The Vanishing Sky

L. Annette Binder

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, September 19th 2020

Although there is an understandable interest in trying to explain why so many turned a blind eye to the atrocities of the Holocaust or were held in thrall of Hitler’s rhetoric, it is easy to forget the tragedy visited on ordinary Germans. Yet this is precisely what L Annette Binder reminds us of in her heartbreaking tale of a rural German family at the end of WWII.

After years of fighting, the Bavarian town of Heidenfeld has been hollowed out: younger and younger boys are being called to the front, old men are being mobilised to defend the town, and women struggle to make do in the face of increasing scarcity, waiting for their boys to come home. From this perspective, Etta Huber is lucky; two years after leaving for the front, Max, her eldest child, has been returned to her alive and intact. But whilst physically unharmed, he is psychologically shattered and, despite Etta’s best attempts to conceal his condition from outsiders, within weeks, he is taken from her again, this time to a psychiatric hospital in the nearby city of Würzburg. Etta suspects her husband Josef – himself debilitated by progressive loss of memory and consumed by shame and fear at his mental decline – of being the informant and, leaving him lost in the past, sets off to rescue her beloved son.

Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Georg is in compulsory military training. An introverted and physically inept boy with little in common with his fellow trainees, he dreams not of exotic women and military glory but of home, his books and Mutti’s cooking. When the one person he cares about in the Academy dies on the front lines, he escapes and tries to make his way back to Heidenfeld alone, his journey, like Etta’s, concluding in Würzburg, where they are caught in the final, desperate battle against the Allies, each unaware that the other is merely streets away.

“They’ve wrecked the world, these men, and they’re still not done. They’d take the sky if they could. They’d take the air if they could, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

laments one of Etta’s friends when she hears of Max’s disappearance, and this is very much a novel about those who suffer at the hands of those who claim to defend them:  Georg, who is not – and will never be –the man his father or the army wishes him to be. The women who have lost sons and husbands who shelter him on his journey. Max, who carries the bodies of his fallen comrades with him everywhere he goes. Josef, a former soldier who has spent his life in the shadow of his war-hero brothers now so lost in his forgetting that he is unwanted even in the old-man’s army. Etta and all the other mothers who just want their sons back home where they belong.

That is not to say that Binder denies the existence of the fascist regime, but it exists at one remove from the daily life of her characters. Their sons are being called away to towns and islands they have never heard of, the German League girls and the Hitler Jugend boys treat their fellow villagers with arrogant disregard, while the commanders who order Georg and his fellows to the front line do so from the safety of their bunkers.

We must never forget the atrocities Hitler and his regime carried out in Germany’s name, but it ought not be at the expense of the people in whose name he claimed to act, experiences The Vanishing Sky so powerfully invokes.