"Waldeinsamkeit is a visible strain throughout German culture and history and the term might have fallen out of favour, but it continues to convey a very romantic notion of the country,” said Austen Hinkley, a doctoral candidate at Princeton"s Department of Comparative Literature. “The claim the term is untranslatable and indescribable to non-Germans is also important. It can only really be explained by first-hand experience – total immersion in the German landscape."