INTRODUCTION

The Ostbahn and European Mobilities in the Railroad Age

According to what is noted in my little book, I should now be sitting in a train car getting ready for tomorrow’s arrival at Eydkuhnen [sic], that is, for my first foreign impression, my heart pounding all the while. For this is where I shall finally see Europe, I who have been vainly dreaming of it for nearly forty years. . . . Meanwhile, the night was coming on. They began lighting the lamps in the train cars. A husband and his wife were situated opposite me, elderly people, landowners, and, it seemed, good people. They were hurrying off to an exhibition in London for just a few days and had left their family at home. To my right was a certain Russian who had spent ten years in London at the office of a commercial firm; he had just gone to Petersburg for two weeks on business.¹

Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1862, on his way from St. Petersburg to France

Here we were walked all day four miles across fields, through ditches, swampy and watery places, and didn’t rest until it was dark. We were led into the forest . . . the twelfth hour struck. Our guide got drunk and brought us closer to the border. When we got to the border, he didn’t know where to cross. After looking around for a while, he told us to go into the river. . . . We were up to our necks in the water; my clothes, and the little food I had were completely soaked. . . . The Muscovites [Russian border guards] started shouting and shooting: some [of us] were arrested, others made it across, and our guide disappeared without a trace. . . . We’re standing in the forest, it’s completely dark, and we’re soaked to the neck. It’s cold and we don’t know where to go. At dawn, we went to the farmers’ fields and rented two horse carts to Eydtkuhnen. It was still seven miles to Eydtkuhnen. We paid two rubles each. We arrived in Eydtkuhnen on Saturday evening. . . . We left Eydtkuhnen on Thursday morning. We rode [by train] through Prussia for three days, day and night. . . . We arrived in Rotterdam on Saturday evening.²

Lithuanian emigrant Kazimir Seniunas in 1903 on his ten-day trip from Lithuania to Rotterdam

THESE TWO ACCOUNTS ARE BOTH related to railroad travel between the Russian Empire and the more western parts of Europe. They mention several well-known European cities but also reference the Prussian-Russian border station of Eydtkuhnen, a place largely forgotten today. Both accounts originate in a time of unprecedented changes in global mobility. The first one reminds us of Jules Verne’s 1872 imagined Tour of the World in Eighty Days—a novel based on a real journey undertaken in 1870.³ Today, Jules Verne’s book is mainly classified as an adventure story for younger readers. However, it represents the tremendous progress made in transportation innovations in the nineteenth century. Also, the novel reflects the zeitgeist, which was a firm belief that technology could overcome seemingly every natural obstacle through human ingenuity, creating fast and reliable global connections.

Yet, as we can see from the second account, there was a substantial qualitative difference between early, affluent tourists equipped with a guidebook, on the one hand, and illiterate subjects of the Russian Empire crossing borders without official documents and with minimal financial means, on the other. The former, such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, traveled for leisure and remained within the comfort zone of first-class express trains and hotels. At the same time, the latter were forced to leave their homes to avoid conscription, poverty, or ethnic discrimination. They crossed borders on foot and traveled fourth class with frequent stops, controls, health checks, and quarantines.⁴

We are all too familiar with these two extreme forms of mobility today: airplanes shuttle tourists and business people across the globe at an unprecedented scale. At the same time, equally unprecedented numbers of refugees are on the move on foot and in makeshift boats across borders, rivers, and seas, looking for a better life.

A TRANSNATIONAL FORCE: THE OSTBAHN

These examples set the stage for this book, reflecting the impact of the “transport revolution”⁵ on the eastern provinces of Prussia and the adjacent western provinces of the Russian Empire. The focus is on the Royal-Prussian Eastern Railroad (Königlich-Preußische Ostbahn, henceforth Ostbahn), which was projected in the 1830s and accomplished in the 1850s. Initially, Prussia planned the line to connect its capital of Berlin to East Prussia’s provincial capital of Königsberg (today’s Russian Kaliningrad). Envisioned as one of the monarchy’s major internal modernizing projects of the mid-nineteenth century, the line soon became a backbone of mobility in Europe and beyond. Not without reason, both famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lithuanian-speaking emigrant Kazimir Seniunas embarked on this line to reach their destinations, though under entirely different circumstances.⁶ This book answers the question of how the Ostbahn, as an inner-Prussian line, developed into a transnational force, overcoming borders and connecting Europeans in a time of rising nationalism.

Historians usually perceive the eastern provinces of Prussia and the adjacent western provinces of the Russian Empire as political and economic peripheries. Thus, erstwhile border towns like Eydtkuhnen are certainly not the most well-known places today. However, as we have seen in the two accounts from the beginning of this introduction, contemporary travel logs frequently mention these towns alongside European metropolises such as London, St. Petersburg, or Rotterdam. Travelers perceived border stations as “gigantic gates” where they felt the “breath of the big wide world.”⁷ Consequently, this book sets border towns and border spaces at center stage.

