Premise: This passage could easily belong to a piece of nonfiction--to one of the witty old Letters from Europe that used to run in The New Yorker . And in fact, in the best of these character studies, a vivid picture of Cold War Europe--infected with mediocre rhetoric, imprisoned by fake boundaries, inhabited by numb and ambivalent people--begins to take shape.

Hypothesis: This passage is certainly a work of fiction.
Relation: contradiction