The horrible circumstances so trouble Morgan that when he is shown the mansion requisitioned for him, he proposes something unorthodox: Rather than send the current residents - German architect Stefan Lubert, his teenage daughter and a few servants - to their fates as displaced persons, he suggests that they share the house with him, his wife and their son. Lewis Morgan, has been assigned to supervise rebuilding and denazification within the British-controlled district encompassing Hamburg. A year after the war’s end, Hamburg’s populace remains hungry and homeless, orphaned children forage for food, and an especially cold winter is about to begin. “The Aftermath” opens in September 1946, three years after the Anglo-American air raids code-named “Operation Gomorrah” - “the Hiroshima of Germany” - set the city of Hamburg afire, killed more than 40,000 inhabitants and displaced 1 million others. Today, it’s hard to know how many readers will recall what happened after Germany’s defeat, when the victors divvied up its territory into occupation zones. Reading Rhidian Brook’s novel “ The Aftermath,” one can’t help but wonder if this is the sort of literary memorialization (albeit from a British author) that Sebald had wished for. Sebald in “Air War and Literature,” a controversial essay that went on to fault writers - especially his fellow German writers - for having failed to adequately memorialize Germans’ experience of the Allied air war. “Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation.” So argued the late W.G.

The aftermath by rhidian brook