![]() With post-war trauma a factor in everyone’s life and frequently left alone in the house, a romance blossoms between Rachel and the German man she’s been taught to despise.īased on a novel by Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath is a well made but familiar look at this period of history. Unfortunately for her the house isn’t empty her husband has decided to share with the the previous owners: Alexander Skarsgård and his daughter ( Flora Thiemann). To her surprise she isn’t staying in the city, she’s going to the country manor of a rich Hamburg family, one of the many acquisitions in the British zone of occupation. ![]() In the winter of 1946 Rachel ( Keira Knightley) arrives in Hamburg to be with her husband ( Jason Clarke), a British army colonel tasked with restoring order in a city where bodies are still being found in the rubble. ![]() Rather than looking at the war itself, it’s most concerned, as the title suggests, with what happened afterwards. This is the setting for The Aftermath, James Kent’s latest film since 2014’s Testament of Youth, the latest in the everlasting cinematic fascination with the Second World War. Six years of war and the coordinated fury of Allied bombing resulted, in the memorable words of Christopher Hitchens, in “hardly one brick standing upon another from one end of Germany and Austria to the next”. The promise of the Thousand Year Reich barely lasted twelve, bringing with it a level of destruction and suffering unprecedented in the history of human endeavour. “It breaks my heart my father’s vision and steps to rebuild a lasting peace in Europe are being put in jeopardy,” he says.Five months after the Nazi Empire surrendered to the Allies, Hamburg is the skeleton of a city. He can’t help but refer to the political climate of today. It was very clear they admired him, and were very fond of us.” “When I asked, they were lovely and effusive about how kind my father had been. “I was often asked if they resented us,” says Kim. He and Heike wrote but 15 years passed before they saw each other again.īy then they both had married and each had four children of their own.įor his research, Rhidian returned to Hamburg with Kim and they all met up. There was a family down the road who we had a much cooler relationship with, we knew they had been in the party.”Įventually, Kim began returning to Britain for boarding school and, aged 13, in 1951, the family left for good. “My gut feeling is they’d have parked it. “We didn’t have deep conversations, maybe the parents did,” he says. ![]() To this day he has no idea what the Ladiges’ role in the war had been, although he does not believe they were members of the Nazi party. Heike told him “to be driving with the Brooks to the seaside and be accepted as equal” was a treasured memory. “She had to hide in the well of the car in case we bumped into the military police,” says Kim. That spring, the family began taking Heike with them to the seaside, even though it was not officially allowed. “Both sets of parents had tears rolling down their cheeks.” “They came and somehow or other we ended up dressing up as choir boys and girls with sheets around our shoulders singing Silent Night in German,” recalls Kim, emotion wobbling his voice.
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