Erlebtes

Erlebtes (das Erlebte) is a German noun formed from erleben, meaning "to experience." It denotes the experiences one has lived through and is used to refer to the totality of those lived experiences in a subjective sense. The term is common in autobiographical and reflective writing.

Linguistic note: Erlebnis is the more common noun for an "experience" or an "event" as something that is experienced; Erlebte emphasizes the lived, remembered, or endured aspect. "das Erlebte" is typically used as a neuter singular, as in "das Erlebte aus meiner Jugend" (the experiences from my youth).

Contexts: In literature and memoirs, Erlebtes serves as material for narrative memory, shaping identity and self-understanding. In psychology, the term may appear in discussions of life events, coping, and memory, including how past experiences are reconstructed. In phenomenology, related terms describe lived experience (Erlebnis) more than the documented events.

Related terms include Erlebnisse (plural), Erlebnis (the concept of experience or a single event), and erlebte Rede, a narrative technique that presents speech or thought from a past perspective. Although Erlebtes is not a formal theory, it appears as a thematic category in German-language literary and psychological discourse.

In everyday usage, Erlebtes functions as a general reference to what a person has gone through, or to the subjective material of memory used in storytelling.