The Aftermath

"They're not like us," warns a Briton in a German cafe, echoing propaganda shown to Allied forces before they entered post-World War II occupation zones. Anyone familiar with postwar history knows this skepticism quickly gave way to fraternization between Allied occupiers and Germans. The Aftermath (2019) illustrates this change through Rachel Morgan (Keira Knightley), a British colonel's wife, who joins her husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), stationed in Hamburg. They self-consciously inhabit the requisitioned house of an architect (Aleksander Skarsgaard) and his daughter, Freda (Flora Thiemann), whom Lewis allows to stay. Rachel loathes the Germans for the death of her son, who died during the bombing of Britain. Her husband has a nearly opposite reaction as he attempts to connect with the locals and reconstruct the city (and society) from ruins. Their inability to cope with the loss of their son divides them. Eventually, Rachel finds mutual comfort in the arms of the architect, who lost his wife to the bombing of Hamburg. Colonel Morgan realizes he does not have the grateful, docile populace he had hoped and that some of the systemic violence inherent to fascism remains even once the fog of war has lifted.

The first hour is promising as a historical drama, if a bit pedestrian. Aerial shots of the skeletons of scorched Hamburg buildings (and human skeletons within) touch upon historical debates surrounding the ethics and necessity of the Allied strategic bombing campaign. Displaced persons walk alongside train tracks. Riots erupt due to food shortages. The most historically intriguing scene concerns the architect Lubert's attempts to procure a Persilschein, or a certificate of clearance that he was not a member of the Nazi party or supported their actions. "After 1933 we built what we were told to build," Lubert says before the denazification review committee to justify his designing houses for Nazi officials. It's a common refrain of the Mitmacher who may not have agreed with the policies but went along with the implementation because what else does one do under a totalitarian state (it turns out there are a number of counterexamples of people who walked away for ethical reasons without repercussions).

Unfortunately, after the Persilschein scene, the film mostly abandons the issue of perpetrator, collaborator, and bystander. The words "Jew" or "Antisemitism" are never mentioned in the film, though pictures of concentration camp victims are shown. Obviously, a movie cannot and should not include everything, and other post-World War II films such as Operation Finale (2018) have addressed culpability in the Holocaust. However, whether intentionally or not, the movie ultimately equates the endurance of fascism with Hitler's cult of personality. When a Hitler-loving insurgent falls through ice on the Elbe, the film seems to imply that the problems of the past die with him. The scene becomes ethically intriguing for another reason: the colonel prevents Freda from saving him. The question of the "banality of evil" remains largely untouched as does any contemporary parallel. The Holocaust is, of course, a unique historical event. However, as more and more eyewitnesses pass away, it is hard not to see a correlation with the worldwide rise of strongman leadership or racialized rhetoric regarding immigrants from "shithole countries." The Aftermath could go deeper, and this is where the film, especially as a potential teaching tool, falls flat.

Instead, the second half of the movie focuses exclusively on the personal dynamics of the love triangle. All three main actors give great performances. Skarsgaard adeptly plays a variation of a recent cinematic archetype, the hunky WWII German with a heart of gold, featured prominently in Suite Française (2014) and The Exception (2016). Humanizing a Nazi character can serve as a warning that anyone can fall prey to hateful ideology, but, especially in The Exception, "He's not like those other Nazis" is a problematic message in itself. The Aftermath largely sidesteps this issue by emphasizing, or in so far that the audience is told, that Lubert was not a party member and despised the ideology...