The chronological focus of this study is on the period between the 1830s and the 1930s. In the 1830s, the first European railroad lines emerged and soon started forming a European network, which quickly permeated the whole continent and linked up to distant places like China. Contemporaries witnessed accelerating globalization, with the forces of modernization flowing into every corner of the world. These flows had a lasting impact on the region in question here, even if it is usually perceived as a periphery of global exchange. The First World War was a critical caesura, temporarily disrupting and subsequently reconfiguring existing networks along with new political regimes and borders. However, in European mobility, the Second World War and its aftermath more permanently divided the Ostbahn tracks and the whole continent, severing lines for decades to come. Simultaneously, automobiles and airplanes changed global mobility patterns altogether. The 1930s thus are a suitable conclusion for this book.

FROM REGIONAL LINES TO A EUROPEAN NETWORK

Early Lines and Early Visions: Great Britain, the United States, and Continental Europe

In the 1830s, the United States and Europe saw their first wave of railroad construction. In 1830, British railroad pioneer George Stephenson (1781–1848) accomplished the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first fully functional railroad connection in Great Britain. This engineering accomplishment reverberated throughout the whole European continent.⁸ At the same time, North America’s Baltimore and Ohio Railroad resonated with the imaginations and fears of Americans. During its construction, southern German political refugee Friedrich List (1789–1846) was in the United States, and he followed the development closely.

List was a national economist and a strong supporter of a unified German nation-state. He was forced to leave his native Württemberg in 1825 and emigrated to the United States for political reasons. In Pennsylvania, he became a coalmining entrepreneur and a railroad pioneer. Returning to southern Germany in 1834, he did not only advocate for railroad construction for national economic and political development; he also envisioned a railroad network that would encompass all of Europe.⁹ In his 1838 essay “German National Transport System,” he predicted that the railroad would “deliver the peoples from the plague of war, dearth of prices and famine, national hatred and unemployment, ignorance, and sloppiness; it will fertilize their fields, revitalize their workshops and shafts, and give even the lowest of them the strength to educate themselves by visiting foreign countries, to seek work in distant regions and to restore their health in remote healing springs and seashores.”¹⁰

At the time, few entrepreneurs and government officials embraced the idea of national, let alone international, networks. In this regard, List’s thinking was quite revolutionary. Conversely, his thoughts reveal another dimension of railroad pioneers’ argumentation: railroads’ strategic value.¹¹ National or European enthusiasm was not the main argument for constructing early lines. Instead, European governments from west to east began to see how the emerging network would simultaneously satisfy their economic and military interests.¹²

France and Belgium

In the early 1830s, French civil engineer and economist Michel Chevalier (1806–1879) predicted that “the continuous exchange of sentiments, ideas, and material goods” would connect Europeans across class lines, inspire cooperation, and end national hatred.¹³ Following this line of thought, in 1837–1838, politician, civil engineer, and head of the French Civil Service Corps (Corps des ponts et chaussées) Alexis Legrand (1791–1848) developed a vision of a French railroad system. He planned lines that would radiate starlike from Paris across the country and lead up to its borders as “lines of power, light, and civilization,” thus centralizing the national space in administrative terms.¹⁴ Although railroad enthusiasts had to compete with canal- and road-building advocates for support and funding, a network of main lines emerged between the late 1830s and the early 1850s. Following a law enacted in 1842, the French state held a strong stake in the railroads, thus controlling the emergence of a railroad system that would link Paris to most regions of France and its neighboring countries.¹⁵

During roughly the same time, Belgium also rapidly expanded its network. The country seceded from the Netherlands only in 1830. Subsequently, its economy capitalized on the railroad to circumvent the high customs barrier and other administrative hurdles the Netherlands erected on its river system flowing to Dutch overseas ports. One solution was a railroad connection between the Prussian Rhenish port of Cologne and the Belgian overseas port of Antwerp. The railroad opened to traffic in 1843 as the world’s first cross-border line.¹⁶ Following an 1844 trade treaty, Belgium granted goods from the Prussian-dominated free-trade bloc Zollverein preferential treatment when transiting through this port (thus bypassing the Netherlands).¹⁷ In 1846, Belgian and French railroads connected their networks, thus linking France via Belgium to Prussia.

German States

In the 1830s and early 1840s, several railroad committees formed in parts of western and central German states; they successfully raised private capital for railroad construction. This development led to a subsequent wave of railroad speculation. In 1835, the first line in a German state running between Nürnberg and Fürth (Bavaria) was inaugurated. After that, new routes emerged in many German states, particularly in the highly industrialized Southwest, the Rhineland, and Saxony. While many of the early, privately built railroad lines served the regional needs and aspirations of entrepreneurs and local rulers of the scattered German states, visionaries such as Friedrich List perceived railroads as a means to unify Germany economically and politically.

The first Prussian railroad opened in 1838, linking Berlin with nearby Potsdam. In the 1840s, privately owned lines emerged in the Prussian Rhineland, between Berlin and Breslau (Wrocław) in Silesia and between Berlin and the Baltic Sea port of Stettin (Szczecin). In 1842, in a manner similar to that in France, a state-owned Prussian railroad fund started investing in new lines, providing interest guarantees and direct financial support. However, as we will see in the first chapter of this book, railroad construction in Prussia’s eastern provinces lagged. It was only in 1857 that Prussia completed the Ostbahn between Berlin and Königsberg, connecting to the emerging imperial Russian network in 1862.

