Europe Central

Vollmann structures Europe Central as thirty-some linked stories, alternating a German story with a Soviet one across roughly the same historical window, so that the book's real architecture is comparative: a chapter on the artist Käthe Kollwitz's work under Nazi suppression sits against a chapter on Soviet documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen, a chapter on Field Marshal Paulus surrendering at Stalingrad sits against one on General Andrei Vlasov defecting to fight for the Germans against Stalin. The pairing isn't offered as moral equivalence exactly, Vollmann is explicit that the systems' cruelties differ in kind and scale, but as a sustained argument that totalitarian machinery produces structurally similar deformations in the people it runs through, regardless of which flag it flies.

Dmitri Shostakovich runs through the book as its closest thing to a central figure, his music, his fraught, opportunistic, sometimes courageous relationship to Stalinist power, and his complicated love for Elena Konstantinovskaya, who is also loved by Karmen, threading multiple stories together across decades. Vollmann uses Shostakovich's whole career, celebrated, denounced, rehabilitated, denounced again, as the book's clearest case study in what compromise with an all-encompassing state actually costs an artist who keeps working anyway, producing music that manages to smuggle grief and dissent past censors who never quite catch what they're hearing.

The SS officer Kurt Gerstein, a real historical figure Vollmann renders in devastating detail, joined the SS specifically to gather evidence of the Holocaust from the inside, procured Zyklon B for the camps as part of his cover, and spent the war trying, with almost no success, to get word of the extermination out to the Allies and the Vatican through back channels nobody believed or acted on. Vollmann uses Gerstein's story as the book's starkest instance of its whole method: a man complicit in genocide by his own actual hand and simultaneously its most desperate would-be witness, a moral position the book refuses to resolve into either exoneration or simple condemnation.

The book's title refers to an actual telephone switching system linking German and Soviet military communications across the shifting front, a literal piece of infrastructure Vollmann turns into the novel's controlling metaphor: two supposedly opposed systems routed, throughout the war, through shared physical lines, shared logics of surveillance and denunciation, shared appetite for turning individual lives into statistics on a ledger. Europe Central, the place, becomes Europe Central, the switchboard, connecting every story in the book whether its subjects know it or not.