Think back to a fond time and place in your childhood — perhaps a stroll with a parent along a waved-washed beach. The memory is a happy (and likely idealized) one, but still tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that you can never go back.
It’s a complex emotion we know as nostalgia.
People experience it for their lost youth, first love and some even pine for a time they never experienced. That feeling is especially potent this time of year, as the holidays creep in.
As part of NPR’s Word of the Week series, we take a look at nostalgia, its origin and how it was transformed from a 17th century malady to a 21st century marketing strategy.
It started with homesick soldiers
During the 1600s, Europe was gripped by a series of major conflicts — the Thirty Years’ War, the Franco-Dutch War, the Nine Years’ War, and others. Switzerland, though largely neutral, became a key source of mercenaries. Many of those Swiss soldiers, far from home in unfamiliar lands, experienced an odd set of symptoms such as anxiety, irregular heartbeat, stomach pain, and melancholy first described in 1688 by the Alsatian medical student Johannes Hofer.
Jess Zafarris, the author of Useless Etymology, says Hofer attributed those symptoms to the soldiers’ longing for the Swiss Alps, labeling the condition heimwehe or
Once upon a time, nostalgia was epidemic among homesick soldiers
