Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For

by Rebecca Schuman

You know that feeling you get watching a pompous jerk whine into his cell as he’s booted out of a restaurant? When the elevator doors slide shut just before your sadistic boss can step in beside you? There’s a word for this mix of malice and joy, and the Germans (of course) invented it. It’s Schadenfreude, deriving pleasure from others’ misfortune, and with Slate columnist Rebecca Schuman, the Teutons have a stern, self-satisfied blast at her expense.

Rebecca is just your average chronically misunderstood 90’s teenager, with a passion for Pearl Jam and Ethan Hawke circa Reality Bites, until two men walk into her high school Civics class: Dylan Gellner, with deep brown eyes and an even deeper soul, and Franz Kafka, hitching a ride in Dylan’s backpack. These two men are the axe to the frozen sea that is Rebecca’s spirit, and what flows forth is a passion for all things German (even though, as everyone is quick to remind her, Kafka wasn’t German at all). Dreamy Dylan might leave the second he gets accepted to a better college than Rebecca does, but Kafka is forever, and in pursuit of this elusive love she will spend two decades stuttering and stumbling through broken German sentences, trying to win over a people who don’t want to be bothered.

At once a snapshot of a young woman finding herself, and a country slowly starting to stitch itself back together after nearly a century of war (both hot and cold), Schadenfreude, A Love Story is an exhilarating, hilarious, and yes, maybe even heartfelt memoir proving that sometimes the truest loves play hard to get.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel, Humor, Germany, Audiobook, Language

288 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 2017

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received this book last Wednesday and started it the very next day. This is unusual for me; no matter how much I want to read something, it usually has to sit around the house for a while before I'm ready to dive in (this is one reason I never read library books). In this case, though, I was about to finish a book that was pretty dark and disturbing. I opened Schadenfreude, A Love Story, read the joke on the very first page, and laughed out loud. I decided this memoir would be the perfect thing to lift me out of my reading-related funk.

And I was right! This book was funny. The stream of jokes in the first half of it was, in fact, pretty relentless. There is no element of her life, no matter how much of a bummer, that Rebecca Schuman can't make a total joke out of. Good for getting you out of your funk, for sure. But not so great when it comes to caring about a narrator. Rebecca Schuman's inability to take her own life seriously made it hard for me to take her life seriously either--which can be entertaining but ultimately makes for a somewhat hollow reading experience.

But that wasn't Schadenfreude's biggest problem. Honestly, this book is a mess. Most of it is about Schuman's experiences spending summers and semesters abroad in Germany. Elements of German culture and language dot the narrative, and Schuman's obsession with Kafka (who wrote in German) is a thread throughout, but mostly the book is about Schuman's attempts to be cool while studying abroad, including eschewing dorms to share apartments with actual Germans, wearing weird makeup and clothes, and drinking beer. This was the most enjoyable part of the book, but there was nothing particularly fascinating about it; it was pretty standard stuff for this type of memoir.

Still, reading about her experiences abroad was more satisfying than reading about her experiences as a grad student in German at UC Irvine, which make up the rest of the book. At this point, the actual "German-ness" of the narrative becomes even less important and the entire memoir turns into a screed about the folly of getting a PhD and attempting to gain a tenured position in academia. Given that Schuman has written about this topic on Slate for quite some time now, I shouldn't have been surprised when the narrative took this turn, but it just didn't work well with the previous section, or with the book's alleged main topic, which, again, was supposed to be all things German. Admittedly, Schuman is able to work Kafkan themes into this section much more handily than in the previous ones, but beyond that it could have been written about any grad program at all. There's also a point-by-point accounting of her initial courtship with the man who eventually became her husband, of the sort you'd maybe go over in your head obsessively while trying to figure out if your suitor liked you or not, or possibly share with a patient friend for the same purpose, but not the kind of thing that needs to included in a memoir. Then Schuman and her boyfriend get married and have a baby. The end! The end? Why do so many memoirs by women end with getting married and having a baby, even if the rest of the book was about something else entirely? It's so lazy and retro, and also dishonest, because these sorts of "happy endings" aren't actually endings at all. Life continues on, and finding a way to acknowledge that while tying in the theme of your book is the real challenge of writing an authentic conclusion.

