The Local
Charlotte Hall
16:52 CEST
A weirdly specific term for an unusual spiritual connection to trees: of course the German language has a word for it.
The German language is full of oddly specific terminology. ‘Waldeinsamkeit’ is one of them.
It’s a compound word made of ‘der Wald’ (forest) and ‘die Einsamkeit’ (loneliness) that does what it says on the tin. It’s that feeling of calm solitude while walking through the woods on your own, one that might be all too familiar, by now, to those who’ve spent lock down near a forest, or any patch of greenery.
By Mike MacEacheran 15 March 2021
Everybody is at it in Germany. They re doing it in the trees in the Black Forest. Out in the magical Harz Mountains. In the national parks of Bavaria when silhouetted in the moonlight. And in the city centre woodlands of Berlin and Munich. Sometimes when completely nude, too.
This isn t a story about the sex lives of Germans or any other nationality, though. Instead, it s an exploration of the country s little-known love affair with something else entirely:
waldeinsamkeit, an archaic German term for the feeling of forest loneliness .
Germans have a wonderfully evocative dictionary of words with no direct English equivalent, with several descriptive if melancholic expressions all finding a home in conversation. There is