The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder

London : New York : Bloomsbury, 2020

Set in 1945, The Vanishing Sky tells the story of the Huber family and small town life in Germany during the waning years of the war. The story unfolds in alternating chapters from the perspective of the mother, Etta and the youngest son, Georg. 

Etta is determined to get her husband and both of her sons through the war at all costs—it is her sole focus. Her older son, Max, has just returned from the war and she recognizes that something isn't right with him, something that we would now recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. While Max spends his days unsuccessfully running from the battlefield horrors that have imprinted on his mind, Joseph, his father, seems only encouraged by the dubious news stories of Germany's success. While struggling with signs of dementia, he still has a certain nostalgia for his own years fighting in the first world war and is determined to fight in this war now that the old and the young are being called upon to serve. 

Georg, an overweight bookish boy, is nearly 200 miles away at a Hitler Youth school. He is trying to hold on and avoid the inevitable day when he reaches the age of sixteen and will be sent to fight. He sees what happens to those who flee. While there he discovers he has feelings for one of the other boys, Müller. They become close friends but Georg knows that the reality of their relationship must be kept secret. 

An excellent writer can create psychological atmosphere—a way of projecting an emotion or feeling onto the reader related to the events of the novel and the internal dialogue and emotional state of the characters themselves. Binder's strength in this regard is her ability to convey the overwhelming sense of dread and the sense of inevitability among the characters in a small village in Germany near the end of World War II. That dread doesn't simply come from the reader's knowledge of how a novel set in this time and place is going to end. It comes from reading the lived experience and the inner dialogue of the characters that the author has created. It is compelling and creates a natural empathy for their plight.

Binder's Hitler Youth School and the Schools of Classic Boarding School Novels : Some Parallels

One would not normally think a novel such as this would have any relationship to classic English boarding school novels of the early twentieth century, but the parallels couldn't be more clear. The culture and activities at the Hitler Youth school are not so different than those of the schools in classic English boarding school novels of the time. There is a general veneration of those students who came before and went off to war, a focus on physical prowess—in this case in war games instead of cricket, and the classic close friendship.

The focus of the Hitler Youth school was not one of academics. One might not call it a school at all given that it served primarily as a military training camp for teens. The school in a traditional English boarding school novel would teach students Latin, Greek, math, etc.—subjects that Georg shows an unusual interest in. In an English boarding school, those who went to war were venerated because of the selfless act of choosing to go to war. The teens at the Hitler Youth school had little choice about attending the school and upon reaching the age of sixteen would be required to join the military ranks.

The traditional English boarding school activities such cricket competitions have been transformed in the Hitler Youth school to weapons competitions, physical training, digging trenches and building defensive walls—basic skills needed to function in a world of war.

Maybe the most important aspect of the classic boarding school novel is the overly close relationship between two of the boys. It is suggested that Georg's closeness with Müller is not invisible to the other boys, but they know that it needs to remain hidden from the adults. The love between these two characters is presented in a similar way as the great loves of boarding school novels, really quite chaste in character, but certainly real in their own hearts.

Binder has done an amazing job of merging genres by mixing elements of the classic boarding school novel with an historical fiction that turns what we think of as a World War II story on its head.