Sehnsucht

What it means

A song you knew at sixteen comes on in a supermarket aisle. For three minutes you want something badly: not the year, not the person you were with, but something behind both. Then the song ends and you are holding a bag of rice. Sehnsucht is that wanting, an ache for something absent, distant or never quite named.

Duden defines it as heartfelt, painful desire for someone or something missed or far away, and gives the plural Sehnsüchte. The object can be specific, as in Sehnsucht nach der Heimat, longing for home. It can also stay open. Duden’s sample adjectives run from brennend, burning, to unbestimmt, indefinite. What separates it from plain wanting is the pain, which the word carries in its second half.

The word also has a research literature. For a 2007 paper in Developmental Psychology, Susanne Scheibe, Alexandra Freund and Paul Baltes surveyed 299 adults aged 19 to 81 and treated Sehnsucht as longing for an optimal, utopian version of one’s life. Life longings gave people direction, but frequent intense ones went with lower well-being, unless people felt they could control them.

Where it comes from

The first part is the verb sehnen, to long for. DWDS traces it to Middle High German senen, to grieve or to suffer painful desire, and calls its deeper origin uncertain. The second part is Sucht, which now means addiction but originally meant illness. DWDS connects it to siech, sickly, and says it is not related to suchen, to search; the modern sense of craving grew under that unrelated verb’s influence.

Middle High German already had the compound, sensuht. DWDS says it was first imagined as a tormenting, painful illness, and records a companion adjective, senesiech, sick with longing. Read literally, Sehnsucht is longing-sickness. The adjective sehnsüchtig followed in the 17th century.

How to use it

Ich habe Sehnsucht nach dir. (I miss you; literally, I have longing for you.) Intimate everyday German, with nach for the person or place missed.

The slow movement has a Sehnsucht in it that the rest of the symphony never settles. Literary English, matching Wiktionary’s label for the borrowed noun.

What it is not

Fernweh. Fernweh has a direction: outward, toward places on a map you have not seen. Sehnsucht has no required direction or object. It can point at a person, at the past, at a future life, or at nothing that could be found. Duden defines Fernweh as Sehnsucht for distance and faraway countries, which makes Fernweh one kind of Sehnsucht, the kind with a destination.

Hiraeth. The Welsh word is anchored in loss. The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru gives its first sense as grief or sadness for the lost or departed, and its early citations mourn dead warriors and absent companions. Sehnsucht does not need anything to have been lost first. Its object may never have existed. C. S. Lewis used it for an “inconsolable longing” that he came to read as a signpost toward Christianity.

In the wild

• C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1955: Lewis builds his memoir around what he calls “Joy”, which he describes as his best translation of the German Sehnsucht.
• Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal, a peer-reviewed journal on Lewis’s work, founded in 2007 by the Arizona C. S. Lewis Society.
• Rammstein, Sehnsucht, released 22 August 1997: the band’s second album, and the only album entirely in German certified platinum by the RIAA in the US.