Angst

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The factual accuracy of this article is disputed.

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2007)

For other uses, see Angst (disambiguation).

Image:The Scream.jpg

The Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch.

Angst or anguish is a Germanic word for fear or anxiety. It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of emotional strife. In German, it is the fear of possible suffering and a behavior resulting from uncertainty and strain which is caused by pain, loss, and death. The term Angst distinguishes itself from the word Furcht (German for "fear") in that Furcht usually refers to a material threat (arranged fear), while Angst is usually a nondirectional emotion.

In other languages having the meaning of the Latin word anxietas and pavor, the derived words differ in meaning, e.g as in the French anxieté and peur.

The word Angst has existed since the 8th century, coming from the base-Indoeuropean *anghu-, "restraint" from which Old High German angust develops. It is pre-cognate with the Latin angustia, "tensity, tightness" and angor, "choking, clogging"; compare to the Greek "άγχος" (ankhos): stress.

A different but related meaning is attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard used the word Angest (Danish, meaning "dread") to describe a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and despair in the free human being. Where the animal is a slave to its instincts but always confident in its own actions, Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to mankind leaves the human in a constant fear of failing its responsibilities to God. Kierkegaard's concept of angst is considered to be an important stepping stone for 20th-century existentialism. While Kierkegaard's feeling of angst is fear of actual responsibility to God, in modern use, angst is broadened to include general frustration associated with the conflict between actual responsibilities to self, one's principles, and others (possibly including God). Still, the angst in alternative music may be more accessible to more audiences than existentialism. The term "angst" is now widely used as a theme by many great modern writers. Often, the expression is used as a common adolescent experience of malaise, as in J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye; in this sense it has become one of the central themes in modern fiction.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] "Teenage angst" and popular music

Angst, in contemporary connotative use, most often describes the intense frustration and other related emotions of teenagers and the mood of the music and art with which they identify. Punk rock, grunge, nu metal, emo and virtually any alternative rock dramatically combining elements of discord, melancholy and excitement may be said to express angst.

Angst was probably first discussed in relation to contemporary music in the mid to late 1950s in relation to music favoured by people influenced by the campaign for nuclear disarmament, especially jazz and folk. Songs like Bob Dylan's 1963 Masters of War and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall articulated the dread caused by the threat of nuclear extinction. A key text is Jeff Nuttall's book Bomb Culture (1968) which traced this pervasive theme in popular culture back to Hiroshima.

In the 1980s "teen angst" was expressed in music to a certain extent in the rise of punk, post punk, and alternative music with which it is currently more associated. It was probably first used in reference to the grunge movement and the band Nirvana. Nirvana themselves seem to have been aware of this, as evidenced by the first line of "Serve the Servants" in which Kurt Cobain describes the success of writing songs dealing with the subject (Teenage angst has paid off well | Now I'm bored and old...).