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Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5472092243
EAN: 9780691125022
ISBN: 0691125023
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: May 08, 2006
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press
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Editorial Review:This book focuses on one of the most visible and important consequences of total defeat in postwar Germany: the return to East and West Germany of the two million German soldiers and POWs who spent an extended period in Soviet captivity. These former prisoners made up a unique segment of German society. They were both soldiers in the war of racial annihilation on the Eastern front and then suffered extensive hardship and deprivation themselves as prisoners of war. The book examines the lingering consequences of the soldiers' return and explores returnees' own responses to a radically changed and divided homeland. Historian Frank Biess traces the origins of the postwar period to the last years of the war, when ordinary Germans began to face the prospect of impending defeat. He then demonstrates parallel East and West German efforts to overcome the German loss by transforming returning POWs into ideal post-totalitarian or antifascist citizens. By exploring returnees' troubled adjustment to the more private spheres of the workplace and the family, the book stresses the limitations of these East and West German attempts to move beyond the war. Based on a wide array of primary and secondary sources, Homecomings combines the political history of reconstruction with the social history of returnees and the cultural history of war memories and gender identities. It unearths important structural and functional similarities between German postwar societies, which remained infused with the aftereffects of unprecedented violence, loss, and mass death long after the war was over.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - not bad
I disagree with the Saudi. This isn't some Zionist conspiracy book looking to (god forbid) blame Germans for supporting Nazism when it suited them. It's a well researched monograph that touches on the major aspects of the homeward return of German soldiers. He DOES talk about their deaths in the Soviet camps, as he attributes the poor condition of Soviet captives as being just as much due to the Soviets as it was due to the documented lack of supplies getting out to the eastern front to the Nazi ... Read More
Rating:  - Yet another endless accusation of German guilt
I found this book to be very disappointing, expecting as I did a balanced and sympathetic rendition of the sufferings of Germans in the post-war period.
The author's reference in the acknowledgements section to his visits to Israel and to his consequent "moral responsibilities" in writing this book should have set alarm bells ringing from the start. This was always going to be a book emphasising the Holocaust over every other tragedy of the war. A distinctly Jewish-orientated point of view. ... Read More
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