Europe Central

“What once impelled millions of manned and unmanned bullets into motion? You say Germany. They say Russia. It certainly couldn’t have been Europe herself, much less Europe Central, who’s always such a good docile girl.”

In his magnificent new work of fiction, Europe Central, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. The result is a daring and mesmerizing perspective on human actions during wartime.

In these intertwined paired stories, Vollmann compares and contrasts the moral decisions made by various figures from this period—some famous, some infamous, some unknown. In “The last Field-Marshal” and “Breakout” he conjures up two generals, Friedrich Paulus, commander of Germany’s Sixth Army, and Russian general A. A. Vlasov, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing, “Zoya” and “Clean Hands,” tells of two heroes—a female Russian partisan named Zoya who achieves martyrdom at the beginning of the war, and Kurt Gerstein, a young German who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes. Also explored in this book are the fates of artists and poets ranging from Käthe Kollwitz and Anna Akhmatova to Marina Tsvetaeva and Van Cliburn.

Perhaps Vollman’s signature accomplishment in Europe Central is a series of stories that examine the complex and elusive Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the constant Stalinist assaults upon his work and life. Here also Vollmann explores an imaginary love triangle between Shostakovich, the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen, and Elena Konstantinovskaya, a translator who was intimate with Shostakovich for a year in the mid-1930s and thereafter married to Karmen for a brief time. In the novel, Shostakovich is a man consumed by fear and regret who does what little he can to uphold the freedom of artistic creation, and whose brief relationship with Elena dominates his life until its end. As Vollman writes in this book, “Above all, Europa is Elena.”