Europe Central by William Vollmann
🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊
This will probably be the last book by William Vollmann that I read for a long while. But that's not because it was bad, just the opposite: it was so overwhelmingly excellent that I think I need a break. While it's the sixth book of his I've read in the last few years, it might just be the best (The Ice Shirt being its closest competition).
Structurally, the book is a series of vignettes following various characters living in central and eastern Europe from just after World War I, through World War II, and into the start of the Cold War. Some of the more memorable narrators include composer Dmitri Shostakovitch, artist Kathe Kollwitz, SS whistleblower Kurt Gerstein, Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen, and Nazi Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. Like most of Vollmann's books the work is deeply rooted in history, exhaustively researched (and footnoted!), but still has moments of hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness magical realism.
There's a lot to love about the book, so I'll try and hit a few of my favorite parts:
Magical realism as a medium of capturing the horrors of modernity
The nearness of the subject matter to the present day changes the valence of the mystical elements of Vollmann's fiction. That is to say, the magical realism feels very different in Europe Central than in his other works. For example, the meandering between between fact and fantasy in The Ice Shirt, seemed almost fitting given the lacunae in the historical record and the bombastic nature of the saga tradition. Alternatively, the spiritual elements in some of the other Seven Dreams novels were clearly Vollmann's method of trying to engage sincerely with real-world religious practices (both Native American and European). But Vollmann's use of the irrational seems much more jarring in Europe Central. Here, the subject matter is in living memory, and the sheer weight of familiar, available information creates a ponderous sense of bland reality. Into that claustrophobic context, the weaving in of mystical or weird fictional elements feels like an irruption of madness, by turns unhinged, vertiginous, and hyperreal. That fever-dream unreality fits the darkest hours of World War II and the Cold War perfectly.
An embarrassment of historical riches
The book is, at bottom, a series of nuanced and deeply felt explorations of the psychology of real historical people living in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. And Vollmann manages to bring them off with a level of prosopographical wizardry that is simply unparalleled in his other work. On one level, it's hardly surprising, given the wealth of primary sources available: almost all of the central characters in the book wrote memoirs and were the subjects of other contemporary works. But Vollmann clearly went above and beyond. In some cases, Vollmann interviewed living people who personally knew his subjects, and even went so far as to pay to have works only available in German or Russian translated into English. His deep engagement with a huge historical record allowed him to create dense, interrelated portraits that would have simply been impossible in his other historical novels.
Ethical challenges: can we even do good?
This book returns to one of Vollmann's favorite themes: can a person caught up in historical forces that are working a great evil actually do anything about it? Vollmann seems to have a fascination with characters who are caught up in doing evil while trying to do what they believe to be good (the Jesuits in Fathers and Crows, O. O. Howard in The Dying Grass, etc.). Europe Central features a few different characters who, in their own way, are caught in the flow of something horrifying trying their best to stop it.
The best (but not only) example is Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer who desperately tried to tell the world about the Holocaust as it was happening, but who continued to work as an SS functionary. His attempts to warn the world were mostly fruitless, and while he sometimes sabotaged the operation of the death camps, he also felt he had to go along in order to stay embedded and alive, so personally contributed to the operation of the gas chambers. But what more could he have done? Fled? Sabotaged more until he was found out? But would either of those choices have done any more good?
These kinds of moral historical puzzles are one of my favorite parts of Vollmann's books, although their solution (as always) is left as an exercise for the reader.
The style, of course.
And last, but not least, this is a perfect exemplar of everything I enjoy about Vollmann as a stylist; it veers from sober and stately1, to crass absurdity2, to hallucinatory nonsense3, but almost always beautiful. As ever, he is unpredictable, prone to digression, and occasionally very frustrating, but even when he fails he gives the satisfaction of watching a consummate artist working near his limits. If we're talking style alone, I'd say this is easily his best book
Assuming you like long-form literary fiction at all, this book is recommended with no reservations.
Footnotes:
"In Berlin, that other composer, Adolf Hitler, was putting the final dispositions on the score of his Thirteenth Symphony: Skizze B: Heeresgruppe Nord. Eigene Lage am 22.6.1941 abds. Operation “BARBAROSSA.” Roman numerals, an hourglass flag, checkerboard flags, numerals inside circles and semicircles, all of these stood dark upon a pale grey map of western Russia. The plural of staff is staves. His General Staff were all staves and knaves stacked one above another in parallels on the music paper. His score had no end. Shostakovich, it’s said, could write twenty or thirty pages a day when well engaged upon a symphony, and Heeresgruppe Nord, Army Group North, would make similarly rapid progress across the pale grey flatness en route to Leningrad. The other two Army Groups proved equally exemplary. Before their symphony was done, they’d kill almost as many high-ranking Russian officers as had Comrade Stalin himself."
"Opus 40
Her electric clitoris and the phrase electric clitoris were the first two aspects of her to be translated musically—a claim which the translator would have rejected, since right up until his Seventh Symphony he proudly disdained program music; but sometimes the critic’s exegesis is wiser than the composer’s, for the same reason that in recordings of Opus 40, Emanuel Ax plays the piano part better than Shostakovich; no one who has read the entire case file can deny that Elena Konstantinovskaya’s clitoris was electric and that its sweet vibrations sing forever in the cello melody which opens the first movement."
"Between exploit and recompense lay only four days, which in most histories would comprise but an ellipsis between words, a quartet of periods, thus: . . . .—but which, if through close reading we magnify them into spheres, prove to contain in each case a huddle of twenty-four grey subterranean hours like orphaned mice; and in the flesh of every hour a swarm of useless moments like ants whose queen has perished; and within each moment an uncountable multitude of instants resembling starpointed syllables shaken out of words—which at the close of this interval, Fanya Kaplan was carried beyond Tau, final letter of the magic alphabet."