WordWealth: weltschmerz

Welt·schmerz , n. German.

Note carefully the pronunciation of this word

I looked around for the source of this heart-rending whimpering. It was me. My salad of pickled wild mushrooms was, our Swedish waitress explained, a speciality of her native land. If so, you wonder how far this saccharine horror - and nothing so trivial as lack of sunlight or a morose nature - explains the works of Strindberg. There he was, poised to write a light comedy of manners, when someone served him the pickled mushrooms. And then, bam! Doom, gloom and Weltschmerz all the way. —— We Don't Need No Reservation; Guardian; Nov 10, 2002

He doesn't start off with the confrontational confidence or insolence of Mr. Mitchell. There's a vulnerability, even a slight shakiness, right on the bespangled, bewigged surface of Mr. McGrath's Hedwig, so that when she announces to her audience that she's ''wide open,'' you don't just snicker. This is a Hedwig swimming in Weltschmerz, and the sparkling makeup on her lips, cheeks and eyelids suggests accumulated tears as it glistens in the light. —— Ben Brantley; Last Double-Entendre of a Gender Bender?; The New York Times; Jan 21, 2000

At first the police are of no help because they do not know about the psychopath; later they are of no help because they believe that David is dead. One exception is Angus West, the star of the Sherwood Police Department. He has retreated from Los Angeles, where he saw too much, where had he listened to a mother's intuitions he might have saved her daughter from death at the hands of a psychopath. Angus, in short, like every character of this sort since Jake Barnes, has a wound. He treats his wound in the usual way, with alcohol and Weltschmerz. He is big, blond, laconic, all man and divorced. He is even one-eighth Native American, Apache in fact. Who says you can't have everything? —— George Stade; How to Write a Movie, Even if You Call It a Novel; The New York Times; August 28, 1997

In his moving elegy for a planet under siege, Bill McKibben is absolutely correct in suggesting that we focus on the carbon-dioxide problem in the decades ahead. But I think his pessimism and eco-Weltschmerz is unwarranted when he dismisses the economic viability of hydrogen ("Changing basic fuels -- to hydrogen, say -- would be even more expensive. It's not like running out of white wine and switching to red"). —— Peter Hoffmann; Letters; The Atlantic; Sept 1998

In this show, the German painter Albert Oehlen makes spirited sport of old masterdom and art tradition. Eight self-portraits, ranging in date back to 1983, meld figuration with abstraction while referring to the work of past masters, among them Picasso, Velázquez and de Chirico.--The show begins with a rather conventional ''Self-Portrait With Open Mouth'' (2001), a big, beautifully rendered likeness whose vacant stare seems occasioned by a profound immersion in the world's weltschmerz.--Counteracting that is a wildly slapstick portrait with one eye and another with three (along with two noses and a double mouth), both from 1983, evoking Picasso. —— Grace Glueck; Albert Oehlen -- 'Self-Portraits'; The New York Times; Jan 25, 2002

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