I'm starting to think I'm going to avoid books by people whose primary writing has been internet-based. These people just do not understand that a book needs to have some kind of unifying structure. It's not enough to decide your theme is "German," then recount your life experiences in haphazard fashion while piping in a little "German" around the edges. I have German ancestry myself and I was really hoping to learn a thing or two from Schadenfreude, A Love Story. Alas, I just learned that having a regular internet column can land you a deal for a book you're not necessarily up to the challenge of writing. But unfortunately I knew that already.

I received this book via a giveaway here on Goodreads.

[Irena Pasvinter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this memoir about the author's long-lasting romance with the German language. In many ways, this "relationship" defined her life. Even though her attempt to transform her infatuation with the language into an academic career eventually ended in frustration, one can never completely part ways with their true "language love" -- what better proof of this postulate than this peculiar book with an overly-long title .;)

Even though my own German language journey is still stuck at the awkward stage of an advanced beginner, I've found a lot to relate to in the author's joys and misfortunes on a never-ending quest to improve the language fluency. Of course, I also found interesting her observations about the specifics of the German mentality and culture.

Read in 2022.

[Sarah Dietzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good thing I started this book early in the morning on a day when I didn't have a lot I had to do, because I was hooked from the first paragraph and could not put the book down until I finished it late into the night. I found it funny and engaging; Schuman clearly has a way with words. While it is true that some of the book is sarcastic, biting humor often is. Far from condescendingly writing as an authority on anything, the discerning reader will see that the main target of her scorn is Schuman herself.
This book concludes with Schuman getting married and having a child. That is not meant as the panacea for her struggles. It is clearly the end only of this chapter in her life, and not the end of her journey or her creativity. I can hardly wait for Part II: Adventures in Parenting.
Also, in truth, I would give the book 4 1/2 stars -- not an option on Goodreads -- because nothing is perfect and because I don't want to be accused of grade inflation.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not read many memoirs (which is what I say almost every time I review a memoir) so every time one works for me there's some specific thing that brings me in and makes me fall a little bit in love with the book and the author. In Schadenfreude, it's Schuman's willingness to examine her younger self (particularly in her teens and early 20's) with a dry wit as sharp as a scalpel. She does not want you to like this younger version of her as much as she wants to try to explain to you how she went from disaffected youth to a person who possesses a PhD in German.

I don't know if everyone will be as charmed by Schuman's wry voice as I am. I was the exact opposite of a disaffected youth who makes giant life choices on a whim. The fact that all this is foreign to me is part of what made it so interesting to read. It ended up as a 3-star rather than a 4-star read because while I laughed a lot while I read this book, I wanted some deeper pull at the center to really bring it together. I'm sure there's a German word for that kind of laughing-with-deep-empathy.

Schuman writes for Slate and if you read a lot of humorous personal essays online, odds are you'll feel very comfortable and happy reading this book.

[Zach · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a disappointment.

To be fair, I should explain what led me to read the book. I was in Barnes and Noble and was looking at the best-seller paperbacks. Surprised that there was a book with a German title on that shelf, I picked it up. The back cover advertises that the author holds a PhD. in German Literature. Interesting. Then I see the table of contents. Each chapter is a “unique” German word (e.g. Liebeskummer) and the title is “Schadenfreude: A Love Story...” OK, so I take it that she is trying to make some sort of Sapir-Whorf point (theory that the structure of one’s language affects its speakers’ world view – think “Eskimos have 20 words for snow...”) about the German language or society or at least with her interaction with it. Something like that. I was at least expecting something mildly intelligent.

First of all, the nine chapters/German words that ostensibly play such a large role are tangential at best. Most do not have anything particularly unique to Germany or the German language (Or at least in how they inform her experiences in the chapter). For example, her title Liebeskummer narrates her having a break-up and moping around afterwards. This is insight into the German psyche! Well, at least the Germans are unique enough to have a single word for it. For...lovesickness. Guess it’s not so unique. Because of this, the book feels like Schuman had an interesting idea one day to integrate a memoir with these German words, but she is unable to coherently organize this. It feels kitsch rather than like a piece of interesting writing.


