New York Journal News // Interview with William T. Vollmann

By Andrew Ervin

William T. Vollmann is widely recognized as one of the most important American novelists of his generation. Perhaps best known for his on-going “Seven Dreams,” historical novels about the genesis of the American civilization, he has also written extensively about his personal experiences in different war zones all over the world and of his appreciation for the seedier spots on our own cultural fabric.

“Europe Central,” is a bit of a departure for Vollmann. Like Danilo Kiš’s masterpiece “A Tomb For Boris Davidovich,” an acknowledged influence, “Europe Central” contains a series of self-contained pieces that gel together to form a novel. Here however the stories come in pairs—common thematic and moral concerns repeatedly unite two separate narratives. Furthermore, Vollmann lined up eighteen of these double, mirrored tales so that every one seems to reflect the others in beautiful, startling and bizarre ways.

The line between fiction and fact is a blurry one. The end of the book features a long list of the sources Vollmann referenced in order to get his historic details as accurate as possible. Set mainly in the mid-twentieth century, “Europe Central”’s characters include Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as well as artists Käthe Kollwitz and composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The most memorable figures though are two opposing lieutenant-generals, the Russian A. A. Vlasov, forced to defend his homeland from invasion, and his nemesis, the German Friedrich Paulus. Then there’s Kurt Gerstein, the SS officer who risked his life to save the very people he was supposed to murder. The result is without question the most profound fictional—if it can be called fictional—account of World War II since Pynchon wrote “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

Last week, on the ides of March, I phoned Vollmann at his home in Sacramento, California. He was obviously suffering through a nasty cold but graciously spoke at length about the origins of “Europe Central” and how in wartime good people end up committing horrific deeds. For the sake of clarity, and to make myself sound smarter than I really am, I have edited and rewritten many of the questions I asked.


How did “Europe Central” come about?

I’ve been really interested in the subject of totalitarianism since I was in elementary school. I remember seeing one of those film loops about the first arrival of the G.I.s in one of the concentration camps. And later on I realized, well, I’m part German and my relatives are probably involved. What does this mean? How could they have done this? So I read a lot of books about Nazism, in the seventies, and then I gradually got interested in Stalinism as well. Then in the eighties I read Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” which I think is one of the great books of the twentieth century. That was the first place I really saw the clear equation of Nazism with Stalinism. Up until that time most people, myself included, tended to think, Of course Stalin was bad and killed a lot of people, but Hitler was worse. And Grossman said it the way it was.

Do you mean to distinguish between different types of murderers?

When I researched “Rising Up and Rising Down” I realized that in fact Stalin was a more effective killer than Hitler. For one thing he was on the winning side of the war. He died probably of old age. And he killed maybe five times as many people as Hitler did. So he was highly successful at what he did, and as I say in “Rising Up and Rising Down,” the twentieth century was really the century of Stalin. Hitler in a way was more of the self destructive ideologue with the artistic temperament and Stalin was a murderous bureaucrat.

Are there degrees of evil?

I got more and more interested in various moral dilemmas, soluble and insoluble. And I started thinking of these people in the stories as tragic actors, people doing the best they could. Good people or indifferent people, sometimes evil people fighting for evil regimes. Whichever regime won or lost, the people were still going to suffer and yet they had a certain amount of moral choice all the same.

Do you find it strange that your readers may very well sympathize with the plight of Nazis? Of Stalinists?

I think of somebody like Kurt Gerstein or for that matter Vlasov or even Paulus and none of them were probably bad people. Gerstein was the most heroic of them all but the other two were probably really doing their best. And if they’d happened to be, let’s say, American generals they would be more or less effective and they wouldn’t have had their various kind of sad ends. Vlasov’s story always haunted me. I first heard about him when I was reading volume one of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which must have come out in the late seventies. And he just mentions Vlasov very briefly. I thought, how strange—how could this possibly be, this Russian guy fighting for a supposed liberation army under Hitler, against Stalin? Very little was written about Vlasov and every now and then I’d go to the library, there’d be nothing. And then finally I went to a graduate library and there were five or six books. Even those didn’t say that much about the guy, but I got some sense of the circumstances. But it was like writing a piece of science fiction in a way. You know that Jupiter has a certain gravity and a probable atmosphere and you extrapolate and try to imagine what life on Jupiter would be like and you do your best, but you don’t know that much.

How has the novel been received so far?

I’ve actually been shocked by the fact that "Europe Central" has been getting such good reviews, and the only reason that I can see is that unlike most of my books it’s directing its focus across the ocean at something other than America. Maybe that’s selling the book short. Of course I’m grateful for good reviews. The truth is, the lessons of Russian and Germany do apply here. They’re very unnerving lessons.