Russian Empire

At first, the Russian Empire did not seem to stay behind. In 1834, Bohemian railroad pioneer Anton von Gerstner (1796–1840) proposed a line to link the distant Ural mining district with St. Petersburg. He convinced Tsar Nicholas I to build an experimental railroad, which opened in 1836 between St. Petersburg and the tsar’s residence at Tsarskoe Selo. Like List in Germany and Legrand in France, von Gerstner tried to persuade the government to build a Russian railroad network.¹⁸ However, he died prematurely in Philadelphia while on an extensive study trip in the United States, long before his vision was fully accomplished.¹⁹

Figure 0.1. An emerging European network: 1849 travel map of Germany and its neighbors. Eisenbahnkarte von Deutschland und Nachbarländern, 1849. Courtesy of State Archive NRW, Dept. Westphalia, Sign. W 051/Karten A, Nr. 11908.

While imperial bureaucracies focused on road-building projects, private entrepreneurs initiated the first significant rail investment in the Russian Empire, the Warsaw–Vienna Railroad, which opened in 1848. It connected the Kingdom of Poland in the western part of the Russian Empire with Berlin, Brussels, and Paris. As a result, it was not the Russian capital of St. Petersburg that was first linked to the existing European railroad network but rather its peripheral Kingdom of Poland. In 1851, the main line between St. Petersburg and Moscow was inaugurated. A true network only emerged in the 1860s after Alexander II acceded to the throne and after the Crimean War had proved railroads’ strategic value. In 1857, the tsar sanctioned the Main Company of Russian Railroads, financed primarily by French and British investors. As a result, railroad construction started at a quicker pace than before.²⁰ The first major project the company accomplished in 1862 was the link between St. Petersburg and Warsaw with branch lines to the Prussian border, creating close connections between the Russian Empire and central and western Europe.²¹

CHANGING MOBILITY PATTERNS, CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF SPACE AND TIME

As Jürgen Osterhammel has demonstrated, the railroad, the steamship, and telegraphy were formative elements of a global network, facilitating nineteenth-century globalization.²² Their development resulted in dramatically decreasing travel times, which in the perception of contemporaries was the equivalent of reduced space. However, most Europeans experienced this “annihilation of space and time” as a gradual and not a revolutionary change.²³ Connections took years to be planned and built, and a well-developed network materialized only within a generation. However, what changed during the 1840s to 1860s was the space of opportunities—even if, for a less-affluent majority, they continued to be “virtual opportunities.”²⁴ Maps depicted railroad connections across borders, with travel times and costs diminished, and newspapers and journals brought the reports of a growing number of leisure travelers to Europeans’ homes. When in 1862 railroad companies first established regular passenger services across the border between Prussia and the Russian Empire, contemporaries in the border town of Eydtkuhnen were fully aware of the fact that now not only Berlin but also Paris and St. Petersburg were moving closer. The Russian trunk line leading to the border was planned by French engineers and financed mainly by French banks, thus symbolizing these transnational connections.²⁵ Consequently, the railroad locomotive pulling the first cross-border train was decorated not only with Prussian and Russian flags but also with a French one.²⁶

As a result of these cross-border connections, travel times between the western and the eastern parts of the continent decreased significantly. A guidebook from 1835 listed a land travel time of thirty-eight days between London and St. Petersburg if travelers used privately hired carriages.²⁷ By the late 1840s, with steamboats between northern Germany and St. Petersburg having been in operation since 1839, the time shrank to six or seven days.²⁸ By 1868, this time shrank further to three one-half days, and in 1914, travelers covered the distance of 2,735 kilometers in precisely 47.5 hours.²⁹

The Ostbahn: A Transnational Force in a Nationalizing World

What was the specific function of the Ostbahn in this emerging European network system? At first, the Prussian planners envisioned the line as a connection between Berlin and East Prussian Königsberg to develop the eastern provinces and draw them closer to the capital. However, at Prussia’s eastern borders, its trunk lines soon connected to railroad lines leading to Warsaw and St. Petersburg. In Berlin, through other lines, it linked up to Brussels and Paris, thus creating the quickest link between the capitals of the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Poland, Prussia, Belgium, and France—with a link to London across the Channel. Undoubtedly, other railroad lines, such as the connections between the Habsburg and the Russian Empires, knitted Europe together. However, while it would be equally feasible to study tourist and migrant flows along those routes, it would be less promising to analyze the tensions between transnational forces of globalization, on the one hand, and the forces of rising ethnic nationalism, on the other.

In contrast to the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, which navigated the rising conflicts among its different ethnicities in various compromises and autonomy charters, Prussia/the German Empire embarked on a path of exclusive, ethnic nationalism, alienating rather than integrating its ethnic minorities. In a modified version, these policies dominated the western parts of the Russian Empire as well. The Ostbahn and its cross-border branch lines passed through multiethnic, Polish-, German-, Yiddish-, and Lithuanian-speaking regions. Scholarship on the impact of the Ostbahn as a powerful modernizing force in this region thus is especially fruitful regarding the tensions between the national and the transnational.

To highlight these tensions, this book follows five recurring concepts as red threads throughout the chapters: multiple mobilities, entangled borderspaces, microhistories and space, human and nonhuman actors, and finally the line itself as a force that created a space of novel opportunities.