(Spoilers)
Overall, this is an underwhelming book about a mediocre, pretentious brat with a psychologically unhealthy sexual fetish with Kafka. She goes out of her way to express her contempt of Germans and Germany. The only “Love Story” aspect of the book seemingly is her desultory documentation of a series of men she sleeps with, despite either abhorring or, at best, being apathetic about them. This is the stuff of true romance…


Other things I disliked about the book:

She has unabashed hostility towards people for being blond or anything vaguely WASP-y. (And she voluntarily chooses to study and live in Germany...) She talks about staying with a German family and she openly resents them for being wealthy and having the audacity of being born with blond hair. She trashes their house, leaves for extended periods of time to debauch herself with drugs, comes back and then self-righteously tries to make them squirm by demanding to talk about the Holocaust with them. I could forgive her for her youthful behavior if she showed some reflection on it or if she does eventually make substantial development. Instead, she seems to document these incidents like the person who would describe something bad and then say with a big grin on her face, "Wasn't I just awful?" Perhaps she assumed that this makes her writing witty or wry or something. I know that you do not need to like or identify with an author to like a memoir, but she never reflects on herself or offers anything interesting for the reader to contemplate. I kept waiting for her to offer some insight into her past or have some meaningful commentary, but the book ended before I was able to see that come to fruition. The only apparent change (and the conclusion of the book) is her marrying a professor and having a baby. This after some 250+ pages of her articulating how much of a good, leftist, feminist rebel she is. Maybe she was trying to be intentionally ironic. I couldn't help but thinking of the (infamous) quotation from Nietzsche's book Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution - it is called pregnancy."

She is an annoying type of pseudo-intellectual hipster. She decides in High School that she wants to dedicate herself to Kafka. Rationale? The guy that she sleeps with for a few months in High School has a book of Kafka in his backpack and he physically resembles Kafka. (This develops further in the book where she even says that Kafka can’t dump her. Maybe Freud would have been better reading material for her). She sententiously declares to everyone that she is now a Kafka expert. She lectures everyone how Kafka can only be understood in German and the translation they read is manifestly inferior. At this point, her German ability is mediocre at best, and is bragging that she has worked her way through the entire first page of Kafka’s “Das Urteil.” Impressive. Basically, most of the insight of this book is similar to listening to some random Junior who just completed his study abroad in Europe and now thinks he is eminently urbane. If you've had the pleasure to listen to such a kid (or were once one yourself), you could probably recreate most of this book.

This sounds like a minor point, but it was quite revealing. She is talking about her education for her PhD in German literature, and clumsily was trying to insert some material from her coursework. She then cites a story about Friedrich Schiller holding his friend Goethe’s skull and she takes a jab at Schiller’s ignorance for attributing Goethe’s intelligence to his abnormally large skull. Other than it being a useless anecdote, I was surprised that a German PhD would write this. German literature is dominated by Goethe (and Schiller to a lesser extent) to a degree that few other authors have influenced their national literatures. German literature literally has a term for the period of Goethe’s career: Goethezeit (1770-1830). Goethe had an incredibly long career. Schiller had a rather limited one. Students in German 101 know this. Goethe died in 1832. Schiller died in 1805. Most semi-respectable academics in German literature would know this by heart (or at least know that Schiller died/stopped writing decades before Goethe). This would be an embarrassing error to make when interviewing for a position for a German literature professorship, (of which she bemoans her lack of success) let alone when writing a book, with the benefit of research opportunities and editors. I never before realized that Schiller was not only a great German writer, but also a time-traveler. Nothing in the book gave me much confidence that she has much beyond a tenuous grasp of the field.


If you want some superficial insight into German culture from a petulant brat who resents German culture and learns about German concepts by sleeping with a number of Americans/Brits/non-Germans, and can lecture you about “toxic late-capitalist morality” while traveling around Europe and being funded by parents or boyfriends that seems so typical of the average, privileged member of the proletariat, you’ll find this book a breath of fresh air. Other than that, she sounds like a lovely lady.

[Sebastian Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biting, hilarious, poignant. What else could you want from self-deprecating, super-smart memoir? Oh yeah, KAFKA!

Being myself a lifelong Kafka superfan, imo, the conceit of threading the pitch black funny moralist as a sort of mascot for the author’s love affair with difficult boys, 90s expat-life and a search for identity is fairly brilliant. Mainly because most who have a passing familiarity with Kafka wouldn’t necessarily highlight humor as one of his most outstanding literary virtues. But that’s where Schuman’s got us.

The book serves as parts travelogue, memoir and essay, deftly weaving Kafka’s biography and writings in as signposts, cleverly commenting on her own bio, as she navigates awkward and absurd encounters with amorous, arrogant academics and sweet old German ladies, who turn out to be shockingly bigoted and painfully human.

