Hello and welcome to the seventh issue of Place. Today we’re exploring the idea of fernweh, a German word with no exact English translation that describes a yearning for elsewhere, motivating its residents to explore far-flung corners of the world. With one of the strongest passports in the world, Germans have long traveled with fernweh lighting the way – but with travel restrictions in place and climate change on the horizon, journalist Konstanze Nastarowitz grapples with the idea that Germans might need to rethink their wanderlusting ways.
“It is possible to discover something new and surprising close to your own neighbourhood,” she found, looking forward to paddling a rubber dinghy around Hamburg’s canals.
And as a reminder from yesterday’s email, this weekend head over to our instagram @placenewsletter as New York-based writer and photographer Giannella M. Garrett takes over our visual space, and shares her reflections about joining Black Lives Matter protests late in life, as a biracial woman who grew up during the civil rights movement.
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our inaugural pitch guide here. And be sure to follow us on Instagram @placenewsletter for a daily visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team.
Travel without distance
Once in New York City, I went on a sightseeing tour with another German, only to find that half our group was also from Germany, including one family from the same small town as my friend. This isn’t uncommon. On a trip to Morocco with my boyfriend, we were making our way to Chefchaouen, a small mountain city famous for its blue painted walls, when we found that all the buses were booked out. After waiting at the bus station for a couple of hours for someone we could share the costs of a cross-country taxi with, we found (of course) two more Germans. It’s a small world when you are Deutsch.
Many Germans enjoy being somewhere else. We love to be away. Only China and the US beat us when it comes to international travel to cities around the world, and our population is only a fraction of both.
This longing to be somewhere else is so ensconced in German culture, we have our own word to describe the feeling: fernweh. To me, it describes this tickling desire to be far away. The word is made up of two components: “fern” which expresses something like “far” or “distant,” and “weh” which can be translated to something close to the English word “woe,” maybe even “ache.” Fernweh is the opposite of feeling homesick. It is the feeling I get when walking by glossy cruise ship advertisements in the shop window of a travel agency or while looking at travel bloggers’ posts on Instagram. So many places waiting to be discovered.
The closest to a direct English translation for fernweh is the word “wanderlust” (which again has German origins: “wandern,” to wander and “lust,” desire). Fernweh and wanderlust are very similar and may sometimes be used interchangeably. But their sounds and components make me believe that they express two different feelings brought about by the idea of travel.
Wanderlust connotes the pleasure and desire of movement itself — to “wander” on an adventure or journey, to maintain kinetic action through space. When I told my mother that I was writing this essay, she pulled out an old German song book with traditional German songs about the pleasure of wandering and the singers’ feeling of a “burn in the traveling boots.”
Fernweh, on the other hand, implies a longing for a certain sense of place. The main requirement? That it is not where you are right now and that it is fern — far.
But since the pandemic hit the world in 2020, our collective fernweh has been locked away.
When the news broke in early spring that the borders would be closing due to Covid-19, the German Federal Foreign Office had to pull off what they labeled Germany’s “largest repatriation effort in history.” Hundreds of planes were sent to bring German nationals all around the globe back home. Over 240,000 Germans from New Zealand to Argentina packed onto flights — the foreign office even stretched its repatriation arm as far as 16,800 km to pluck travellers from the beaches of Tonga, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands. We were everywhere.
With each passing week of lockdown, the feeling of fernweh grew stronger and stronger. It drew me to go through old pictures of my trip to New York, if only to remind myself that traveling was once possible and soon would be again. Meanwhile, my selection of blue Lonely Planet guides seemed to glare at me from my dusty bookcase. The German government seemingly anticipated that its citizens would get restless — in the areas close to the North Sea and Baltic Sea, police controls were temporarily installed to make sure German nationals wouldn't try a quick escape to one of the areas’ many islands. The question of summer holiday planning was frequently discussed on national media, and among friends and families. When would we travel again?
Distances started to feel different. A short work trip to another city felt like a long journey. I remember being on the motorway, passing by endless fields of yellow rapeseed on my way to an interview. I stared at those fields from the car, feeling free for the first time in weeks. All of a sudden, rapeseed fields felt foreign and new. Even just arriving in a different German city for a couple of hours satisfied my longing for a different place — my fernweh.
Although domestic tourism in Germany was high before the pandemic began, my generation in particular has always preferred to travel further away. For many of us, a getaway to a picturesque German town or a bicycle tour did not cut it. Have we really been traveling if we were only traveling within our own country? How adventurous is a trip that only takes us from one federal state to the other?.
We are looking for a story to tell, and our benchmarks for a “true” travel adventure were high.
