Homecomer. Some biographical implications of immigrants’ visiting their former homes

This paper considers some of possible implications of emigrants’ visits back home. Alfred Schütz’s seminal paper “The Homecomer” provides a theoretical framework for analysis of autobiographical narrative interviews with young Polish people living in Germany. An attempt is made to explore why and how – typical for the emigration processes – a more critical and objective image of country of origin and a growing feeling of strangeness at home deepens emigrants’ capacity for reflection on their life and identity. Consequently, most of them painfully realise that they will never fully assimilate with the country of immigration and they no longer find themselves comfortable in their country of origin. This has crucial implications for their biography. The collected empirical data show that some of emigrants plan to immediately return to Poland in order to save their emotional relationship with those back home. Others find their homeland poorer and less prospective in comparison to Germany. This legitimate their residence abroad. And finally, the negative homecoming experience can perform a very important function in the narrators’ common-sense argumentation, i.e., this should reduce psychological and biographical costs of their emigration career