Schuman does this all with a bone dry comedic grace, that both deepens one’s appreciation of Kafka’s own idiosyncratic gallows humor, while getting a nice laugh at the old boy’s expense. The frustrated description of her own high school self trying to resolve the perplexing riddle of one of Kafka’s more well-known parables, involving a country yokel seeking entrance to The Law, brought me back to my own tumultuous high school romance with the brooding, dark-eyed Czech. Where was Dylan Gellner to help my burgeoning literary mind take it all in?? :)

Schuman excels at unveiling eye-opening insights on Kafka via the array of anthropological ordeals she endearingly fumbles through, revealing her own ineptitudes and fears of shortcomings with funny yet sincere candor.

While living what Thoreau called the "life of quiet desperation" as a law clerk, Kafka was an ardent letter writer to his paramours, as Schuman points out. She also knows how seductive the written word is. For her, Kafka and all other social miscreants who scribe as their best way to live out loud, "Schadenfreude" is most definitely our kind of love story.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone needs to go out and purchase this smart, poignant book by Slate columnist and blogger extraordinaire, Rebecca Schuman. It's the kind of funny that makes you laugh so hard you have to put the book down, and when you pick it back up you start laughing at the same sentence all over again. It's the kind of funny that makes you laugh so hard you write your first ever Goodreads review. It's the kind of funny that makes you demand your book club read it next just so you can read it again. I learned a little German and a lot about Kafka (new insights on the books I had already read and new motivation to read Kafka's other works). I've probably read over a dozen in this type of memoir-by-funny-woman genre and I liked this one the most. Definitely going to be one of the best of 2017.

[Gregory · Rating 2 out of 5]

(I received a copy of this book as a Goodreads giveaway.)

As a fluent German speaker myself, and as one who has gone traipsing across Europe multiple times, I thought that “Schadenfreude” would be right up my alley. Unfortunately, while the concept is good, and Schuman is interesting enough, the final result was rather poor. The tone of the book can be summed up in two words, patronizing and sarcastic.

The book is patronizing because Schuman presents herself as the only real authority on Middle Europe that you will ever meet. She can tell you what others cannot because she loves Kafka, is a German major, and was able to experience Prague and the former DDR while they still had character. And we should be ever so grateful that she will regal with 250+ pages of her adventures.

Another serious problem is that there are too many asides in German. Of course Schuman knows what she has just written, and coincidently so do I. But the average reader is likely to be lost, even with the quick glosses provided. The same can be said for many of the cultural and historic references made. It reminds me of high school students who intentionally use dramatic-sounding words they barely understand.

The book is sarcastic as the tone is too flippant and sneering. The more I read the more I thought how little I would enjoy running into Schuman at a bar. The prose is much like the nonchalant attitude of cheap internet writing which has become all too common in this day and age. (Schuman also writes for Slate, but I hoped that this book would be different from what I encounter online on a daily basis.) I never knew what her message or point was, beyond simply flaunting her indifferent affectation.

Though the tone taken made the book a grueling read, I can at least say that the subject matter is interesting enough. And, who knows, perhaps this sort of abrasive experience appeals to people. As such, I can at least give “Schadenfreude” two stars. Perhaps am being too generous, or perhaps I see missed potential and an judging the book on that basis.

[MJ Brodie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who majored in German in college, this book resonated with me on a deep level - and was also very funny. I was somewhat familiar with Rebecca Schuman's writings from her column in Slate and, in particular, from her thinkpiece on why PhDs in the liberal arts are a terrible idea (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cu...) so when I saw this book in my local indie book store, I had to get it. Never before have I read a book that exactly details the strange forces that shape the minds and hearts of GermanistInnen (German scholars) but this book does. From falling in love with the writings of Kafka to becoming slightly insane from dwelling too long on arcane points of hermeneutics, this was one book where I was nodding along with the protagonist in nerdy solidarity.

Schuman is a witty writer, deploying lots of self-deprecating humor and hyperbole, all the kinds of humor that Germans have little appreciation for, and I laughed out loud at some of her experiences in navigating the complexities of a different 'Kulturraum'. Anyone who has ever been an exchange student or on a year abroad, or even just a 90s InterRail trip, will appreciate this book. We've all been there but Rebecca Schuman has been there more than most. At some points, her path through German cultural assimilation bore eerie resemblances to my own career and study path. I even lived in the same neighborhood of Kreuzberg for a couple of years in the early 2000s.

