Learn English – What does “backworld” mean

meaning-in-contexttranslation

You can read the chapter where the word was met. And I put a little extract below:

To me the convalescent would it now be suffering and torment to believe in such phantoms: suffering would it now be to me, and humiliation. Thus I speak to backworldsmen.
Suffering was it, and impotence – that created all backworlds; and the short madness of happiness, which only the greatest sufferer experienceth.
Weariness, which seeketh to get the ultimate one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all gods and backworlds.

There is also a derived word "backworldsmen". I guess the world is author-invented? Could you shed some light on its meaning?

Best Answer

Google does give results for Thus spake Zarathustra backworld. The first one is http://nathanbauman.com/odysseus/?p=2949

The first paragraph of that page says (my emphases):

Zarathustra’s next two speeches in Nietzsche’s book Thus Spake Zarathustra are related in terms of their assertion that the physical world trumps the Otherworld, or, rather, the “backworld” as Del Caro translates the German term Hinterweltlern. The term is very difficult to pin down in English. The footnote to the word in my edition says that it refers to “those who are of, or believe in, a world beyond, a hidden or a back-world, a secret world”; the note also says, rather curiously, that the word has similar connotations to the English word hinterland. I think what is happening is that Zarathustra is saying that those who believe in an Otherworld are being provincial and silly.

This isn't a German-language site so attempting to translate the German Hinterwelt and Hinterweltlern is not going to be easy. "Back-world" and "back-worlds-men" are the literal translations.

But the expression other-worldly does exist in English: "belonging or relating to, or resembling, a world supposedly inhabited after death" [Chambers], or perhaps "a world outside the physical realm."

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