1. MULTIPLE MOBILITIES

The railroad revolutionized mobility. However, as the two quotations at the beginning of this introduction show, mobility manifested itself in strikingly different forms. While international express trains offered the speediest and most extravagant mobility opportunities at the time, various other forms of mobility were also associated with the Ostbahn and its branch lines. First-, second-, third-, and fourth-class passenger and freight trains facilitating transportation across Europe operated on the same tracks; however, these flows were separated. Think of the tourist and the emigrant traveling along the same route for hundreds of kilometers but in completely different circumstances—the former in a luxury express train, the latter partway on foot and partway on fourth-class quarantined trains bound for port cities, without the possibility to disembark freely on the way.

John Urry advocated for an interdisciplinary mobility turn, connecting “the analysis of different forms of travel, transport, and communications with the multiple ways in which economic and social life is performed and organized through time and across various spaces.”³⁰ Valeska Huber developed this concept further and proposed the term “multiple mobilities” to underscore the multifaceted character of movement and the many different ways in which this very movement is enmeshed into systems of laissez-faire, on the one hand, and evaluation and control by authorities and companies involved in the business of mobility, on the other—with the two extremes of wanted and unwanted mobilities.³¹

Tourists like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and emigrants like Kazimir Seniunas were literally on the same track. However, they moved distinctly separately from each other, and it was only at specific nodal points that they would encounter each other in passing.

2. ENTANGLED BORDERSCAPES AND TRANSNATIONAL ENCOUNTERS

Histories of mobility usually focus on the big nodal points, such as the metropolitan railroad junctions of Paris or Berlin that serve as centers of national and international networks even today. However, there are also the small but critical nodal points of border crossings that historians tend to overlook. Reflecting the work of Karl Schlögel, this book holds that a focus on these very places can be incredibly enlightening and help us to understand transnational, entangled European history better.³² Thus, this study shifts the attention away from the well-researched political and economic centers toward the alleged peripheries of the Russian Empire, on one side, and Prussia/the German Empire, on the other. At border crossings such as Eydtkuhnen, “global localities” developed, where empires intersected and international travelers, migrants, and merchants got off the trains and into the waiting rooms assigned to their respective travel classes; railroad employees unloaded and reloaded goods destined for border crossing; and border police and customs examined freight, luggage, and passengers alike. Moreover, passengers literally had to change tracks because of the difference in track gauge at this border.³³ Thus, it is no coincidence that both the affluent traveler and the emigrant mentioned the border station of Eydtkuhnen in their reports.³⁴ While this place is a “global locality” in the truest sense of the word, the region around Eydtkuhnen and other border towns also formed the cores of entangled borderscapes. The term borderscapes describes borderlands that are “shaped and reshaped by transnational flows” with a distinctive, hybrid “border culture.”³⁵ This concept highlights the “spatial and conceptual complexity of the border as a space that is not static but fluid and shifting”; thus, it goes much further than the positivistic perception of the border as a “contact zone”—a term Mary Louise Pratt introduced to describe colonial encounters.³⁶ Within the borderscapes analyzed in this book, subjects of the two empires living here often felt a stronger bond to the region than to their respective states; they interacted in ways that went far beyond mere contact.

The example of cross-border encounters leads to another concept the book engages with—namely, the idea of transnationality. Migration studies developed this approach to describe the “dual lives” of emigrants, formed by the close connection to their birthplace and manifesting in frequent visits, regular correspondence, and media consumption from the homeland.³⁷ Subsequently, this approach developed further and influenced various social sciences and humanities disciplines in multiple ways. In historical research, it is part of a well-established trend to consider global connections.³⁸ While this book does not intend to offer a global history of mobility, it does see its goal in analyzing transnational entanglements occurring naturally in the borderscape and the sphere of railroad technology and travel. It follows a pragmatic approach, defining the phenomenon of transnationality in the field of mobility as repeated and constant crossings of cultural and state borders within clearly defined social spaces. These entanglements often created friction since they occurred in the era of the emerging modern nation—a nation usually distinguishing itself from other nations in ethnic or racial terms. Border regions as hybrid spaces do not fit in this model and can only be adequately researched from a transnational perspective.³⁹

Studying border places requires an interest in spatially informed history. Consequently, this book is also a microhistorian’s plea to “think globally and dig locally.”⁴⁰

3. MICROHISTORIES AND RESEARCH INFORMED BY SPACE

All chapters of this volume are closely related to specific places or regional spaces transformed by the Ostbahn. Be they the nodal points at the borders or unique railroad structures such as station buildings or bridges, this book analyzes the obvious and not so obvious nodes of this network and the spaces in between.⁴¹ These places are microcosms showcasing global developments. As seen in the quotations at the beginning of this introduction, Eydtkuhnen appears prominently in multiple travel guidebooks and personal accounts. Crossing the border at this nodal point corresponded to a rite de passage for those traveling to and from the Russian Empire. On the one hand, this was for practical reasons: travelers had to change trains here because of the different track gauges. On the other hand, many travelers and migrants considered this place to also mark a mental continental divide. On the mental map of Lithuanian emigrants from the Russian Empire, the Prussian border town of Eydtkuhnen was already halfway to the United States. They realized that bypassing Russian border guards and passing Prussian health checks almost guaranteed them passage to America. Not without reason, border towns like Eydtkuhnen played an essential role in what Larry Wolff has called “Inventing Eastern Europe.”⁴² While this clear delimitation between a seemingly uncivilized eastern Europe and a civilized “Western world” remains relevant for mental maps today, the book questions this dichotomy.

