I like to think about Retired!König sometimes. Big, rough, mean König, stripped away of everything that made him König. It came not from old age, not from his own will, but from a bomb that shattered his knee and left him with a permanent limp that could be treated but not cured. A slow soldier is a dead soldier, and there was nothing he or the medics could do to stop the retirement from reaching his way and ruining everything he had ever built.
Alexander returns to an empty home and an overflowing bank account that could only exist in the hands of a soldier with enough of a bad character to smear his hands with dirty work. But it doesn't matter now. The old ladies down the street will never know of his sins, and neither will the people who cross his path everyday. A blessing isn't too far from a curse, after all, and the blissful unawareness of others serves more as a way into isolation than anything. König was reserved, yes, but never anonymous. Everyone around base knew about his achievements, about the feats of his career, about what it took to become a Colonel.
Ah, this is why the suicide rate among veterans is so high, isn't it? Not even a man of such size can escape the suffering that lingers when everything breaks into small pieces of nothing but memories.