A sprawling Doorstopper of a novel, Europe Central tells a fictionalized version of the story of dozens of World War II's main characters, concentrating mainly on those involved with the Eastern Front. On the German side we meet everybody from Adolf Hitler (usually called "the sleepwalker" in sly reference to his 1936 declaration, "I go the way Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker) to Kurt Gerstein, and on the Russian side everyone from Josef Stalin to Andrey Vlasov, but if you had to pick one of the characters as the protagonist, it would probably be the ultra-gifted composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who faces both the devastation of his country by the Nazis and the devastation of his family and his conscience by the Communists, and can resist only with his music. There seem to be two anonymous narrators, one Russian, one German, both cogs in the wheels of the tyrannies they serve, who give us a sort of worm's eye view of the artists and soldiers at the center of the war.
- Abusive Parents. Kurt Gerstein's father dismisses the Nazis' murder of his own daughter for her mental disability as justified.
- All Just a Dream. At least part of the Cold War portion of the story is this, as the German narrator repeatedly dreams of assassinating Shostakovich, who keeps coming back to life and mocking the narrator. The line between reality, dream, and madness is hard to discern in this part, probably deliberately so.
- Awful Wedded Life. R.L. Karmen and Elena Konstantinovskaya have this, largely because Elena's in love with Shostakovich, although the fact that she's bisexual and needs female companionship too doesn't help either.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance. The two narrators are a National Socialist and a Communist, each fully committed to the regime he serves and fully willing to murder or torture racial enemies and class enemies respectively, at least at first. The National Socialist appears to lose faith toward the end of the novel, but that may be due more to opportunism than to any genuine revulsion against the Third Reich (his oft-repeated refrain that he was "only a telephonist" comes off as a rehearsal for his war crimes trial).
- Go Mad from the Revelation. Downplayed, but several characters' tendency to not finish their sentences (especially Shostakovich) appear to stem from their minds not being able to cope with the idea of stating the horrors of the war aloud.
- Les Collaborateurs. Deconstructed. Friedrich von Paulus and Andrey Vlasov are both generals who ended up working for their former enemies, and both are both portrayed sympathetically.
- Sexual Karma. Shostakovich and Elena Konstantinovskaya apparently have the best sex of anybody in the book. But it doesn't save their relationship from the overwhelming obstacles it faces.
- Stealth Insult. The anonymous NKVD narrator asks the great poet Anna Akhmatova, whom he is assigned to spy on, whether Pushkin is worth his time. Akhmatova assures him that Pushkin would be a complete waste of his time, which the narrator assumes is a putdown of Pushkin rather than himself.
