Iron Landscapes Nation-Building and the Railways in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938
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Iron Landscapes Nation-Building and the Railways in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938 Felix Konrad Jeschke UCL Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 I, Felix Konrad Jeschke, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract In the 1920s and 1930s, Czechoslovakia created a national railway network out of the fragments of the obsolete Habsburg system. The main aim of the construction project was to create a connection from the previously Cisleithanian Bohemian Lands to the previously Hungarian territories of Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. The study examines how this new network contributed to the discursive development of a Czechoslovak national space. The railways in the twentieth century have been neglected as a research topic, since, unlike in the nineteenth century, they no longer represented the shift to industrial modernity. However, the two trajectories of the railway discourse in the inter-war period still evolved around the notion of modernity. On the one hand, the railways were considered an instrument of national unification capable of overcoming the geographic and ethnic fragmentation of the country. In highly organic imagery, the railway lines between Slovakia and the Bohemian Lands were imagined as the backbone of a healthy nation-state, and thus as material confirmation of a pre-existing unity. At the same time, railway lines never stopped at national borders. Due to their transnational character, they were turned into a symbol of Czechoslovakia’s modern cosmopolitanism. The study shows how these often incongruous goals were negotiated by examining the following themes: the railway plans developed by the geographer Viktor Dvorský, the new railway lines in Slovakia, the national conflict on trains, the new railway stations in Hradec Králové and Uherské Hradiště, the country’s representation in travel writing, and the discourse around a Czechoslovak high-speed train. As a cultural history of infrastructure, it uses a variety of sources that include ministerial documents, press clippings, contemporary travel literature and newsreels. The study thus not only contributes to literature on nationalism, but also to a spatial history of inter-war Czechoslovakia. 3 Contents ABSTRACT 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 ABBREVIATIONS 7 INTRODUCTION: IRON LANDSCAPES 8 Railway Journeys: Cultural Studies of Railways 11 The Infrastructure of the Nation: Railways in the Twentieth Century 16 The Railway Station as a Fortress: The Codification of Czechoslovak Space 25 The Czechoslovak Railway Paradox: National and Cosmopolitan Railways 31 CHAPTER 1: VIKTOR DVORSKÝ AND THE SPACE OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK NATION 41 A Railway to Unify the Country 49 Geography as the Biology of Nations 52 The Railways and Circulation 65 CHAPTER 2: RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION AND REPRESENTATION IN INTER-WAR CZECHOSLOVAKIA 75 The Railways in the Czechoslovak Takeover of Political and Spatial Power 77 The Railways in the Czechoslovak National Body 89 Building the Backbone of the Nation-State: Railway Construction in Slovakia 93 Celebratory Czechoslovakism: Opening New Railway Lines 97 ‘Mountain Men’ and the ‘Iron Horse’: The Railway between Handlová and Horná Štubňa 104 CHAPTER 3: THE NATIONAL CONFLICT ON THE RAILWAYS 113 The Czech-German Borderlands and the Jireš Affair 116 Czech Provocation or German Hatred? The Jireš Affair in the Press and the Parliament 122 The Conflict over Language Use on Trains 129 Railway Employees and the State 141 CHAPTER 4: RAILWAY BUILDINGS AND DE-AUSTRIANIZATION 154 A Metro in New Prague 157 New Railway Buildings: Hradec Králové and Uherské Hradiště 169 Making the ‘Salon of the Republic’: Hradec Králové 173 The Station as Folklore: Uherské Hradiště 181 4 CHAPTER 5: TRAVEL WRITING AND RAILWAY PROPAGANDA 191 ‘Get to Know your Homeland’: National Travel in Czechoslovakia 194 ‘The Heart of Europe’: International Tourism in Czechoslovakia 204 All Railway Lines Lead to Prague: Tradition and Modernity in Mezinárodní spoje ČSR 210 The Heart’s Periphery: Travelling to Carpathian Ruthenia 218 CHAPTER 6: NATIONALISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM IN THE SLOVENSKÁ STRELA 233 Cars, Trains, Aeroplanes: Speed and Modernity 234 The Slovenská strela as a Signifier of Czechoslovak Modernity 244 The Slovenská strela as a Tool of Czechoslovak Nation-Building 250 The Slovenská strela and the End of Czechoslovakia 255 CONCLUSION: NATIONAL BODIES, MODERNITY AND RAILWAYS 258 APPENDIX 270 Figures 270 Tables 280 WORKS CITED 283 Published Primary Sources 283 Periodicals 286 Archival Sources 287 Secondary Literature 288 5 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors, Egbert Klautke and Peter Zusi. Egbert welcomed me to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) when I first arrived in 2005 and has supervised all my major writing projects since. Under Peter’s guidance at the Czech Seminar, I developed many ideas that found their way into this thesis. Their knowledgeable and calm advice has been invaluable. At