To our present-day ears ‘homecoming’ sounds like a brief, one-off process. But coming home from war and imprisonment was a long and often inconclusive undertaking. People spoke of Heimkehrer (literally: homecomers) as if coming home were a state of being, a profession or even a disability. Coming home was an endless process: one had come home and yet one had not. Even years after their return, some men were termed Heimkehrer as a way of excusing their strange behaviour.

Harald Jähner, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 (2021)