Schwellenangst

German term for the fear of crossing a threshold and, by extension, of trying something new.

The concept of Schwellenangst has been embraced by the cultural elite to describe the problem of encouraging (often young) people into public spaces, like theaters and museums, that were designed specifically for them and, more often than not, funded by them.

Speaking to The Times of London, the chief executive of the Plymouth Theatre Royal, Adrian Vinken, questioned whether discounting or giving away theater tickets would encourage young people to see plays: “The Germans have a word for it, Schwellenangst … Just reducing the cost barrier isn’t suddenly going to unleash … demand for Chekhov.”

Empathizing with Schwellenangst, the critic Thomas Sutcliffe said in The Independent:

I first encountered the word in the Seventies, used by an arts administrator who was discussing the difficulty of getting people through the doors of art centres and exhibition spaces - spaces that had been expressly designed and expensively subsidized for their delight and recreation but which 90 per cent of them stubbornly persisted in regarding as in some way off limits. And though, as a professional arts consumer, I am long past experiencing Schwellenangst at the threshold of a theatre or an arts centre, there is one place where it still persistently strikes. At the door to any major art exhibition – contemporary or classical – I feel a tremor of inadequacy, an uncertainty as to whether this is really for the likes of me.

Interestingly, the term has more literal applications. In its obituary of Holocaust survivor and refugee activist Leon Zelman, The Times of Londonnoted that in reconciling “former Austrian Jews to postwar Vienna [Zelman] brought more than 4,000 Jews to the city, taking care to defuse theSchwellenangst, or trepidation, many felt on returning to a city where they had been demeaned and brutalised in 1938 and from which the lucky ones had been driven into penniless exile, while others were sent to their deaths in the east.”