Reading this book meant a lot to me and brought back a lot of memories so I loved it for that reason alone. One thing I felt was missing was some kind of 'Auseinandersetzung' (yeah, I said it) with Schuman's Jewish heritage and her encounters with German culture. It's impossible to be in Berlin and not see traces of the Holocaust and the Nazi era. For the two years that I lived in that city, I felt haunted by this history at times -and I'm not Jewish at all, as far as I know. I would have been interested to read more about how the writer approached German culture and history as a Jewish (or in her own words, 'selectively Jewish') person, especially as she mentions that her Jewish grandfather fought in WW2 and liberated concentration camps. This is mentioned in the book but I felt it was not explored fully. Perhaps that was an editorial decision to give the book a lighter tone.

Nonetheless, this is a great book and a very enjoyable read for scholars of German or anyone who is just interested in German culture and literature.

[Jay Hinman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly really enjoyed this book full of humiliations, false starts and "Kafka-esque" life parables. I'd have given it 5 if not for the misadventures in academia sections at the end, which took a book about "funny things about Germany, Germans, and me" and shifted into "what's wrong with academia - and how it took me so long to figure that out". Two books in one?

From reading the afterword, it may be that this was cobbled out of several SLATE articles, but for the most part it doesn't read that way. Schuman is very funny, fantastic with words, and self-effacing in a very recognizable (but too often unadmitted to oneself) manner. I'll definitely check out anything else she'll publish, provided it's in English.

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having spent a year in Germany as an exchange student, I was looking forward to to this memoir of what I thought was to be a humorous description of a woman's attempt to cross a cultural and language divide I knew all too well myself.

The book starts out on an entertaining note - Shuman has a punchy, funny writing style inspired by Dave Barry, and I was startled to find some dramatic overlap between our lives in the first few pages. While she was inspired to fall in love with Kafka and his native German language by a moody, hyper-intellectual boyfriend while living in Eugene and reading Dave Barry in 1993, I was attempting to recover from my own experience with a moody, hyper-intellectual boyfriend I'd met in Germany who inspired me to fall in love with Hesse while also living in Eugene and reading Dave Barry in 1993.

Given that beginning, I expected to have no problem relating to Rebecca as she narrated her tale of following the thread begun by that brief relationship out of the literary German world and into the real one. But with her first college exchange program living in Germany, the connection I felt to her began to change, primarily because she is not remotely sympathetic. Her first exchange experience seems to be little more than an act of rebellion in which she expresses disdain for the host family who took her in, preferring instead to avoid both them and the language she had ostensibly come to learn in favor of getting drunk with other exchange students.

Another section has her visiting Prague in search of Kafka's origins and describing a one-sided attempt to turn a random meeting with an American at a train station into her own personal "Before Sunrise" romantic fantasy, which unsurprisingly ends in a less than cinematic fashion.

My hopes for the book began to go up again when she seeks out living situations for another language immersion program in Berlin not long after the fall of the wall, which forces her to actually interact with Germans and begins to live up to the subtitle of the book. Her first residence with a young former East German woman is rich with cultural insight, and her subsequent landing in a "room" constructed out of a curtain in an illegal Kreutzberg loft was by far the richest part of the book.

Like many other chapters, however, Schuman's focus inevitably shifts back to whatever boyfriend she happens to have at the time, and my hope Schuman would use her sharp wit to share more insight about what it was like to live in that historic place and time was unmet.

The latter half of the book discusses her various educational efforts in America that led to pursuing a PhD in German literature and her subsequent failure to find a teaching position in the hyper-competitive world of higher education. While there is value in her morality tale of living through the exploitation factory that higher education has become, this section is likely to seem disconnected from the first by anyone who didn't find themselves fluent in German with no particular use for it. At one point, she comments that a German friend expressed bafflement that any American would choose to learn German if she didn't have to, so I can understand how Schuman could try to create meaning out of her youthful misadventures by diving deeper into that well in attempt to come out with something practical.

In the end, however, I found the book did not live up to my hopes for it. While it is quite funny in places, there was too much missed opportunity for me to be able to give it more than a half-hearted recommendation, and that primarily to people who have some direct experience of Germany, its language and its people.

[Jeanette]

Can't do it. First officially abandoned book of 2018 hit early. Just too much Rebecca foul mouthed ire and complaint to absorb in order to get to the "fun" words. No star value rating as I only read to about 16%. The tone of this copy is frenetic and it eviscerates any core of self-respect of the writer for herself other than in an intellectual hubris quantity. Most of the time I don't even understand her value system or context of language either. Although on second thought- why would I want to do that? Not fun, icky.

