weltschmerz

noun

1. (uncountable)An apathetic or pessimistic view of life; depression concerning or discomfort with the human condition or state of the world; mal du siècle, world-weariness.

   “And in this respect [Ludwig] Uhland presents a marked and useful contrast to the lackadaisical, sentimental, Weltschmerz school, the poets of which trade on their own pretended misery, and, cunningly enough, suggest that their poems must be touching and true in proportion as the authors set themselves forth as peculiarly skilled in bitterness of heart and badness of life.”

   “The artificial woe of the ancient armorist, whose days were a perpetual honeyed despair and his nights one long lachrymose vigil, is an extinct literary tradition; but a new, a different, and, alas! a more real sadness has taken its place—the modern world-sadness, the Weltschmerz, which infects all we do and are, not excepting our love-making— […]”

   “Here we have it at once, blended though it may be with the new elements of purging humour and all-embracing Weltschmerz, in [William] Shakespeare's Hamlet.”

   “[Henry] Koerner's painting did have the heaviness, the harsh humor and the all-pervading weltschmerz which characterized German expressionism in the 1920s.”

2. (alt-of, uncountable)Alternative letter-case form of Weltschmerz.

   “[Henry] Koerner's painting did have the heaviness, the harsh humor and the all-pervading weltschmerz which characterized German expressionism in the 1920s.”

   “Execution, the band's second record, burns with intense weltschmerz, its existential crises cloaked in buoyant instrumental hooks and shimmery arrangements.”