Intercultural Issue: The german concept of "Fremdschämen" Hi everyone, This notebook entry is not really supposed to be a language exercise but more of an open question concerning a german cultural concept. But even though i'm more interested in what you have to say about the topic itself, i'll nevertheless be grateful for language related corrections as well. So, in this entry i'd like to talk about a contemporary german concept which we call "Fremdschämen" (which roughly translates to: feeling embarrassment for a stranger's behaviour). It describes the state of feeling ashamed and embarrased for some reason while watching someone who is embarrassing himself (often without being aware of it). So even though you actually have no reason to be ashamed because it's after all not you who is doing something embarrasing, you still have that feeling and it's sometimes so intense you have to turn your eyes off the scene which is cause to the embarrassement. It is not quite like the concept of "Schadenfreude" which you might heard of. "Schadenfreude" means to feel secretly delighted with someone else's failure because the other person's failure makes you feel less inferior. "Fremdschämen" kind of means that you emphatically put yourself in the other person's position and imagine what it would mean to be exposed to that kind of embarrassement. Consequently there is a feeling of pity for the person and you feel the embarrassement almost as if it was your own. I guess this kind of feeling always existed in german culture, but it's only recently (sometime within the last ten years) that we developed a term for it. Before that people would just say something like "Das kann man ja nicht mit anschauen." ("I can't take watching this"). I suppose that the developement and definition of the term is somehow connected to german tv culture, which increasingly adopted talkshows and reality shows over the last ten to twenty years. Obviously these kind of shows give a lot of opportunity to feel ashamed for other people. What i was wondering about is if you experience similar feelings while watching someone else's embarrassement. Does this feeling have a name in your culture and if so what do you call it? What is your general impression of this kind of cultural concept? What do you think does it reveal about a culture? Thanks to everyone who took the time to read this and especially to those who'll take the effort of writing an answer ;)