The stories in Europe Central are rarely narrated by their characters. Although the various narrators are seldom identified and the reader must speculate who they might be, the author uses their narrations to illustrate his themes and ideology because much of the narration conflicts with what the reader knows is true. For example, Russian dissident poet Anna Ahkmatova’s story is told by a loyal Communist, Comrade Alexandrov, who is assigned to watch her every move. The popular poet writes beautiful verse that becomes more political as Stalin’s atrocities increase. When she discovers the grave of Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyev (executed along with sixty-one alleged traitors to the Soviet government), the narrator exclaims:

There she was, praying and sobbing again! Had it been up to me, I would have shot her right there. But who listens to me? And so naturally she went home and wrote more anti-Soviet poems.

The reader soon recognizes the irony: the narrator’s viewpoint is biased.

German SS officer Kurt Gerstein’s story is narrated by an arrogant Nazi who calls Gerstein an “impure element” and proceeds to contemptuously detail Gerstein’s failed attempts to interfere with Hitler’s “final solution” by repeatedly trying to inform Swiss, Swedish, and Vatican officials about shipments of the deadly gas Zyklon B to the concentration camps. The reader realizes that Gerstein is not an “impure element” but a hero for opposing everyone, including his own family, while trying to inform the world about the horrors of the Holocaust.

Vollmann uses strong motifs throughout the novel, one of which is music. While the Third Reich unravels and Nazi Germany loses battle after battle, Hitler escapes into a reverie of German composer Richard Wagner’s operas. There, he deludes himself into believing that like the opera, his army consists of tall, blonde Aryan sword-wielding heroes instead of malnourished, exhausted soldiers waiting in vain for his approval to break formation or surrender. “After Wagner,” he says, “I feel hardened and refreshed.” A corresponding Russian music motif is the recurring subplot of composer Dmitri Shostakovich who turns his pain into music. Shostakovich spends his life resisting the Soviets, refusing to join the Communist Party (at great peril to himself and his family), and refusing to write music that is acceptable to Comrade Stalin. He stalls for years when the Party asks him to dedicate one of his symphonies to Lenin. Shostakovich “whispers curses against Comrade Stalin” in his wife’s ear by night, and by day he uses double talk and stammering to confound the Communists as they continually insist that he join the Party:

Oh dear, oh, me....The difficulty is, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, I never could understand the, the, you know, when they talk about surplus value....

Meanwhile, he confides to his friends, “Join the Party? Not if they pull my teeth out!” Shostakovich pretends to agree with Stalinists who complain that his music is too formal and does not appeal to the masses, but he secretly sneaks strident notes and melodies into his compositions that represent his anger and frustration with the Soviet’s attempts to corrupt his music. In defiance of Stalin’s insistence on “realism” in the arts, Shostakovich continues to translate his feelings into his compositions. “Can music attack evil or not?” he asks his lover. “Certainly not,” she replies, “All it can do is scream.” So Shostakovich screams his pain into his music, culminating with his magnum "Opus 110," written toward the end of his life, which becomes a “living corpse of music, perfect in its horror.”