Europe Central

Set during the overlapping catastrophes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from roughly 1914 to 1975, this work of historical fiction comprises dozens of interlocking stories narrated by intelligence operatives, soldiers, artists, and an omniscient consciousness associated with a black telephone at the heart of totalitarian power. The book dramatizes the moral crises of real and fictional figures caught between two monstrous regimes, returning to central characters whose lives become parables of complicity, resistance, love, and artistic survival.

The book opens with "Steel in Motion," introducing the central metaphor: a squat black telephone that functions as the controlling intelligence of "Europe Central," the contested territory between Berlin and Moscow. The telephone links Hitler, called "the sleepwalker," and Stalin, called "the realist." Their alliance via the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, the subsequent invasions, and the eventual war between them unfold as signals along the telephone's cables.

The early stories establish parallel arcs. "The Saviors" recounts the 1918 assassination attempt on Lenin by Fanya Kaplan, a young Social Revolutionary. The tale is framed through Kabbalistic letter-mysticism, a Jewish tradition in which Hebrew letters carry mystical power. Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, persuades Lenin to let her visit Kaplan's cell, but the prisoner may be an actress planted by Stalin; Kaplan has already been executed. "Mobilization" shifts to Berlin in 1914, where a pale little man with a dark moustache, an early anonymous glimpse of Hitler, shouts "Germany!" louder than the Kaiser himself.

"Woman with Dead Child" traces the German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, defined by the death of her youngest son Peter in Flanders in October 1914. She had reluctantly let him volunteer against his father Karl's wishes and spends the rest of her life creating images of mourning mothers and dead children. In 1927, she visits the Soviet Union for an exhibition, where she meets a young photojournalist from Odessa named Roman Karmen. The story follows her through the Third Reich, her forced resignation from the Prussian Academy, the death of her grandson near Stalingrad, and her own death in Saxony in 1945.

The book's central thread follows the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. In "Opus 40," the young Shostakovich, newly married to Nina Varzar, begins a passionate affair in 1934 with Elena Konstantinovskaya, a young translator, composing his Cello Sonata in D Minor as an expression of their love. The affair ends when he remarries Nina after she announces a pregnancy. Elena is arrested in 1935 during the purges Stalin launched after the assassination of the prominent Bolshevik Sergei Kirov, seemingly to pressure the composer.

The central story "The Palm Tree of Deborah" traces Shostakovich from child prodigy through the catastrophe of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which Stalin walks out of in 1936, triggering years of persecution. When Germany invades in June 1941, Shostakovich serves as a fire-warden during the siege of Leningrad, composing his Seventh Symphony between air raids. The famous "Rat Theme," an invasion motif building through 12 variations from a light knocking to a full-throated march of evil, defines the work. The symphony is performed in besieged Leningrad on 9 August 1942 while Soviet artillery silences the German guns.

A parallel German narrative follows Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus through the Battle of Stalingrad in "The Last Field-Marshal." Paulus commands the Sixth Army through its triumphant advance, then its entrapment as Hitler refuses permission to withdraw and soldiers starve. On 30 January 1943, Hitler promotes Paulus to Field-Marshal, an implicit command to commit suicide, since no German Field-Marshal has ever been captured alive. The next day, Paulus surrenders. He testifies at Nuremberg, retires to East Germany, and dies in 1957.

"Breakout" presents General Andrey Vlasov, a hero of the Battle of Moscow captured after Stalin refuses to let his encircled Second Shock Army withdraw. The story traces his defection through disillusionment with Stalin and seduction by Captain Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, a Baltic German intelligence officer who promises him an autonomous Russian army. When Strik-Strikfeldt reveals the Katyn massacre, in which the Soviet secret police murdered thousands of Polish officers, Vlasov's last moral defenses collapse. Captured at war's end, he is hanged in Moscow in August 1946.

"Clean Hands" follows Kurt Gerstein, a devout Christian who joins the SS to uncover its crimes after the euthanasia of his sister-in-law Berthe at the Hadamar killing facility. He witnesses mass gassings at Belzec and Treblinka, sabotages shipments of the poison Zyklon B, and tries to alert diplomats and clergy, none of whom act. After the war, the French imprison him as a war criminal; he is found hanged in his cell in July 1945 and not rehabilitated until 1965.

Running through many stories is Comrade Alexandrov, a Soviet intelligence operative who narrates his surveillance of the poet Anna Akhmatova in "And I'd Dry My Salty Hair," alternating between contempt for her art and overwhelming admiration. He also obsessively monitors Elena Konstantinovskaya, confessing his own unrequited love for her.

The book's second half follows Shostakovich through decades of accommodation. The Zhdanov Decree of 1948, a Soviet resolution denouncing musical "formalism," renews attacks on his work. Nina dies in 1954. He proposes to Galina Ustvolskaya, who refuses. After a disastrous brief marriage to Margarita Kainova, he marries Irina Supinskaya, a quiet, much younger woman who becomes his devoted caretaker. In 1960, officials compel him to sign an application for Communist Party membership, the act he had sworn never to commit. He attempts suicide but is prevented by his friend Lebedinsky.

The climactic story, "Opus 110," describes Shostakovich encountering the ruins of Dresden while visiting East Germany. The collision of German and Soviet suffering erupts into his Eighth String Quartet (Opus 110), composed in three days. Built on his musical signature D-S-C-H, a four-note motif representing the German musical spelling of his initials, the quartet is described as "too sad even to rise from a moan into a wail." It contains Operation Barbarossa, the screaming of Leningrad, Elena's face, the sound of prison dogs, and a flash of beauty from Lady Macbeth in which the heroine sings her lover's name before drowning herself.

Throughout these years, Shostakovich's love for Elena persists. She is married to Professor Vigodsky. They meet intermittently in Leningrad restaurants; he tells her he loves her, and she says no with immovable gentleness. She once gives him a photograph of herself as a young woman, then asks for it back; he returns it in a sealed envelope without a word. He lives on through progressive physical decay, producing symphonies and film scores while making ritual denunciations at Party functions. He dies of lung cancer in August 1975. Elena dies the same year.

Surrounding these central narratives are shorter stories: "The Sleepwalker" narrates Hitler's arc from triumph to suicide through Norse mythology and Wagner's Ring Cycle; "The Red Guillotine" traces Hilde Benjamin, East Germany's feared Minister of Justice, from youthful idealism through merciless prosecution; "Operation Citadel" presents the Battle of Kursk through the hallucinatory eyes of a German telephonist; and "Airlift Idylls" reimagines the Cold War as surreal espionage fantasy. The final story, "The White Nights of Leningrad," reimagines Shostakovich lying in Elena's arms during a luminous summer night, rendered entirely in gray. The narrator reveals this was only a dream; Shostakovich had already been evacuated, and Elena had married and divorced Karmen. But in the dream, "those two pale, open-mouthed Russian corpses formed their own exclusive society on a street corner which shone brilliant silver with rain."