[Chela · Rating 5 out of 5]

The rare and viciously coveted five stars from my lizard brain. Jarring and rabidly hilarious. For a sizable part of the book, it felt like Schuman was eavesdropping in my sad, volcanic memories of love and literature. 😭

[Jennifer Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words for was one of the most enjoyable memoirs I've read in recent years. The voice of the author,Rebecca Schuman is intelligent, reflective, distinctive, honest, funny, and entertainingly self-deprecating. Perhaps it was that as a failed student of German I could relate to the "struggles with learning language" based anecdotes with pleasure and empathy. I found the narrative held together really well with the structure based on uniquely German words for various compound sensations and cultural nuances - like Ostalgie - "longing for the good old days of the GDR, from east and nostalgia." This was a superb chapter, as was the next one relating Rebecca's year in Berlin living in a Luftschloss with some fabulously strange characters. There is so much to enjoy here.

I also really appreciated the author's literary references and the joys of discovering and then assimilating much that can come with the 'literary' into her persona. There was, for me, though, a happy absence of pretension about literature which is so often predictable in much literature-centred writing. What is there is genuine, real, and honest. Give it a read. You can discover things about Germany and Germans past and present through the eyes of someone discovering it themselves, but with the added benefit of a writer skilled at extracting both the humour and the pathos in the ridiculous and the humiliating. So different from anything I've read recently also which made it refreshing and page-turning.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the whole, this was a really fun & funny read. The earlier chapters had me laughing the hardest. The latter chapters were more uncomfortable because of my own crash course in academic culture within a Ph.D. program (despite having the loveliest, most supportive peer cohort a girl could ask for) and disappointments with the job market/adjunct career path. I have never studied German, but reading Rebecca's prose made me imagine I would enjoy it.

[Kay · Rating 1 out of 5]

I speak German and love all things German so thought this would be the book for me.

Meh. I’m sure the author is a lovely person but the way her memoir was written was pretty much people telling her how beautiful and intelligent she is. Which, I’m sure she’s both, but it came off a little braggart to me.

I wanted to learn more about her time in Germany, not who she slept with or how much she wrote about Kafka.

[Kaitlin Kline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook two times in a row because I loved it so much. 5 stars.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is beautifully voiced. Original, fun and really hilarious at times too. For me, Schuman is a cross between Dave Barry and Mrs Maisel. It kept me smiling and laughing the entire read.

The book spans a long time--from senior year in high school until she is 38, about to have a baby. Memoirs with long time spans are tough to pull off. I am now starting work on a language memoir of my own (Japanese) and hoping to study with Schuman at Stanford Continuing Studies. While I was reading, I kept wondering, "is this really okay to make fun of Germans like this?" My husband says it is allowed... She is so hilarious --especially when she went back to Berlin again in grad school to try to become fluent yet again. And I loved how her passion for Kafka propelled the entire life story-- laughing when every single German person took time to remind her that, yeah, Kafka is not German!

The funny parts were funny, but I have to say I preferred the serious parts. She was excellent on Heidegger and Wittgenstein and I would have wanted a lot more of that. I suspect there was more but maybe that was edited out. What a shame that would have been as those parts really captured my interest. I also appreciated her long struggle with trying to get tenure. Her struggle was long but the descriptions did not drag on and in fact, it was only the very last part of the book.

I was happy it had a happy ending too.
Now, I am off to see what else she is writing.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fun and unique memoir/travel memoir about Schuman's love (possibly hate) at times relationship with German and Germans, starting with her first exposure to Kafka via a boyfriend in high school (and yes, we all know Kafka wasn't an actual German). Schuman is approximately 2 years older than me, so we experienced the same Germany in the mid-1990s. And we had very different experiences, to say the least. She has some interesting stories.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a funny and inspiring book about a woman trying, and utterly failing, to follow her dreams into the world of academics. Reading about her misadventures really makes you think about the path your own life is taking, and whether it is all worth it to get that one position you only thought you wanted. I really enjoyed this. It was thoroughly thought provoking and is making me reassess my life choices. It doesn't hurt that Schuman has hilarious anecdotes to offer on every page either!

[Jill Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought and read, "Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans and...Words for", on the basis of the blurb, which seemed to indicate that it would be about a young American woman who has made a life for herself in Germany, Berlin, to be exact. What the book is is actually a funny, rambling, coming-of-age saga, where a love of Kafka and the education in learning German, has actually prepared Rebecca Schuman for nothing other than writing creatively for the on-line Slate magazine. In general, I am not a great reader of coming-of-age memoirs, but Schuman's was worth the venture into the genre.