Consequently, this book holds that history takes place and follows the leitmotif of the spatial turn. It advocates for an in-depth analysis or uncovering of historical layers in situ, focusing on the events unfolding chronologically and the venues where these events occur, promoting the “unity of place, time, and action.”⁴³ Thus, the chapters set out to explore “interactions between the universal and the local,” perceiving carefully selected places along the railroad line as microcosms of the changing world.⁴⁴ In the words of John-Paul Ghobrial, this book’s author is committed to “seeing the world like a microhistorian”—studying particular places and bringing them into context with one another in the manner of a “multi-sited ethnography.”⁴⁵ This ethnography calls for the researcher to visit relevant sites and not just encounter them in central archives or—even more remotely—on the internet. Doing so tends to be time-consuming since it requires “actual residence in the locale under study,” knowledge of foreign languages, and interaction with local people—usually not considered objects of historical study.⁴⁶ However, the reward is a greater authenticity in the research, which pays off in the form of an “ethnographic dividend of everyday life.”⁴⁷ Observing international tourists on their way to the Russian Federation today and comparing them to nineteenth-century travelers is a trivial example of this approach. However, the author’s personal experience of temporary internment by a Russian border patrol in former Eydtkuhnen during a study trip is somewhat closer to the anxieties and cultural and linguistic misunderstandings that emigrants from the Russian Empire faced over one hundred years ago.

The spatial compression caused by an ever-denser railroad network was a significant step forward in global civilizational progress.⁴⁸ The Ostbahn was part of this development. As a result, railroad timetables developed into ever-thicker tomes, reflecting “our new interdependency and proximity” and the “genesis of modern Europe.”⁴⁹ While human ingenuity established this network, it soon developed a life of its own and fostered changes that its creators did not intend.

4. HUMAN AND NONHUMAN ACTORS

This book perceives the European railroad network as a “large technological system” that creates a space of new opportunities.⁵⁰ Within this technological system, we can identify numerous players—or actors, as Bruno Latour would call them. These actors all followed their own agendas. For example, the railroad companies owning the tracks and the rolling stock were interested in expanding the number of passengers and the amount of freight to maximize their profits. In the case of the Paris–St. Petersburg connection, most of the involved companies were state owned. Not only did the governments have an interest in operating a profitable business but they also had overarching goals, such as the economic development of their empires’ peripheries or a connection to the world market for agricultural goods, or outright strategic goals. Another group of actors was the international tourists, as clients of the railroad companies. They strove for a comfortable and quick trajectory.

In contrast, comfort and speed were less critical for an emigrant from the Russian Empire, for whom affordability was the primary concern. As Kazimir Seniunas’s emigration route shows, his goals conflicted with the interest of the imperial Russian state. Therefore, Seniunas did not take the direct train from Kaunas to the Prussian border town of Eydtkuhnen. He took a time-consuming detour and crossed the border clandestinely and on foot to avoid contact with Russian imperial bureaucracies. Here, another goal of the Russian Empire came into play—namely, control of its subjects’ mobility. The empire’s subjects had to possess a passport to travel abroad legally. This was an expensive document engaging several layers of imperial bureaucracies, and it was almost out of reach for young males who had not yet served in the military.

All the actors mentioned above are human. However, looking at the railroad through the lens of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory can help us understand the line itself as an independent, nonhuman actor in its own right, entangled tightly with human actors.⁵¹ As Jane Bennett has pointed out, “things, too, are vital players in the world.”⁵² As such, the Ostbahn had the ability “to make things happen, to produce effects,” and can be positioned at the intersection of conflicting interests between various human actors who utilized the railroad as a tool for economic and military development or profit maximization.⁵³ Once established, the line itself developed into an actor that created spaces of opportunities initially unintended by its creators—such as the spreading of nationalist ideas or mass migration.⁵⁴

When planning the railroad link between their realms, Prussian and imperial Russian planners anticipated increased trade and travel for tourism between the two empires—Fyodor Dostoyevsky being a prime example of such tourism. Also, the respective governments intended to get a firmer grip on their peripheral territorial possessions—be it in economic or geostrategic ways. However, the railroad was much more than “an instrument of national strategy.”⁵⁵ Governments did not anticipate this imperial tool turning against them as a “relay” or “intermediary” of Polish nationalists’ ideas when facilitating their dissemination across partition borders.⁵⁶ Similarly, emigration was not a prominent factor in the underlying discussions on the construction of cross-border railroad lines. Nonetheless, the railroad soon transported Kazimir Seniunas and millions of other seasonal and permanent migrants across state borders or within the country.

5. THE POWER OF THE LINE: CREATING SPACES OF NOVEL OPPORTUNITIES

The most obvious red thread running through this book is the railroad network itself. Its tracks and related infrastructure are essential requirements for the mobilities discussed in the subsequent chapters. The Ostbahn, the true hero of this book, was an integral part of the increasingly dense global infrastructure network. This network consisted of railroads allowing for land-bound transportation and steamships for maritime transport; telegraphy also allowed for international communication in nonmaterial ways. Thus, upon arrival in Berlin, the affluent tourist Fyodor Dostoyevsky could send a wire to his friends and family back in the Russian Empire, informing them about his successful trajectory in almost real time. The telegraph lines transmitting his message were located next to the tracks he had just traveled.

