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Europe Central
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Across thirty-seven linked narratives, Germany and the Soviet Union become rival centres of surveillance, propaganda and war. Real and fictional lives are paired across the two regimes: Käthe Kollwitz attempts to preserve humane art under Nazism; Kurt Gerstein enters the SS and tries to expose mass murder; Friedrich Paulus is trapped with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad; and Andrey Vlasov crosses from Soviet command into collaboration with Germany.
Dmitri Shostakovich provides the book’s most sustained story, composing under Stalinist scrutiny while private love, fear and artistic ambition become politically dangerous. Anna Akhmatova and Roman Karmen extend the portrait of culture under coercion. Moving from the purges and the Holocaust through Leningrad and Stalingrad into the post-war decades, Vollmann asks what moral choice can mean when every available action is compromised by dictatorship, violence and survival.
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