Europe Central

With Oprah author James Frey in the news for possibly fabricating part of his million-selling memoir, it seems like a good time to look at Vollmann's use of historical characters in Europe Central. Unlike many memoirs, which are at pains to hide their fabrications, Vollmann's book is quite clearly labeled as fiction even though the author delves into the minds of many well-known people, including composer Dimitri Shostakovich, documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen, artist Käthe Kollwitz, Russian general Andrei Vlasav, German Field Marshall Palus, and even Adolf Hitler.

Rather than pretend any historical objectivity, Vollmann freely confesses his fabrications. Much of the book revolves around a supposed love triangle among Shostakovich, Karmen, and Elena Konstantinovskaya, but in an afterword (entitled "An Imaginary Love Traingle"), Vollmann tells us "for my own narrative purposes I have invented many of the interrelations between these three individuals." The same could be said for many of the other relationships Vollmann establishes in Europe Central.

So what are these "narrative purposes," and why has Vollmann assiduously researched (and footnoted) this book if he's just going to make things up? Well, one could always say something about the inherent subjectivity of any telling of history. One could also say that fiction can be more finely tuned than truth, giving Vollmann better abilities to get his points across.

Those answers are certainly true enough, but I think there are others that are more interesting. For one thing, there is the narrator (or narrators) that tell many of the chapters. In this review the narrators are summed up as "The Bureaucrat." That's not a bad name, although I prefer to think of these narrators as nameless internal spies; members of the German and Russian secret police that spy on potential dissidents, like Shostakovich or Palus.

These narrators are characterized by a couple of things: intimate knowledge of their subjects, but, despite that knowledge, a fundamental lack of understanding of their subjects' lives. These senses, they're somewhat like Vollmann, who is removed by over 50 years and must imagine what his characters are like and must "spy" on them by reading history books, correspondence, and such. In order to further their very different purposes, Vollmann and his narrators must invent a good deal about the people they are tracking (of course, Vollmann is much more at liberty to admit his inventions than, say, a Stasi agent would be).

So, perhaps Vollmann is freely inventing lives of his historic personages in order to better get into the minds of some of his narrators.

I think there may be one other reason, and that is to be found on page 453 of Europe Central. On that page, it says:

To put it aphoristically, a human skeleton is not human. It frightens us because it proves the truth of that gravestone epitaph so common in the age of Holbein: What I once was, so you are. What I am now, so you will be. . . . Since death itself is nothing, the best our minds can do to represent it is through that expressionless face of bone which one day will be ours, and to which we cannot help imparting an expression. . . . That is why SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein cannot help clothe the skull in beloved Berthe's image.

"Beloved Berthe" is a woman that Gerstein was in love with, now dead. All that remains of the dead is a skeleton, brittle bone and brittle facts, but the soft flesh of personality and history melts away. When confronting the dead, it is too much to accept the fact of their death, and so, like Gerstein, Vollmann clothes the dead in the image of a beloved, someone alive, or close enough in memory, that more than just a skeleton remains.

Previous readings of Europe Central. 1

Previous readings.