Similarly, from Rotterdam, the less-affluent emigrant Kazimir Seniunas sent a letter to his father in Lithuania, shipped by railroad on the same tracks, at a much slower pace but a more affordable cost. Since he was illiterate, he asked a literate proxy to write the letter on his behalf. Seniunas informed his father about his past journey and his plans to get on a steamship bound for the United States.

These two examples show that the multiple mobilities discussed in this book could occur along very different trajectories. For a pre–World War I tourist, the International Sleeping Car Company’s Nord-Express, connecting Paris to St. Petersburg in forty-three hours, had marked start and endpoints.⁵⁷ While this is a strong image that reflects the opportunities of European transcontinental travel, it is by far not the only transcontinental link that contemporaries could imagine and utilize. Affluent tourists had the option to start their journey in Lisbon, Madrid, or London and, after the Trans-Siberian Railroad’s completion, could move on to East Asia. As a result, the 1914 English version of Baedeker’s guidebook to Russia also encompassed China.⁵⁸ By contrast, emigrants from the Russian Empire usually started their journey in small towns and villages in the western part of the Russian Empire; they covered part of the burdensome passage on foot and transited through border towns and control stations. The endpoint of the European leg of their routes typically was one of the significant emigration ports in northwestern Europe, such as Hamburg, Bremen, Southampton, Rotterdam, or Le Havre. However, their final destinations usually were ports on the East Coast of the Americas, from which they frequently moved on to relatives or friends elsewhere.

Contemporaries witnessed the emergence of a European network of railroad, telegraph, and steamship lines covering most parts of the continent. These developments were part of a widespread “fundamental experience of modernity” (fundamentales Modernitätserlebnis), as Wolfgang Kaschuba has put it.⁵⁹ The chapters of this book set out to explore select places and trajectories where this experience is noticeable in all its complexity and ambiguity.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

The book’s chapters follow people’s itineraries, goods, and ideas, moving across borders and along the Ostbahn and its branch lines. They engage with the five fundamental research perspectives charted above (multiple mobilities, borderscapes/transnational encounters, place-based microhistory, human and nonhuman actors, and the line itself). Each chapter is set in one particular place or region connected to the Ostbahn or its cross-border branch lines—from Berlin in the west to the Kaunas region in the east. Within each chapter, these places serve as vantage points to analyze the transformation and the changing role of specific microcosms within the European transportation network.

Chapter 1 focuses on Berlin, where the government, politicians, entrepreneurs, and engineers planned the Ostbahn and its cross-border trunk lines. Between the 1830s and the 1870s, Berlin’s industrial potential and its population rose enormously, and the city developed into a significant Prussian and German railroad junction of European significance. The debates over the construction of the Ostbahn Berlin–Königsberg reflect discussions elsewhere, with the competing economic, political, and strategic interests of various pressure groups. Drawing from Friedrich List’s vision of a railroad net unifying Germany and Europe, the chapter highlights political obstacles, on the one hand, and the desire to open up Prussia’s eastern territories for national military development and international economic development, on the other. As a result of railroad construction, with the newly erected railroad stations, adjacent city quarters, and technical facilities, Berlin’s urban landscape changed dramatically. In addition, the Ostbahn and the Lower Silesian Railroad (Niederschlesische Eisenbahn) were decisive in overcoming the obsolete Customs Wall and establishing Berlin as a European travel, migration, and economic hub.

Figure 0.2. The Ostbahn network (light gray) and other lines (dark gray) in Prussia’s East, ca. 1874. The rectangles and numbers indicate this book’s important places and the related chapter numbers. Courtesy of Prussian Secret State Archives Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA, Rep. 93E, Nr. 781, 267–268.

Chapter 2 focuses on the entangled borderscape emerging around the railroad crossing at Aleksandrów (Alexandrovo), located on the border between Prussia and the Russian Empire. While railroad lines were built to bond a state’s territory internally, borderlines were drawn and increasingly guarded to separate the inside from the outside. The chapter examines the cross-border mobilities of smugglers, border guards, soldiers, and Polish nationalists in the entangled borderscape of Aleksandrów against the backdrop of de-Polonization and Germanization efforts in the western parts of the Russian Empire and Germany. Tellingly, one of the arguments for the construction of the Ostbahn was its possible influence on the merger of different populations of Prussia in a region where ethnic affiliation was fluent and interchangeable. Located right on the Prussian border, the impressive railroad station at Aleksandrów was a manifestation of imperial Russian power and dominance in this part of Europe—a position challenged by the Polish Uprising of 1863–1864. With manifold traditional cross-border contacts in existence, contraband and the growing efforts of Polish nationalists to collaborate across the partitioned lands of Poland were closely linked to this branch line, which connected Berlin with the important Polish intellectual centers of Poznań, Warsaw, Cracow, and western Europe.

