Alfred Schütz, “The Homecomer” (1945; republished 1964)

Alfred Schütz’s social-psychological essay examines why returning home requires a reconstruction of familiarity rather than a simple resumption of life. The returning veteran supplies its principal example, but its scope includes emigrants, travelers, and others who return permanently. Beginning with Odysseus’s failure to recognize Ithaca, Schütz distinguishes the homecomer from the stranger: whereas the stranger anticipates unfamiliarity, the homecomer expects remembered knowledge to remain sufficient. Precisely this expectation makes return a shock.

The argument proceeds from the meaning of home through the structure of shared experience, the effects of separation, and the irreversibility of time, before addressing veterans’ reintegration. Home is both an orienting point and an emotionally charged way of life. Familiar objects, habits, and relationships compose a practical scheme through which people interpret one another and anticipate events. Its security rests less on an absence of change than on established ways of handling it:

Paradoxically formulated, there is even a routine way for handling the novel.

Schütz clarifies this familiarity by separating three features commonly conflated in the sociological concept of the primary group: face-to-face contact, intimacy, and recurrence. The “pure we-relation” arises through shared space and time, in which people participate in one another’s unfolding experience. It does not necessarily entail intimacy: strangers on a subway also share a vivid present. Enduring relationships, meanwhile, consist of intermittent encounters whose participants take the possibility of renewal for granted. Home thus depends on confidence that interrupted relations can be continued, and on the incorporation of others’ lives into one’s own biography.

Separation undermines this confidence without necessarily making its erosion apparent. Direct participation gives way to memories and typifications. Letters preserve contact, but writer and reader address versions of one another inherited from their last shared life. Meanwhile, each acquires experiences and priorities unavailable to the other:

But separation conceals the Other behind a strange disguise hard to remove.

The asymmetry matters. Those remaining at home experience changes together and adjust their interpretive scheme continuously. The absent person retains knowledge of its general style, but those at home may understand the absent person’s new world chiefly through public stereotypes. In the veteran’s case, propaganda and entertainment supply images of combat that listeners impose upon his account. What he regards as a singular, transformative experience becomes another instance of something they believe they already know. Misrecognition concerns not simply facts but relevance: what deserves attention, what counts as courage, and what has changed a person.

Even perfect communication could not restore the past unchanged. Schütz grounds the difficulty of homecoming in the irreversibility of inner time:

Being recurrent, the recurrent is not the same any more.

Later experiences alter the meaning of earlier ones. Former possibilities have become fulfilled hopes, disappointments, or impossibilities; recollection therefore cannot reproduce the original horizon of anticipation. Neither home nor the returning person remains identical to what was left behind. This philosophical turn also makes a methodological claim: sociological terms such as adjustment and adaptation require an account of temporality and meaning, rather than functioning as self-explanatory labels.

The final movement considers what the returnee wishes to retain from life elsewhere. Longing for home can coexist with a desire for new goals, recognition, and opportunities. The decorated officer formerly employed as a cigar clerk exemplifies the inadequacy of merely restoring an old position. Yet capacities and status acquired within one social order do not transfer automatically to another. Military life combines authoritative discipline within the group with anomic struggle against the enemy; civilian return demands independent choices and different ways of relating to others. Losing the uniform also means losing an immediately recognizable privileged status.

Schütz consequently treats reintegration as a reciprocal task, not a burden borne solely by the returnee:

However, it seems to be equally indispensable to prepare the home group accordingly.

Public representations must dismantle the misleading heroic types they helped create, allowing those at home to encounter the changed person. The concluding return to Homer gives the essay its practical force: both homecomer and welcomer need guidance. Its broader relevance lies in showing that familiarity is a continuously sustained social achievement, and that renewed belonging depends on recognizing change rather than demanding repetition.