SSEES, I am also particularly grateful to Robert B. Pynsent and David Short, who simultaneously taught me how to read Czech and write English. The shortcomings that remain in the text are, of course, my own. This project was funded by a three-year doctoral scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I also received financial support for a year-long study trip to the Czech Republic from the UCL Graduate School, and a seven-month fellowship for research at the Institute of Historical Studies of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest from the Hungarian Scholarship Board, which was then still based at the Balassi Institute. I thank all these institutions for their support, without which this project would not have been possible. I am grateful to the colleagues who contributed to this study by giving me the opportunity to discuss it in various settings outside SSEES, particularly Chad Bryant, Milan Hlavačka, Ines Koeltzsch, Miroslav Kunt, Miroslav Michela, Jan Musekamp, Miklós Zeidler, and Martin Zückert. The study is based primarily on the resources of the National Library in Prague, the National Archives in Prague, the SSEES Library, the British Library, and the Széchényi National Library in Budapest. The staff of these institutions often went out of their way to help me, for which I am grateful. My friends contributed more to this thesis than they probably think, especially by taking my mind off it, and I thank them for it. The desire to emulate my twin sister Lisa was one of the reasons I went to study in England. I am glad to report that the simultaneity of our academic careers is unbroken and we will submit our PhD theses at almost the same time. As to her, I am grateful to our mother Carola, whose untiring support and efforts to learn Czech mean a lot to me. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife Lunja for her patience when I complained about writing, among much else. This thesis is dedicated to our daughter Rita Szofia, whose gestation has been a lot quicker than this text’s. 6 Abbreviations Čedok Československá cestovní a dopravní kancelář Czechoslovak Travel Bureau ČSA Československé státní aerolinie Czechoslovak State Airlines ČSD Československé státní dráhy Czechoslovak State Railways ČSR Československá republika Czechoslovak Republic ČÚRŽ Československá ústřední rada železniční Czechoslovak Central Railways Council KČT Klub českých (or československých) turistů Club of Czech (or Czechoslovak) Hikers MÁV Magyar Államvasutak Hungarian State Railways MŽ-TR Ministerstvo železnic – Tiskový referát Ministry of Railways – Press Department NA Národní archiv České republiky National Archives of the Czech Republic NFA Národní filmový archiv National Film Archives PMH Prágai Magyar Hírlap Prague Hungarian Newspaper SOA Státní okresní archiv Uherské Hradiště State District Archives Uherské Hradiště 7 ‘I daresay that the railways have raised nations in the same way as schools.’ Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 18981 Introduction Iron Landscapes As Berlin correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924, the Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) wrote an ambivalent hymn to modern technology entitled Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck (Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction). In the form of a religious creed, he invoked the railway junction as the centre of the modern world: I affirm the triangular railway junction. It is an emblem and a focus, a living organism and the fantastic product of a futuristic force. It is a center. All the vital energies of its locus begin and end here, in the same way that the heart is both the point of departure and the destination of the blood as it flows through the body’s veins and arteries. It’s the heart of a world whose life is belt drive and clockwork, piston rhythm and siren scream. It is the heart of the world, which spins on its axis a thousand times faster than the alternation of day and night would have us believe; whose continuous and never-ending rotation looks like madness and is the product of mathematical calculation; whose dizzying velocity makes backward-looking sentimentalists fear the ruthless extermination of inner forces and healing balance but actually engenders healing warmth and the benediction of movement.2 Roth’s notion of the railway combined biological and mechanical images. He described the junction as a living being, even the heart of the world. At the same time, this is not a normal, organic heart, but the heart of a machine. The ‘merciless regularity’ of this machine, he continued, was inhuman. Indeed, the power of the machine devalued its very creators. ‘What 1 Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Jak pracovat? Přednášky z roku 1898 (Zurich, 1977), p. 32. 2 Joseph Roth, ‘Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction’, in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920– 33, trans. by Michael Hofmann (London, 2004), pp. 105–08 (p. 105). Emphasis in the original. 8 Introduction Iron Landscapes holds sway in the arena of my triangular railroad junction is the decision of the logical brain, which, to be sure of success, has implanted itself in a body of unconditional certainty: in the body of a machine.