When Jella Lepman returned from exile in 1945 to her hometown of Stuttgart and her place of work during the Weimar Republic, the Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt, she felt like a „stranger among strangers,“ as she confessed in her memoirs Die Kinderbuchbrücke. Like most exiles, she had been deeply alienated by the Germans’ deprivation of her rights, persecution, and expulsion. And like most exiles, she remained silent about her experiences and her feelings of homelessness and loneliness. But how did she manage, against internal and external resistance in the country that had rejected her, to found an institution that was an epitome of a hopeful future? Research on remigration has shown that it was primarily repatriates who were able to reconnect with their old professional and friendship networks from the 1920s who stayed and contributed to social and economic reconstruction. Others who lacked such networks did not last long in a society that was often hostile to repatriates. Overall, the contribution of remigrants to the reconstruction of post-war Germany was less than previously assumed. In this context, Jella Lepman is regarded as a lone fighter, not least because of the way she framed herself in her memoirs Die Kinderbuchbrücke. However, a look at the founding of the International Youth Library shows that Jella Lepman also relied on a network of supporters. Furthermore, the International Youth Library did not remain an isolated entity in the German library landscape, but provided an important impetus, so that this project can be considered as a successful contribution by a remigrant to the social and cultural reconstruction of post-war Germany.