Schadenfreude (by Heather)

Use the idea of schadenfreude in your story this week.

I am about to come out of the closet.

Schadenfreude (meaning to take pleasure in another person’s troubles, for those of you who haven’t an unkind bone in your body) is not just a remote German concept to me – it’s a way of being. I can’t imagine a more horrible or socially unacceptable thing, but there you are. I’m a schadenfreuder.

I can’t help it. I’m German. Well, at least I’m one quarter German. My father was one half German and he was about twice as naughty as I am. My grandmother was ALL German and she was total mischief.

You’ve probably heard me speak reverently about my father, who I idolised (and still do). However, you may NOT have heard the story about one Easter when he was fourteen and his sister six. On the evening before Easter Sunday he put out a trap and told his little sister to her horror that he was going to catch the Easter bunny. After bedtime, he took out his rifle and bagged a rabbit. He then carefully placed it in a trap for his worried little sister to find on Easter morning. There was apparently quite a furore about that incident. Not everyone in the family took such pleasure as he did in my aunt’s wails of distress and loss of innocence.

I myself was brought into the Schadenfreude fold early. I remember being very small, and having my Grandmother teach me how to make the sign of the cross on my chest at mealtime. She would have been quite aware that my mother was violently anti-Catholic and that it would create some distress all around when I demonstrated my new-found skill at the dinner table. There’d have been a gleam in her eye as she sent me home that day.

But my grandmother may have realised she’d met her match when a few months later (I was 3 at the time) I literally pulled the chair out from under her. She was partly crippled and zipped about the house on a wooden kitchen chair that had had wheels drilled into its legs. She was not a little woman. I have a clear image of standing there behind her, looking up through the spokes of the back of her chair, and thinking that if I rolled the chair away, she’d go to sit down and, as there’d be no chair there, she’d fall in a great funny crash. That’s pretty much how it happened, and I remember scooting under the kitchen table to wait, thumb in mouth, for the furore to die down.

Shadenfreude continued to play itself out in my life on a pretty much daily basis after that. Over the years, I have taken it to an art form. I well remember a time when my six year old son was rocketing about his grandmother’s gardens, putting his new runners to the test. While I watched, he spun on his heel and shot across the lawn, obviously intending to leap over the little hedge. What he had forgotten is that a fairly steep cliff riddled with blackberries lay on the other side. He soared through the air and, as he suddenly saw the perils below him, did a kind of Wiley Coyote thing where he tried to stop in mid-air. As I watched him, powerless to do anything, I felt something snap inside. Before I knew it I was shrieking with laughter and rolling about so hard I couldn’t be part of the delegation that went down to rescue him.

I have to admit, I still can’t help grinning at the thought of it.

I had a similar experience a few years later when my husband Rick was playing volleyball in a friend’s big back yard. Someone lobbed the ball far out of play, and Rick went running after it. Backwards. And downhill. He was reversing straight toward a low lying shrub. When he connected with it, he did a perfect backward somersault right over it. That thing in my chest constricted and then snapped again. I’m sure I waited until I saw he was alive and in one piece before going hysterical with laughter.

Well. Here I am, out of the closet and feeling a bit of relief about it. Eighty-two million Germans can’t be wrong (and that’s not even counting all the one-quarter Germans like myself) – there is joy to be had in practically anything – but in particular the misfortune of others.