As a woman who is probably the same age as Rebecca's parents - both college professors - and having children the same age as Rebecca, I've long been cognizant of an often lengthy forced adolescence. A disappointing job market in the past 20 years and increased chances at advanced education has given many of today's young adults advanced degrees but little opportunity to put them to use. Rebecca, who writea wittily about her life and the people she's met along the way, seems almost a casualty of this economic paradigm.

If you're looking for a book about moving to Germany and reinventing yourself, don't read this book, because, frankly, you'll be disappointed. But if you're looking for a smart, snarky read by a young woman who seems quite lovable and who is making her way in the world, pick "Schadenfreude" up and enjoy it.

[Jenn Estepp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I super enjoyed this. I am also very close to Schuman in age, spent lots of time wandering (mostly proverbially and never in Europe) and have half a year of middle school German under my belt, so. I dunno. It's funny and has the right balance, which some memoirs that are trying to be funny lack.

[P. A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love memoirs.

I got this book from my local library the day it was released. As someone who has spent time in Berlin, I loved reading about Rebecca's time there, especially in the 90s. Rebecca is a badass. I didn't do half the crazy she was up to in Berlin. I was grateful to live around the FU campus; she thought it was lame. I thought her recollections were a bit melodramatic at times, but now I understand why it was written that way.

I didn't want the book to end because it was a constant source of inspiration for humorous and humble writing. I appreciate her down-to-earth attitude towards literature, as well as the German language. Although, I found her constant snides a bit misleading because relative to other languages German is not that difficult to learn. For example, despite Rebecca's "struggling," she gets fluent in only a few years. Good old immersion has worked (afterall). I like the comparison of her learning German and her "experience" of graduate school (sorry, she had to go through that).

Overall, I like this book because it's about Berlin from the perspective of a regular person, i.e. someone I could relate to.

[Lane Pybas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schadenfreude, A Love Story is a smart and funny coming of age story by former German professor turned columnist and critic of American academia Rebecca Schuman. The book is organized into nine chapters, each of which contains an episode from Schuman’s life that relates to her love of Kafka and her initiation into the world of German studies. Five out of the nine chapters detail Schuman’s experiences studying abroad in Germany as an undergraduate German major. Schuman’s representation of Germans is comical and entertaining (“Sometimes I felt like my roommates just woke up, combined a bunch of random nouns and verbs, and then decided to go do whatever that was.”), and the madcap scenarios in which she finds herself will likely be familiar to anyone who has ever studied or lived abroad. However, a disproportionate amount of the memoir is spent on Schuman’s undergraduate studies abroad, seemingly for the sake of the image of wackiness that this renders. I’m emphatically pro-wacky anecdotes, but I would have liked to read more about Schuman’s experiences in graduate school for a more balanced autobiography. Who knows, the halls of academe, although lacking the otherness of a foreign country (kind of?), might have contained the wackiest adventures of all. Anyway, come to this memoir for the hilarious descriptions of Kafka stories (“and the Doorkeeper is like: ‘THIS DOOR WAS JUST FOR YOU. NOW I’M GOING TO SHUT IT.’), and stay for the prescient indictment of the PhD job market.

This review originally appeared on my blog: http://buriedwomenwriters.com/2017/02...

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me preface this by stating that, as a former German student who spent time in many of the places Schumann mentions in her book, this 5-star review is very biased.

Schumann and I have a decent amount in common: we are around the same age, we both studied German, lived abroad, spent considerable time in Berlin (in fact, we may have crossed paths given our similar travel time lines), and got more college degrees than we probably should have. That is pretty much where the similarities stop, but I haven't found any books that have so many funny anecdotes about things I have also experienced in the German culture. That said, Schumann is, personality-wise, very different from me (aside from the sarcasm we both clearly value highly), and I don't think our personalities would have meshed then or now.

Schumann is a funny gal and she takes no prisoners, including herself. Schumann got a phD in German but really should have also received an honorary phD in self-depreciation. She's ruthless and outrageous and I found myself laughing out loud more than a few times. (Note: if you don't like swearing in your books, you should give this a pass.).

While reading this, I frequently asked myself if I thought someone without such a common bond with the author and her experiences would like it as much. Though I think that my experiences and education push me more toward a higher rating than the average person, it's still an enjoyable read, particularly for someone who has spent time abroad, learned a foreign language (especially abroad), or spent too much time in college. Schumann's sass alone will hook you, if sass is your thing.

