An hour in my hometown

Radio recording from 1962

 After 1945, the trauma of the war and its aftermath came to the forefront of many national literatures. Many authors also drew on their own experiences of the trenches, captivity, imprisonment in concentration camps or (in the case of German writers) forced exile.

 The stories and experiences of the Second World War are perhaps most prominently present in German post-war literature. Writers felt very strongly the need to contribute to the moral cleansing of their nation, which had caused the war conflict and after 1945 had to cope with defeat and guilt. With this focus in mind, the literary group Gruppe 47 was founded in 1947, with which many important German writers associated their literary work for a shorter or longer period of time. Among the most famous were Hans Werner Richter, the founder of Gruppe 47, Siegfried Lenz, Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, Erich Maria Remarque and last but not least Heinrich Böll, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature.

 As in his numerous prose works, Heinrich Böll returns to his central theme in the radio play The Hour in the Hometown, namely the reckoning with his country's wartime past. He himself spent the Second World War at the front in the service of the Wehrmacht and from 1945 in captivity. The protagonist accidentally finds himself in the town where he spent his youth and from where he left at the age of seventeen. Now, against his will, he returns to the people and events of that time in his memories.