Waldeinsamkeit

What it means

You left the car at a forest car park in the Spessart at nine. By eleven the marked trail is behind you, the traffic noise from the valley road has gone, and the only sounds are a woodpecker and your own boots on beech leaves. You have not seen another person for two hours, and you do not want to. Waldeinsamkeit is that state: being alone in a forest, and finding the aloneness good.

It needs trees, distance from people, and some choice in the matter. A walker lost after dark feels fear, not Waldeinsamkeit. In the story that made the word famous the feeling also turns: a bird sings of forest solitude as a joy, then sings it again as something lost, and by the end the forest has become uncanny. The word kept both sides.

It is not an everyday word. Duden marks it “dichterisch”, poetic, and gives it one bar out of five for frequency; DWDS marks it “gehoben”, elevated. English lists of untranslatable words give it far more room than German speakers do. In 2009 the literary scholar Stefan Nienhaus wrote that it had disappeared from everyday speech, partly because car parks and waymarked trails had made the thing itself hard to find.

Where it comes from

The word joins Wald, “forest”, and Einsamkeit, “solitude” or “loneliness”, from einsam, “alone”. DWDS lists the variant Waldeseinsamkeit with the genitive -es-.

Ludwig Tieck put the word into Der blonde Eckbert, a literary fairy tale published in 1797 in the first volume of his Volksmährchen (Berlin, Nicolai). The Freies Deutsches Hochstift, which runs the German Romanticism Museum in Frankfurt, calls it the word Tieck created; Nienhaus calls it Tieck’s successful neologism. German Wikipedia dates its first appearance to 1796. In the story a magic bird’s song begins and ends with the word, and the song changes each time it returns. From Tieck it passed to Eichendorff, Heine and the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Tieck reused it as the title of a late novella in 1840.

How to use it

Nach drei Stunden ohne Wanderweg hatten wir endlich so etwas wie Waldeinsamkeit. (After three hours off the trail we finally had something like Waldeinsamkeit.) Elevated German used half-knowingly; the speaker is aware the word sounds like 1800.

The brochure promised Waldeinsamkeit and delivered a forest with a café every four kilometres. Ironic English, with the German noun capitalised as a borrowed label.

What it is not

Kenopsia. Kenopsia, John Koenig’s coinage, is the eeriness of a place built for crowds and standing empty: a school corridor in August, a stadium concourse at dawn. The emptiness is wrong, and that is the point. In Waldeinsamkeit the emptiness is right. A forest is meant to have no one in it, and the walker went there to be the only one.

Einsamkeit. Plain Einsamkeit covers both solitude and loneliness, including the unwanted kind in a city flat. Waldeinsamkeit narrows it to one setting and tilts it toward the chosen kind. A widower alone in his apartment feels Einsamkeit. The same man on a forest walk he looks forward to all week does not use that word for it.

In the wild

• Heinrich Heine, “Waldeinsamkeit”, a poem in Romanzero (Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 1851), in which the speaker flees human envy into the green Waldeinsamkeit.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Waldeinsamkeit”, a poem first printed in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1858.
• Ludwig Tieck, Waldeinsamkeit, a novella of 1840, collected in his Gesammelte Novellen (Breslau, 1842).