wanderlust

Wanderlust entered English from German, where it grew out of a nineteenth-century culture of walking. German Romantic writers and artists treated the journey on foot as a path to freedom and self-knowledge. Wilhelm Müller's poem “Das Wandern,” which Franz Schubert set to music in his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin in 1823, opens with the line “Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust,” or “Wandering is the miller's joy.” Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, from around 1818, became the visual emblem of that spirit.

The ideal had practical roots. For centuries, craftsmen in German-speaking lands completed their training with years on the road, known as the Wanderjahre or the Walz. Carpenters, masons, and other journeymen traveled from town to town to learn techniques from different masters, a custom still kept by a small number of German carpenters who wear traditional black corduroy suits. Around 1900 the Wandervogel youth movement, founded near Berlin, encouraged middle-class students to leave the city and hike through forests and hills.

In modern German, Wanderlust usually means simply an enjoyment of hiking. The word closer to the English sense is Fernweh, literally “farsickness,” an ache for distant places formed as the counterpart of Heimweh, “homesickness.” English speakers adopted wanderlust in the early 1900s and broadened it to cover any longing to travel, whether on foot, by ship, or by plane. It is one of several German loanwords whose meaning shifted after crossing into English.

Some writers have tried to link wanderlust to biology. A variant of the dopamine receptor gene DRD4, known as 7R, has been associated in a few studies with novelty-seeking behavior and with the distances early human populations migrated, and popular articles have called it the “wanderlust gene.” The evidence is limited and disputed. Most researchers treat the desire to travel as a product of personality, upbringing, money, opportunity, and culture rather than of any single gene.

In the twenty-first century the word became a staple of travel marketing and social media, where the hashtag #wanderlust accompanies millions of photographs of beaches, mountains, and city streets. Budget airlines, gap years, and remote work have made long-term travel possible for more people than ever before. Critics note that the same trend has contributed to overtourism in places such as Venice, Barcelona, and Bali, where crowds of visitors strain local housing, water supplies, and infrastructure. Writers have long examined the urge itself: Bruce Chatwin built his 1987 book The Songlines around the question of why human beings seem so compelled to keep moving.