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Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia built an ambitious national rail network out of what remained of the obsolete Habsburg system. While conceived as a means of knitting together a young and ethnically diverse nation-state, these railways were by their very nature a transnational phenomenon, and as such they simultaneously articulated and embodied a distinctive Czechoslovak cosmopolitanism. Drawing on evidence ranging from government documents to newsreels to train timetables, Iron Landscapes gives a nuanced account of how planners and authorities balanced these two imperatives, bringing the cultural history of infrastructure into dialogue with the spatial history of Central Europe.
“It is excellent that the book provides us with opportunities for reflection and generates new questions. The publication is undoubtedly beneficial and, above all, inspiring. It is an innovative treatment of the subject, so it might encourage other historians to look at things from a different perspective. I also believe that the book has the potential to revive the debate on the development of railways and transport infrastructure (not only) in interwar Czechoslovakia.” • Austrian History Yearbook
“A terrific book that is highly recommended for reading and that will hopefully find a wide echo.” • Journal of East Central European Studies
“This welcome study examines the ways in which the railroad embedded national space in the physical landscape and how that in turn shaped people’s sense of time, distance, and the nation.” • Tatjana Lichtenstein, University of Texas at Austin
“Based on an impressive number of primary and secondary sources, Felix Jeschke tells the fascinating story of two seemingly divergent aspects of the Czechoslovak railroad: its roles in both the cultivation of internal unity and the promotion of Czechoslovakia as a modern and cosmopolitan state.” • Jan Musekamp, University of Pittsburgh
Felix Jeschke is a historian at the University of Munich. He holds a doctorate in modern history from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London.
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Forging a Nation from the Tracks: Railway Construction and Representation in Interwar Czechoslovakia
Chapter 2. The Heart of Europe and its Periphery: Travelling and Travel Writing
Chapter 3. ‘Germanized Territories’ or ‘Pure German Soil’? The National Conflict on the Railways
Chapter 4. Stations between the National and the Cosmopolitan: Railway Buildings and De-Austrianization
Chapter 5. ‘Bratislava to Prague in 4h 51min’: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Slovenská strela
Conclusion
Appendix: Tables: Nationality Statistics of Czechoslovak Railway Workers in 1923
Bibliography
Index