Homecoming – around 1947

A scene which frequently occurred in the post-war era: after long imprisonment as a prisoner-of-war the father returned home. His wife, left in doubt for many years about his fate, had pronounced him dead and remarried. The couple's son sees his father for the first time: he is a stranger. Moreover, this stranger's country had also become alien to him. He could not stay in his own flat, had lost his wife, child and home. The experience of war and imprisonment also left its mark on other homecomers. Coarsened and brutalized, these men had great difficulty finding their way back into family life.

A witness reports:
"Women have become very self-sufficient in this time of deprivation. And then the husband came home thinking he would find his housewife at the stove, having waited all this time for him, to fling her arms around his neck and let him do everything again. Women were used to bringing up the children, earning the housekeeping and doing everything independently. So then there was often friction… among my close relations it often happened that a homecomer would return joyfully to his home and wife to find her in the arms of another. Then the wife ran off in shock and left the husband alone with the children. He hardly knew how he was supposed to exist himself, now he had to provide for three children. And the children had lost their mother and instead had a father who was a stranger to them. It was terrible."
(Ursula B. geboren 1921, in: Zeitbrüche – Lebensbrüche. Frauen erinnern sich an das Jahr 1945, Erfurt 1995, S. 35.)

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