Chapter 3 focuses on the impressive railroad bridge of Dirschau (Tczew) as a starting point to elaborate on the development of a scientific community that was transnationally intertwined. Railroad construction and operation were closely linked to the development of new professions. The profession that would have the most significant impact on the rural and urban landscapes was civil engineering. At Tczew, to this day, one can examine a substantial feat of nineteenth-century railroad architecture: the remnants of the 1857 massive railroad bridge of the Ostbahn spanning the Vistula River. The chapter focuses on the evolving construction plans elaborated by Carl Lentze. Lentze was part of a scientific community that was highly mobile and that interacted across borders through frequent travel, personal meetings, and scientific journals. The Dirschau Bridge reveals the substantial influence of structures in the United States, France, and Great Britain, testifying to a world that was already highly connected in the mid-nineteenth century. However, the bridge’s openly German-nationalist iconography is also an example of the dichotomy between internationalization, on the one hand, and nationalization, on the other. To Dirschau, the railroad carried two foundations of modernity: technological and economic progress, on the one hand, and nationalist concepts, on the other.

Chapter 4 concentrates on Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo, two “global localities” on the border between Prussia and the Russian Empire. Because of the different track gauges, international travelers had to change trains and goods had to be reloaded in these towns. Once insignificant villages, the two places emerged into centers of an entangled borderscape, alongside huge reloading and customs facilities and large railroad stations. Not only were the towns important for economic exchange but they also developed into sites for cultural and political exchange. Here, the European political, social, and economic elite faced a coerced stop when traveling for business or tourism across Europe. While Eydtkuhnen and Verzhbolovo were important points on the itineraries of the International Sleeping Car Company, they also developed into places where literal, figurative, and imagined dividing lines between western Europe and the Russian Empire emerged. For international travelers, the border crossing was a rite de passage, or a “passageway between two worlds.”⁶⁰

Chapter 5 focuses on East Prussia’s provincial capital of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and its growing role as a relevant European meeting place. Trade, industry, culture, and urban development flourished at this location because of its convenient position close to the imperial Russian border and a significant ice-free Baltic Sea port. Königsberg was an important economic center even before the advent of the rail. However, the interconnection of speedy sea and land transportation massively increased the port’s turnover. Subsequently, the city developed into an important trading hub, facilitating East Prussian and imperial Russian grain trade with more western parts of Europe and beyond. After the advent of the rail, travelers from Paris and St. Petersburg could reach Königsberg in one to two days, cutting previous travel times by six days. International travelers for business and leisure, Jewish merchants facilitating the grain trade, and the international seaport all added to the city’s cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Chapter 6 focuses on the trajectories of emigrants parting the Kaunas region in the Russian Empire’s northwest. They mostly left on the grounds of imminent military conscription, poverty, or ethnic discrimination. Prospective emigrants first traveled to the Russian Empire’s western border. Because of restrictive emigration laws, the majority crossed clandestinely and registered in Prussian border towns. In emigration control stations like Eydtkuhnen, Prussian officials only admitted healthy migrants with sufficient financial means. Since the 1880s, Ellis Island had emerged as a symbol of mass immigration into the United States and of new Americans’ opportunities. However, while medical examinations, quarantine, or outright rejection all occurred on Ellis Island, the share of those turned away was much higher in Prussian border towns than in New York. Once emigrants had passed this hurdle, the Prussian railroads assigned them spots on special trains bound for northern German or western European ports. The authorities of Ellis Island and Prussian control stations built up sanitized and racialized borders. Here, they quarantined or turned away those who were seriously ill and those who allegedly carried contagious diseases—decisions that were often made on ethnic or racial grounds.

Chapter 7 focuses on developments after 1914 and revisits prominent nodal points reflecting the new geopolitical situation. The emergence of new political borders and the changes in political systems led to a dramatic shift in the railroad line’s importance. Despite Königsberg’s efforts to attract international trade, it lost much of its global significance. However, it was still vital to the German economy and travel. During the 1920s and 1930s, much of the domestic passenger and goods traffic between Germany and the exclave of East Prussia stayed on the rail, though hampered by new borders. Part of the Berlin–Königsberg line now ran across Polish territory, the so-called Polish Corridor. As a result, Polish and German authorities built up new border regimes and developed new border crossings. Although German interwar propaganda suggested otherwise, and despite a constant Polish-German war on tariffs, the two governments arranged for agreements that restored the prewar importance of the Ostbahn for Germany. As a result, the highest speed ever achieved between Königsberg and Berlin was in 1939, when the express train covered the distance of 679 kilometers in six hours and eight minutes.

The Second World War interrupted previous transcontinental mobility patterns in an unprecedented way. While an additional book would have to be written to elaborate on these changes, the epilogue allows for a glimpse of developments in the region, shaped by the Ostbahn during the previous century. The epilogue thus revisits familiar places on the line. It briefly examines their fate throughout the Second World War, the Cold War, and the subsequent reconfiguration of Europe after 1989.

NOTES

1.Dostoyevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, 8, 10, 26.

2.AGAD, zespół 247, sygn. 246, 6–8. I am grateful to my colleague Vasilijus Safronovas for the translation from contemporary colloquial Lithuanian to modern English. Alissa Klots helped me with the Russian Empire’s officials’ Russian translation.

3.Verne, Tour of the World in Eighty Days; Foster, Around the World with Citizen Train. For travel and early tourism in greater detail, refer to chapter 4 of this book.

4.For a detailed description of contemporary migration procedures, refer to chapter 6 of this book.

5.Bagwell, Transport Revolution.

6.The Lithuanian spelling of Kazimir would be Kazimieras. I kept the original spelling from the Russian source.