[Allie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I have mixed feelings about this book. It was a fun trip down memory lane for me (also Vassar alum, also studied in Berlin, also did PhD program in German), and the style was funny. At the same time, the tone put me off—it was never clear to me what Schuman likes about German(y) and Germans. She was so self-disparaging that she took everyone else down with her. It was also unclear who the audience was. People familiar with German would be my guess, but then why so many translations and explanations of info? But if not someone familiar with German, why would they read this?

Because I am a teacher and simply a know-it-all, I have to point out one major mistake: she wrote about Schiller keeping Goethe’s skull as a paperweight, but Goethe died decades after Schiller. Where was the publisher’s fact-checker?

[Chrissiem · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the title and by the prospect of reading what a modern Jewish-American thinks about us Germans.

I was bitterly disappointed. The author desperately tries to be quirky and so edgy and cool, and chooses her vocabulary accordingly. Newsflash, quoting Kafka for pages isn't cool and edgy, it's pretentious and boring, and you can really smell the desperation.

I finally stopped reading when rolling my eyes became too hard, because she claimed that some German writer called Schiller kept the skull of his friend Goethe on his desk after Goethe died.

A German major should know that first of all, Goethe and Schiller are two ofe the most renowned and revered German authors, and that secondly, Schiller died years before Goethe. Embarrassing.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read much memoir and yet I had a hard time putting this book down. I also became strangely fascinated by the German language in high school for no good reason, and started learning and studying the language in college. I took some German literature courses and even considered majoring in German. For those who have learned German as a second language, this book will surely relate to you. Schuman's struggles in many ways mirrored mine and I was relieved to not be alone. I also briefly lived in Berlin and faced many of the same challenges and held the same naive ideas about language and culture immersion. Her experience and perspective was relatable and fresh, I found humor and inspiration through her academic and personal journey.

The book takes a turn towards the end as she continues to graduate school and her life as a writer. I didn't mind this shift but the tone surely changed. I also found the notion of German having words that "they only have words for" to be highly problematic and rooted in stereotypes of language. German simply has ONE word to describe things that English would require multiple words for, but to say that things are only expressible in one language is simply not true- this is basic information taught in psychology and linguistics. So in that end, it was disappointing, but as a whole the book was enjoyable enough for me to forgive her.

[zan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sure the Germans have some clever compound word that works better and is more evocative than "funny and un-putdownable," but English I am stuck with, and so I'll do my best in English. Schadenfreude is a laugh-out-loud funny book about the quest to find the right words to describe your passions and obsessions, whether they be in another language or in your own. Rebecca writes with that breathless fluid intelligence I've always been in awe of, but also the self-deprecation and raw edges of someone who isn't kidding herself about our mortal (and formerly Lucky Strike-smoking) place in the world.

Recommended especially for anyone who has ever learned another language (and was frustrated by not being able to sound as intelligent in that language), lived with a foreign host family, loved or even just LIKED Kafka,or harbored fantasies of being Julie Delpy to some Ethan Hawke only to find that reality is often far more disappointing, but at least we get good stories out of it to share with the world. So glad Rebecca shared her truly hilarious and heartwarming story.

(Disclaimer: I have known the author since college, but she can attest to the fact that I wouldn't bullshit her if I didn't like her book. I loved it, totally independently of my feelings for her.)

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received Schadenfreude, A Love Story for free through Goodreads' Giveaways program.

Rebecca Schuman, a lover of all things German (and of Franz Kafka), uses German words as a framework for her memoir. Each chapter is titled with a German word that serves as a guide for that particular chapter.

She takes us from her high school days in Oregon up to the present time. We travel with her from Oregon to Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, New York, California, Ohio, and Missouri. Along the way, we read about her love life/social life, her education, her work, and her life in general. There's a lot of self-deprecating humor in here, which is funny, but at times, it was too much.

Schuman does a good job of explaining/describing the differences between Germans and Americans. The cultural misunderstanding and confusion that often occurs is entertaining-- and enlightening. I also enjoyed her section on her graduate school experience, which she-- to put it mildly-- did not enjoy (this section also made me thankful that I didn't get a PhD).

The weakest section of the book was the ending- this felt "tacked on" and didn't delve into her life as much as previous parts of the book. That is probably understandable, however, because that is her current life, one in which she appears to be much more content. Unhappiness and tumult make for more interesting reading...

Overall, this was a fun and entertaining read. Recommended.