While reading a great article from the amazing website White Noise- "Far Away From Here" by Teju Cole (http://www.whitenoise.city/articles/teju-cole-known-strange-things-switzerland-photography-familiar-unfamiliar-landscape) a paragraph got me thinking:
"Heimweh, having been absorbed into standard German, acquired an antonym, fernweh. Fernweh is a longing to be away from home, a desire to be in faraway places. Fernweh is similar to wanderlust but, like heimweh, has a sickish, melancholy tinge. Wanderlust is rooted in the German Romantic tradition and is strongly tied to walking out in nature. Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings of a lone hiker in spectacular landscapes, communing with the overwhelming greatness and intricacy of nature. Fernweh is a bit more imprecise."
It was a few days after I recorded the Growing Up With Shanghai- Wuchang Lu walk where we walked through a neighborhood that was largely demolished save a few souls still clinging to their home in the hopes for.... for... And it was this thought that got me thinking. What dreams could they have? We walked by an open door and out of the corner of my eye I spied an old man slightly setback from the doorway, half in the dark. I wondered what could he have been waiting for? The typical answer to this is ‘money’, and is why most people leave in the beginning, but why wait so long living on the edge of such squalid conditions, there must be any number of typical reasons. I wanted to begin a project that examined the dreams that these people could have, the dreams and promise of a better life in a newer, better place- both its truths and illusions; their ‘Fernweh’ or from one of my interpretations, their dream to leave.
Cole’s description of ‘Fernweh’ is quite basic but the wording in comparing Wanderlust and ‘Fernweh’ left me wanting more. I recently contacted a person via Soundcloud Martin Kuroczik (@shanghaicoyote) a native German that made field recordings in Shanghai and we arranged a meet to talk some shop and get to know each other. I asked him via Wechat what he thought the definition of ‘Heimweh’ and ‘Fernweh’ was. ‘Hiemweh’ (homesickness) is an emotion that I, and most of us, have experienced at one time or another and is quite commonly used in English. It’s antonym however has a much rarer usage- if at all in English. If it is not ‘wanderlust’, what feeling was it? When had I ever experienced it? Is it something these people could be experiencing? I needed more insight.
What resulted was several short excerpts from Martin @ 1 minute each (the Max. length of time a single voice message can be sent in Wechat) totaling about 10 minutes. It was amazing and opened so many more doors of interpretation for me.
In Martin’s description, I felt that he too was trying to define it for himself. What I especially like was that he went so far as to think about the time at which the terms were first used during the era of Romanticism, which glorified the past and revered nature as a reaction against the progress of the Industrial Revolution that was also happening at that time. Martin mentions that the meaning of the word may have been used differently back then that it is today, when distances have become less with the airplane, car and other modern inventions, and is curious how it fits in to a modern context. He mentions that ‘Fernweh’ may be a longing for a fantastic place that doesn’t exist or that is too impossible to imagine… See what I mean?
But one man’s definition does not paint a complete picture. I would like to invite more people to give their definition of ‘Fernweh’ to help me define this term for my project. Could this definition explain what that man could be thinking? Can it be defined? Should it? Is the meaning and experience of ‘Fernweh’ different for everybody?
Have a listen and discuss.
