Historians of science and technology have fixated upon newness and innovation, argues David Edgerton, overlooking what a technology comes to mean once it becomes quotidian, widespread, and thus seemingly unremarkable (The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 [Oxford, 2007], ix–xi). It is precisely their ubiquity “in the lives of Czechoslovaks,” however, that leads Felix Jeschke to examine how railways shaped “spatial and national identities” in interwar Czechoslovakia (187). During this time, Československé státní dráhy (Czechoslovak State Railways, ČSD) “routinely attracted the highest single portion of the [state] budget” (187). Moreover, the “average Czechoslovak” traveled a distance of 400 kilometers annually using the train (187). Focusing on a technology that was over one century old allows Jeschke to show how nation-building was always a “negotiation between the government and the population,” incorporating into his analysis the voices of the multiple parties by then invested in the railways, such as government ministers, railway staff, enraptured tourists, and disgruntled passengers (102). If a technology can shed light on some of the techniques of and venues for nation-building, then a study of nationalism on and through Czechoslovakia's railways sheds light on the processes by which layers of ideologies, propounded by various social groups, can attach themselves to a technology. Jeschke's thoughtful and witty work also proves valuable reading for historians of European integration, state-building processes, and modern East Central Europe.
The first chapter considers how interwar politicians, often based in Prague, sought to unify Czechoslovak national space through railway infrastructure development. It focuses on major construction projects in Slovakia to show how such attempts to create unity were inflected by paternalistic rhetoric on the part of the Czech elites overseeing them. The second chapter finds similar dynamics in state-sponsored attempts to promote tourism on Czechoslovakia's railways. Investigating travelogues written by those who set out to explore the easternmost reaches of the newly formed Czechoslovak state, Jeschke finds “demi-orientalizing” rhetoric in lieu of a language of brotherly recognition (78). While “Czechoslovaks did get to know their homeland by train,” he concludes, “the homeland they discovered was not as unified as some had hoped. It was a complex, layered, and hierarchized geography, whose Czech domination was, as it turned out, unsustainable” (94). If the first two chapters focus above all on what were supposedly harmonious relations between “Slav brothers,” the third chapter pinpoints Czech–German conflict on the railways, examining the highly publicized ejection of a Czech passenger from a Deutsche Reichsbahn train—on Czechoslovak territory—following an altercation with the conductor. Jeschke here shows the extent to which Czechoslovak ministers and nationalist activists were and were not able to “territorialize” the interwar Czechoslovak state using railway infrastructure (128). Next, Jeschke turns to station design, considering in the fourth chapter how architecture could simultaneously promote the Czechoslovak state's nationalizing and “cosmopolitan” aspirations. Finally, in chapter 5, Jeschke examines how the roll-out of the state-of-the-art Slovenská strela (“Slovak bullet”) train in 1936 highlighted, on the one hand, tensions in the increasingly beleaguered project of Czechoslovakism and, on the other, successfully insisted upon the “modernity” of a mode of transportation now over one hundred years old.
Iron Landscapes explores the relationship between Czech, Slovak, and Ruthenian travelers, writers, and politicians with subtlety. While hierarchical and certainly paternalistic, Jeschke rejects the idea that the relationship between Czech metropole and Slovak and Ruthenian periphery amounted to a colonial one, arguing—with allusion to other travel writing produced around that time—that “Ruthenia was not Czechoslovakia's Congo. Its inhabitants were Slav brothers; they were romanticized and infantilized but never depicted as savages” (78). By examining how the local press and nationalist politicians in Slovakia interpreted the arrival of the railways, Jeschke shows how these constituencies were far from voiceless (if routinely spoken over) in public debate, nuancing the picture that political histories of nationalism in interwar Czechoslovakia that focus on parliamentary structures or the Prague-based press can give.
The microhistory of patriotic Czech schoolteacher Josef Jireš's rage against the German spoken onboard a German-run train, leading to his ejection from the locomotive as it shunted through Czechoslovak territory, is analyzed with incisiveness. If railways brought members of different national communities into contact, then staffing, signage, and language-use could be employed by those administrating such infrastructure to favor the claims of one constituency over the other, exacerbating national conflict (128). Through media coverage of dramatic incidents such as Jireš's ejection, the terms of the national conflict in Czechoslovakia's borderlands then came to “set the tone for the discourse in the country as a whole” (108). Events such as Jireš's altercation derived their drama precisely from the fact that they were not everyday occurrences, argues Jeschke (113). But the exceptionality of Jireš's case could be profitably underscored from another angle as well. Schoolteachers such as Jireš were a distinct and perhaps even somewhat isolated group in interwar Czechoslovakia, argues Tara Zahra, on account of their national zeal which far surpassed that of the rest of the state's contemporaneous, “nationally indifferent” population (Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 [Ithaca, 2008], 52–54).
Jeschke simultaneously reconstructs the First Czechoslovak Republic's railways as a social and material world. Newspaper articles detailing conflict on trains and travel accounts penned by passengers are analyzed alongside the bricks and mortar of station buildings, signposts and the politics of the languages they were written in, tunnels and other feats of infrastructural engineering, and the trains themselves—from the ergonomics of their seating to the technical specifics of their horsepower. By repeatedly bringing the railway's material culture and the legislation and practices associated with it into conversation, Jeschke shows how deeply one influenced the other. Ideology and engineering combined to create Czechoslovakia's interwar railway network. Jeschke duly understands the railway as so much more than the sum of its rails and rolling stock.
It might seem strange to write a history of the railways just as the attention of Europe's politicians, scientists, and business elites turned to the roads and the skies, but relationships between old and new technologies are not zero-sum: Czechoslovakia's railways indeed entered a dynamic new phase of motorization and development in a bid to see off precisely the threats posed by the motor age (171). Showcasing the adaptation of an already widely diffused technology, and highlighting the role played by its mass usership in its resignification, Jeschke moves against the direction of travel of earlier histories, bringing his reader along for a most thought-provoking and entertaining ride.
