wants what the other person has. Schadenfreude is pleased when they lose it. The two often arrive together, and Aristotle paired them: in the Nicomachean Ethics epichairekakia stands opposite phthonos, envy. Schopenhauer, in a passage Wiktionary quotes, called envy human and Schadenfreude diabolical.

In the wild

• Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, 1924: DWDS cites a line in which a character accepts “die Schadenfreude, die sich darein mischte”, the Schadenfreude mixed into it.
• The Simpsons, “When Flanders Failed”, first aired 3 October 1991: Homer wishes Ned Flanders’s shop for left-handed people would fail, and Lisa scolds him for schadenfreude.
• Avenue Q, music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, Broadway 2003: Gary and Nicky sing “Schadenfreude” in Act II.