The successful author Karl Heinz Götze returns to his hometown in the North Hesse province in his new book "What Happened to My Homeland While I Was Away for So Long: A Return to Germany" after nearly forty years. He once left this place as a young man to study in France—a country that has always held promise for him. He reflects on this place of memories to confront the rediscovered past with the present. How has family life changed? How has the relationship with children evolved, and how have childhoods transformed? Has the landscape itself changed? Götze writes about both the familiar feeling of home and the foreign elements within it. He describes how we define home and how societal transformation processes over the past decades have influenced its significance. Karl Heinz Götze takes an unsentimental look at these changes.