Now, after months in isolation, Germans are starting to tell a different story. Europe is slowly starting to open up and tourism is becoming a real possibility. But it feels like things have changed. My Instagram feed is now flooded with travel advertisements for holidays within Germany, from boat trips on German rivers to hikes through the German Alps. My friends are checking out camp sites on islands at the North Sea and Baltic Sea (currently all booked out) and renting cabins in the Bavarian countryside.
One of my closest friends had planned to be in Italy this spring, indulging in cacio e pepe and glasses of Sangiovese, taking the train from one charming little town to the next. Instead, she spent her holidays in a borrowed camping van at the breezy shores of the German North Sea. She told me about cozy rainy nights spent in the camper van and recounted calming walks along the beach with her friend. She liked it.
Maybe Covid-19 has taught my generation that this tickling desire to be far away can be satisfied differently. Instead of wanting to be fern (far) many of us are now longing to simply escape our daily routine, whether with a visit to the Alpine mountains in Bavaria or a trip to the blue Baltic Sea with its cold frothing waves. And isn’t that what traveling is about?
Maybe we are getting back to the essence of travel, stripped of the privileged veil of distance. Sure, fernweh and wanderlust are old German words, evidence of a long history of love for travel, but my parents traveled much closer to home when they were my age. My generation’s understanding of fernweh, of travel and tourism and open borders, has been facilitated by technological advancements, political privileges, and a certain standard of living.
The German passport is one of the most powerful passports in the world, offering entry to 189 countries without a prior visa, a mere one or two less than the top spots given to Japan and Singapore. This means Germans have been able to fulfill their fernweh without administrative hurdles, without the pain or shame of asking for permission. As a member of the European Union, Germans also enjoy the free movement among member states, so naturally many of us did not even understand the concept of a real border between two countries until the pandemic closed them shut. While extensive international travel is not a given for many less affluent German families, the amount of our international tourism spending reveals that not only do we love to travel, but that many of us can afford to.
Fernweh is a feeling. Experiencing it may not be a privilege, but being able to fulfill it is.
Interestingly, fernweh’s more globally accepted counterpart, wanderlust, does not have distance in its definition. Maybe the German wanderer in my mother’s old songbook satisfied his “traveling fever” closer to home?
This conversation has been ruminating in the back of my mind even before Covid-19. As an affluent nation, we travel so frequently that our environmental footprint has only grown bigger and bigger, slowly taking its toll on the world. Cruise ships, for one, have been heavily criticized for their use of heavy fuel oil, problematic waste management and pollution of coastal cities. But Germans love their cruise ships, we even watch entire TV series set on German cruise ships traveling the world.
Long-haul flights have their own detriments; a round trip from Berlin to New York’s JFK airport has a climate impact of 3,158 kg CO2 per person, according to the organization Atmosfair, while the climate compatible annual emissions budget for one person is only 2,300kg CO2.
Already conversations with my friends about future vacations were hedged with plans for bus and train travel, carbon offsets and Greta Thunberg’s latest speech. But still, it is difficult to let that adventure go, when we had grown up with that style of travel for so long, and believed it to be the only true expression of fernweh. Covid-19, however, grounded our planes and cancelled our trips, without regard for our whims and desires. It left us no choice but to stay on the ground. In the long run, climate change won’t either. If Germans want to live up to our green ideals, it’s going to mean reckoning with our long-unquestioned cultural values and how our love of travel has been at the expense of the rest of the world’s health.
It’s not going to be easy to redefine fernweh. But the circumstances of the last couple of months have proven one very powerful fact: It is possible.
It is possible to travel within Germany and to feel happy and fulfilled at the same time. It is possible to discover something new and surprising close to your own neighbourhood. It is possible to develop a sense of freedom and fulfil your fernweh without having to book the next long distance flight. We do not need to fly.
I hope that this experience signals the beginning of a rethinking process within my travel-obsessed generation. A rethinking process of our privileges, including our environmental footprint.
To start off my own traveling again, I recently bought a rubber dinghy. I live close to a system of canals in Hamburg and from my balcony, I’ve observed more and more colourful portable boats exploring the city from its waterways. Another display of how Germans love to move and travel. This year I’m satisfying my wanderlust closer to home, from the soft and squeaking confines of a rubber dinghy floating through my own city. And to my own surprise, I’m excited.
- Konstanze Nastarowitz is a German broadcast journalist. She’s studied international relations and international journalism in Germany, Turkey and Denmark. With illustrations by Kylee Pedersen.
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Join us next week as contributor Gloria Kimbulu discovers a deep connection to her Congolese heritage on a trip to Cuba.