Sehnsucht: How to Be Grateful for Suffering

Have you ever heard of the German word sehnsucht? I hadn’t, either. When I first heard it, I imagined it as the name of a German sewing machine company — a competitor of Pfaff, perhaps. Boy, was I wrong.

Instead, this word — just this one word and my search for its true meaning — has recently served as a kind of Rosetta stone for my soul. 

Through it, I have come to a deeper understanding of questions that previously baffled me — the purpose and meaning of human suffering, for example, and the crucial significance of literature, the creative arts, and music — and to my surprise, how these two aspects of life intimately relate to one another.  

Sehnsucht? Really? Still never heard of it? Allow me to explain, or at least try.

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If you’re an exclusively English speaker and never studied the Romantic period of history, you may never have encountered the word sehnsucht before. It originated in the middle-ages, then became a focus during the 19^th century when music, art, and literature attempted to capture its true spirit and significance. The quest of that period to express sehnsucht came to be labeled “romanticism,” not in the sense we mean today — like dating someone — but as the artistic expression that sought to preserve love for nature and the “ideal” in the face of the onslaught of industrialism. 

The word has inspired a plethora of creative treasures, from the music of Franz Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy to the books of C.S. Lewis. (There is even a literary journal devoted to his work named Sehnsucht). The poem Ode to Joy, written by the Romantic period poet Friedrich Schiller, inspired Beethoven to include it in his Ninth Symphony. In Germany, the word has continued to inspire. For example, the Neue Deutsche Härte band Rammstein has a 1997 album named “Sehnsucht.”

But this complex German word has no accurate single equivalent word in English. It denotes at the very least a trifecta of joy/sadness/and lonely longing, all at once. The longing is not for just anything, though — it is for a sense of the sublime.

Sublime really means something of “outstanding spiritual, intellectual or moral worth,” something “lofty, grand or exalted,” a “transcendent excellence” that points beyond mundane everyday life. 

Sehnsucht’s sublimity points to a deep but sometimes vague, lonely longing for something more, something greater than ourselves, more profound and meaningful than just normal daily existence. For example, Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Sehnsucht” begins: 

If I from this darkened valley
Where the gloomy vapors creep
Might by some wonder swiftly flee
My soul could blessedly weep!
Gazing upon this pure serene
Eternal hills through heaven fare,
Had I wings to climb this scene
My spirit would scale the air

But do not mistake sehnsucht’s stretching to the sublime as lightweight fluff or foolish sentimentality. Oh, no. The word is deeply rooted in the gritty reality of extreme suffering — with which it associates exquisite joy. Therein lies its magic. 

For me, Thomas Wolf explains it best in his 1941 essay God’s Lonely Man. Wolf begins by claiming he is an expert on being lonely because he has spent the majority of his life alone. He says, “To live alone as I have lived, a man should have the confidence of God, the tranquil faith of a monastic saint, the stern impregnability of Gibraltar.” He then explains his extreme suffering because he possesses none of these, and his stunningly prolific creative life is a study in emotional contradiction. 

Alone, he endures “the dark time” and “the huge, dark wall of loneliness” around him. As time “flows by him like a river,” “he waits in his little room like a creature held captive by an evil spell.” But then, his mood shifts, and “suddenly, one day, for no apparent reason,” life comes back in “a tidal flood,” and he can “plunge once more into the triumphant labor of creation.” 

Wolf compares his life to Job’s in the Bible. He describes the Book of Job as “The most tragic, sublime, and beautiful expression of human loneliness which I have ever read.”

When Job’s story begins, he and his life are perfect. He has it all: family, lots of children, land, and wealth. Then suddenly, violently, unpredictably, and for no apparent reason, he loses it all — and I mean all. On top of that, he becomes horribly sick, and then his friends blame him for all of it. 

Despite his suffering, Job remains steadfast in his belief in God, and thus has become a model for patience. But Wolf explains that the tale means so much more. Far from being the “dreary, gray, and dismal” story he regarded it as a child, he realizes it “wears at the heart of its tremendous chant of everlasting sorrow the exulting song of everlasting joy.” 

In other words, it is a perfect expression of sehnsucht. Wolf explained:

For the tragic writer knows that joy is rooted at the heart of sorrow, that ecstasy is shot through with the sudden crimson thread of pain, that the knife-thrust of intolerable desire and wild brief glory of possession are pierced most bitterly, at the very instant of man’s greatest victory, by the premonitory sense of loss and death. So seen and so felt, the best and the worst that the human heart can know are merely different aspects of the same thing, and are interwoven, both together, into the tragic web of life.

Wolf’s words hit me hard. 

It had taken me a long time to understand sehnsucht, many weeks of contemplation, listening to music, and reading poems and essays, but when I heard Wolf say that “the best and the worst the human heart can know are merely different aspects of the same thing,” I stopped dead in my tracks. I read it again and again, reminded of the Baha’i writings that speak so often of regarding suffering as a blessing — something I never really understood before. Wolf’s descriptions reminded me of this powerful passage from a talk in Paris given by Abdu’l-Baha, the son and successor of Baha’u’llah, the prophet and founder of the Baha’i Faith:

The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.

“The deeper the ground is ploughed, the better the seed will grow.” Yes, Wolf’s essay tells us that beautiful art can grow in this fertile ground of suffering. The suffering is necessary. In the case of Job, his story, which we have been reading for centuries, is the fruit of his suffering, and Wolf’s voluminous books and essays are the fruit of his. 

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Wolf’s essay also points us to another aspect of sehnsucht, the power of true art to lift both its creator and those who experience it to the elevated mental states from which the art itself emanated. Sublime art can lift us out of our mundane daily life to the plane of the eternal. Consider another profound passage from Abdu’l-Baha:

This life is like unto vapour in a desert, and the existence of every thing is as a mere illusion, evanescent and bound to extinction. That which endureth is the spiritual reality: it is the shining essence; it is life eternal; it is undisturbed felicity, unfading and perpetual, flourishing and plenteous … 

And the amazing thing is this, that the most effective means whereby this light of truth is safeguarded and protected is the onslaught of the enemies, grievous ordeals, and manifold hardships …

Therefore one must show forth gratitude in the face of Job-like afflictions and must evince joy and pleasure at the unyielding cruelty of evil-doers, inasmuch as such tribulations lead to immortality and serve as the supreme factor to attract His consummate blessings and infinite bestowals.

Sehnsucht. Now you’ve heard of it, so now you can name it, experience it, and try to understand it.