Paper short abstract:

This paper is about the expressions and experiences of homecoming of WWII expellees. It focuses on how these returnees search, find, revisit and symbolically re-inhabit their old houses. Revisiting the birthplace is crucial to the expellee’s apprehension of home in the last stage of their life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about the expressions and experiences of homecoming of WWII expellees. 65 years after the end of the war and 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, German expellees travel back to their homelands in Eastern Europe. My demonstration is based on ethnographic fieldwork with returnees who rediscover the places of their childhood. I focus on the bodily practices of homecoming, namely the way of moving and stopping, of gazing and pointing sites and objects, in order to apprehend the expellees' experiences of being home again.

The returnees' search for their roots is centered on material vestiges. The childhood home functions as the mental starting point of the personal itinerary in the village of origin. They head for their houses and some even seek to cross the threshold. These homecomers actually search, find, revisit and symbolically re-inhabit their old houses. "Being here", back home several decades after the forced departure, is a highly emotional experience that allies retrospection and introspection: rediscovering the house also means to rediscover oneself. Homecoming offers a framework for narration and reflection about Self and the itinerary of life which took a special turn in 1945. Memory might fill up the material vacuum, the absence of tangible vestiges. Thus, the expellee's childhood home resurrects before the inner eye; the returnee actually can "be there", emotionally and even bodily in the intimate past home. Homecoming experiences are crucial to the expellee's apprehension of home in the last stage of their life.