Hans Siemsen, the son of a Westphalian pastor, found himself pulled between worlds from an early age. Paris lured him in 1913 into the Bohemian scene around Café du Dôme, where art and life-affirming pleasure clashed with the confines of his upbringing. Then came the war. In 1917 he was buried at the Western Front and spent months in a hospital. From that moment, he was a different man: a socialist, a skeptic, someone who saw through the era’s false certainties. “Where have you been wandering?” — this laconic title of his second book from 1920 reads like a question to the returning veteran, but also to the seeker who no longer feels at home in any order.
The book appeared in 1920 with Kurt Wolff in Munich. It belongs to Siemsen’s early works. It consists of short prose sketches, travel memories, and autobiographical fragments. In it, Siemsen blends observation, reflection, and accounts of experience.
War as a Psychological Landscape
A central thread is Siemsen’s personal wartime experiences and their consequences—psychological, social, and cultural. In the book, the author reflects on how war reshapes self-understanding, the surrounding environment, and the perception of the self. While there isn’t a lot of battle description, the dominant mood is one of disillusionment, pain, and an awareness of loss, interruption, and things left unsaid.
Siemsen does not portray war as a heroic saga, but as a mental topography. There is no thunder of cannon, only a dull echo: being buried, the depression, the sense of dead-ends, which he writes into the sketches of his book. It is the world of a young man who has come too close to death to view life naively. “Where have you been wandering?” — the father’s question becomes a bitter refrain of a homecomer who no longer belongs.
Homosexuality in the Shadows
Yet Siemsen’s book carries another layer: forbidden love. Between the fragments of the war, hints of a not-lived homosexuality flash. Not confession, but concealment; not fulfillment, but repression. In a society that treated statutes like Paragraph 175 as iron bars over the intimacy of young men, Siemsen could only hint. It is precisely for this reason that the book’s melancholy is so piercing: the wounds of war mingle with the scars of forbidden desire.
That is a remarkable aspect of “Where Have You Been Wandering?” Siemsen already touches on topics such as homosexuality and unexpressed sexual identity. The environment in which he lived, the expectations of his parents, and societal morals are critically examined. The “unlived homosexuality” is part of the quiet suffering; repression is tangible, not dramatized in explicit terms.
The Wandering as a Way of Life
“Where have you been wandering?” — this question is no longer a repro but a program. Siemsen remained, his entire life, a man who let himself drift: through the bars and pubs of Berlin, through exile hubs in Paris and New York, through friendships that were more than friendships. His work marks the restlessness of a life caught between adaptation and resistance, between the violence of war and the violence of morality.
Siemsen uses his personal wartime and postwar experiences to write against militarism, nationalist propaganda, and repressive social norms. The call for humanity, openness, and against state control over identity and sexuality recurs. “Where have you been wandering?” provides an early moment in this critique.
A Legacy of Restlessness
Today, looking back, Siemsen’s book reads as a double testament: it tells of war as inner decay and of a love that could not be lived. That this work could fade into obscurity is due not only to the political ruptures of his life but also to the fact that it spoke too early, too softly, too indirectly. Yet precisely in that delicacy lies its strength. “Where have you been wandering?” is less an answer than an open question — to a time that buried its youth at the fronts and to a society that banished its lovers into the shadows.
“Where have you been wandering?” isn’t a war novel in the classic sense. Rather, it is an essayistic sketch in which a writer dares to tread the margins of what can be said — to the edges of his own identity, his era, and his society. World War I here appears not as a battlefield but as a psychic wound; not as a political territory but as an experience of loss, hardship, and estrangement.
For understanding Weimar-era literature, prose forms, and the sexual and political emancipation movements, Siemsen’s work is of great importance. It shows how individuals orient themselves in times of upheaval — and how literature can help mark ruptures, touch taboos, and give voice to those who have wandered — geographically, psychologically, and culturally.
