“Über das Glück nach der Lektüre von Schopenhauer, in Kalifornien” is a cycle of six poems by the Bulgarian-German poet Tzveta Sofronieva written in 2005 and first published in 2007 in the German literary journal Akzente. The cycle, prompted by the poet's reading of Schopenhauer—perhaps the ultimate representative of European pessimism—during an extended stay in California, attempts to define happiness amid the surroundings of the New World, reflecting on the extent to which happiness can exist independently of place and on the cultural and linguistic parameters of the concept of Glück. The first and last poems in the cycle, which consider, respectively, motherhood and language(s) as nomadic sources of happiness, act as a frame for an exploration of loci of happiness in the New World. The cycle always has an eye to the presence of the Old/old in the New/new and investigates the kinds of happiness afforded by America in all its complexity: the awesome natural beauty of Yosemite, the mode of life on a Navaho Indian reservation, the excesses of Hollywood, and—referencing Lion Feuchtwanger's story “Venedig (Texas)” (1946)—the traces of the Italian Venezia in Los Angeles's Venice Beach.

The physical circumstances surrounding the cycle's creation and subsequent publication are not insignificant. Sofronieva, born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1963 and resident in Berlin since 1992, took her first serious steps to becoming a German exophonic poet—that is to say, a poet who is not a native speaker of German, but who adopts it as a literary language—in the United States during a 2005 residency at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades.