Iron Landscapes : : National Space and the Railways in Interwar Czechoslovakia / / Felix Jeschke.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Jeschke, Felix,
• Place / Publishing House: New York ;, Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Explorations in Mobility ; 5
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Abbreviations -- Introduction. Iron Landscapes -- 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