If time is most often described in terms of a line then let’s just stick with that. Dark line on white background. Looking a little closer you might see little scribblings notched along it, noting important dates above and below. But let’s look even closer. Take out our special timeline scissors and snip two ends, the first around the turn of the twentieth century and our second at, say, 9 August 1975. Then let’s bring this smidgen of time up to eye level, and turn it sagittally so we can look through it like a telescope. It is not a solid but not quite hollow, the inner-walls undulating with minute hills and declivities, myriad and growing from the walls inward, toward that tiny speck of common air that remains true through the entirety. As an illustrative example, we could cut off a single day in time’s line and bring it up to eye level and these hills and valleys would be too many and varied and interlocking to ever really be able to locate a single independent one; the surface area so subtly ridged and dipping that measurement is near impossible, the space it occupies seemingly infinite. Hold onto this image. It is as good a way as I can think of to try and understand what William Vollmann is attempting in “Europe Central.”
Short stories of true lives, fictionalized for drama’s sake, connected both historically and for the book’s structural sense, and understood with the kind of empathy for victimhood that only someone like Vollmann could achieve, “Europe Central’s” action manages to convey the violence of and between two totalitarian states whose real losses are generally obscured by the very numbers used to describe them. This is where our snippet of time comes in. The relationships and connections of Vollmann’s characters are manifold, too many to adequately number, and pressed together in spaces of time too fraught with other, often more historically significant moments. What is, after all, one in a lot of millions? And in the midst of such an epic historical moment, Vollmann manages to pan and zoom through the fog of great history, to brush aside the grandiose plodding twists and turns of battles won and lost among massive states, to peer in on the small personal histories that were all, in one way or another, disfigured by the violence of not just war but also the violence of abusive, dehumanizing power.
Victims of street crime, muggings and dime store robberies, are often said to be the victims of “senseless violence.” And by using such a description the acts can be slid under a corner of the community rug and assigned as outliers, fringe acts of the criminally perverted unleashed on those unfortunate enough to be caught in the crosshairs of sheer bad luck. As much as dealing with cruelty can be, this is a pleasant thought, allowing us to think that the people who commit such acts are the rarest minority, lost to mainstream society, mentally unbalanced, jaded, maybe–charitably–victims of circumstance and the poor socialization of others. Whatever the filter, the motive of categorizing violence as senseless remains the same: to describe it away and assign it to a negligible phyla of human activity. In the world Vollmann reveals to us in “Europe Central,” The Third Reich and Stalin’s Russia and the unfortunate bystanders who lived between and around them while they were in place, is a world where the fringe violence of petty theft and the like are superseded by the closed-fist constriction of thought and activity by the state itself.
Such a description still remains too vague to do real justice to the breadth of this book. Vollmann is able to convey the gradual, iterative failure of the lives he describes as they are worn down in the teeth of these governments; lives that otherwise–he suggests–would likely have turned out differently, happier and more complete–whatever those words might mean. He masterfully squashes any impulse two compare Germany or Russia to the United States and in the process creates a variety of narrative voices cleverly designed to evoke the inherent evil of the governments while never to removing his eye from the kaleidoscope long enough to make judgments about Reich or the Iron Curtain. In Vollmann’s Europe, there is nothing that lay beyond.
Vollmann examines two nations whose structure was founded not upon the respect of the human as individual, but rather on the need for rigorous–and if necessary, violent–adherence to certain standards of not only personal conduct but thought. Essentially the ironing out of human difference until the populace is reduced to interchangeable parts meant only to serve the state apparatus. Artists in these nations were gauged by how well their art supported the image and consciousness demanded by the state. Professional advancement predicated on how well one’s decisions supported the prevailing leadership and its ideals, governments whose ideals themselves were somewhat nebulous and gray enough to support the whims of caprice. The governments of “Europe Central” were bent on sheering off the portions of the populace who could not conform to those demanded standards. How does a human being cope with the vast state apparatus designed to re-engineer human action into a submissive, goose-stepping, ubiquitous one and all?
Answer: It crumbles. Slowly. Becomes something less than human. Or it dies. Or, maybe worse, maybe better, it gives itself over and in the process pawns its liberty for an ersatz life. “Europe Central” is the best book I’ve read that describes the minute violence of control when brought to bear on every individual of a nation.