7.Brock and O. G., “Eydtkuhnen. Stadt an der Grenze,” 11.

8.Bagwell, Transport Revolution, 88–106.

9.Roth, Das Jahrhundert der Eisenbahn, 34–36. On Friedrich List and the influence of his time in the United States on his later life, refer to Thum, “Seapower and Frontier Settlement.”

10.List, Das deutsche National-Transport-System, 6.

11.Refer to Musekamp, “Friedrich List.”

12.At the same time, Franz Riepl developed similar plans for the Habsburg Empire. Refer to Weck, Eisenbahn und Stadtentwicklung in Zentraleuropa, 21–38.

13.Chevalier, Politique européenne, 2.

14.Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer en France, 124, quotation on p. 99.

15.Caron, 148–150.

16.On the international negotiations concerning construction and governance of this cross-border link, refer to Schot, Buiter, and Anastasiadou, “Dynamics of Transnational Railway Governance in Europe,” 267–269.

17.Mieck, “Große Themen der preußischen Geschichte,” 747.

18.Cvetkovski, Modernisierung durch Beschleunigung, 212–213.

19.On Gerstner’s study trip to the United States, refer to Gamst, “Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner.”

20.Haywood, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 7.

21.On the development of the Russian Empire’s rail network and its importance for the development of new perceptions of space and state, refer to Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne.

22.Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 710–724.

23.Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 33–34. Compare to Karl Marx’s concept of capital striving “to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another.” Refer to Marx, Grundrisse, 539.

24.Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 711.

25.Vergara, “La politique ferroviaire russe.”

26.N. N., “Eydtkuhnen.”

27.Granville, Guide to St. Petersburgh, xxiii–xxxvi.

28.Handbook for Northern Europe, 438.

29.Michell, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Russia, 2nd ed., 65; Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits, Guide officiel de la Compagnie. For greater detail on east–west railroad connections and travel times, refer to Musekamp, “Paris–St. Petersburg.”

30.Urry, Mobilities, 6. On the need to consolidate different disciplines in mobility studies, refer to Neubert and Schabacher, “Verkehrsgeschichte an der Schnittstelle.”

31.Urry builds his concept of mobilities and his notion of an interdisciplinary mobility turn on theories by Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman, and other philosophers and sociologists. See Urry, Mobilities. Huber shaped the term multiple mobilities, resorting to Shmuel Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernities. See Huber, “Über den Umgang mit verschiedenen Mobilitätsformen um 1900,” 325.

32.Schlögel, “Eydtkuhnen oder die Genese des Eisernen Vorhangs,” 51.

33.On the concept of global localities as a category of analysis, refer to Huber, Channelling Mobilities, 31.

34.On the border region at Eydtkuhnen as a European microcosm, refer to Musekamp, “Big History and Local Experiences.”

35.On the term borderscape, refer to dell’Agnese and Amilhat Szary, “Introduction,” quotation on p. 6. Ruth Leiserowitz introduced the term “compacted/condensed border space” (verdichteter Grenzraum), marked by a distinctive “border culture” (Grenzkultur). Refer to Leiserowitz, Sabbatleuchter und Kriegerverein, 136–137, 171.

36.Brambilla, “Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept”; Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

37.Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt, “Study of Transnationalism.”

38.The literature on global, world, and transnational history fills entire libraries. Some volumes that inspired this book are listed here in alphabetical order: Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Conrad, What Is Global History?; Hopkins, Globalization in World History; Iriye, Global and Transnational History; Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World; and Saunier, Transnational History.

39.Osterhammel, “Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte,” 473.

40.Refer to the chapter on historical archaeology connecting to the wider world in Orser, Historical Archaeology of the Modern World, 183–204.

41.On the network as a metaphor, refer to Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 710.

42.Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.

43.Schlögel, In Space We Read Time, xviii.

44.Hopkins, “Introduction: Interactions between the Universal and the Local,” 5.

45.Ghobrial, “Introduction: Seeing the World like a Microhistorian.” The idea of a “multi-sited ethnography” is referred to on p. 19.

46.Putnam, “Daily Life and Digital Reach,” 168.

47.Putnam, 172.

48.Dirk van Laak even states that the developments in infrastructure over the last two hundred years culminated in the smartphone as a “‘remote control’ of the network society.” See van Laak, Alles im Fluss, 7.

49.Schlögel, In Space We Read Time, 305.

50.Hughes, “Evolution of Large Technological Systems.”

51.Latour, Reassembling the Social, 84. For a concise summary of actor-network theory, refer to Muniesa, “Actor-Network Theory.” For an example of how to apply the approach in historical research, refer to Sridhar, “Engaging with Archival Texts.”

52.Bennett, “Thing-Power,” 38.

53.Bennett, 39.

54.I would like to thank Bryan Paradis and Matthew Plishka for their insights into the potentials of actor-network theory for historical research.

55.Maier, Once within Borders, 197.

56.Latour, Reassembling the Social, 78–79.

57.The travel time remained relatively constant between 1897 and 1914; for the 1914 schedule of the Nord-Express, refer to Compagnie internationale des wagons-lits, Guide officiel de la Compagnie.

58.Baedeker, Russia with Teheran, Port Arthur, and Peking.

59.Kaschuba, Die Überwindung der Distanz, 102.

60.Schlögel, Das russische Berlin, 66.