For Histories of Transport! A Manifesto of Sorts

The modern Greek word for transport is Μεταφορά (Metaforá). I first learned this standing on a ferry deck at Piraeus watching lorries with the plural Μετάφορες emblazoned on the canvas roll into the belly of the ship, pleased by that heureka-feeling that must often come with studying the language whose ancient incarnation served as the

basis for the academic and philosophical lingo of most European languages. How could the highly abstract notion of ‘metaphor’ – the precise meaning of which is a matter of dispute and can by no means be reduced to ‘a comparison without like/as,’ as I was taught in school – possibly be connected to the concept of ‘transport’ as embodied by something as banal as lorries? Of course, the etymology is clear enough; even without going into the intricacies of what might constitute a metaphor, there is undoubtedly an idea of transfer – or, if you will, transport – of meaning. But while the disregard of the significance of Greek lorries might only deprive many an academic of one heureka-experience, and is thus only a personal tragedy, the lack of histories of transport is a serious flaw in contemporary historiography, and hence a public tragedy. For transport is a metaphor (whatever that is)!

Transport as a concept seems to me to be the main visible signifier both of modernity and urbanity. The industrialization undeniably brought many other changes to the lives of Europeans, such as the rise of factories, the emergence of the working class and ultimately the appearance of metropolises in their contemporary form. But what makes a big city feel like a big city is not the number of skyscrapers – or even inhabitants – but its traffic, its infrastructure, its cars, buses, trams, tubes, streets, pavements and cycle lanes. There is an abundance of early twentieth-century literature which has the city as a theme and more often than not, the first reason for the protagonist’s alienation with it is its traffic. It is no coincidence that Alfred Döblin’s genre-setting 1929 Berlin Alexanderplatz starts off with Franz Biberkopf’s long-dreaded tram trip from Tegel prison into the whirlwind of the city. Neither is the sheer predominance of shots of trams, trains and other road vehicles in both The Man with a Movie Camera and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. At least on the level of representation, city life is transport, and there are hardly any more symbolic images of London than the red bus, black cab and Harry Beck’s schematic tube map. Judging from what can be inferred from the cultural output of the first half of the twentieth century, transport and travel was a topic urban modernists thought about very consciously and interpreted as symbolic of living in the accelerated environment of their age.

By contrast, we 2010ers take mass transport and mass travel by-and-large for granted, and other concepts have taken the place of trams as signifiers of our age (such as the internet and the mobile phone). Yet the ubiquity of travel, the sheer and astonishing frequency with which the urbanite moves around his environment using different means of transport serves to underscore the paramount importance transportation inhabits in our daily lives. Many of our everyday conversations concern transport – tube delays, train prices, flight bookings. One might think this a banal part of our lives, the external structure we have to successfully navigate in order to reach fulfilment of some sort beneath it. That, however, does not diminish its importance; on the contrary, it suggests the neglect many academics have shown for such an integral part of the life of us and all European city-dwellers of the twentieth century.

Of course, stressing the importance of transport is stating the obvious to an extent. But it seems that the study of individual transportation links are frequently confined to the margins of scholarship and lack the analytical depth they deserve. Trains and trams do no merely form an ancillary part of cultural history because modernists were obsessed with them; they are not only part of micro-history because they are part of our quotidian realm of experience. For instance, the Pressburgerbahn, an electric railway that ran between Bratislava and Vienna from shortly before World War I throughout the interwar period, illuminates the fascinating history of Bratislava as little else does. Pozsony (the city’s Hungarian name) was long simultaneously loved and loathed by the Magyarising Kingdom: on the one hand, it was Hungary’s old capital and the “magyar bástya” on the Western border; on the other hand, it was mistrusted for being too German, a mere suburb of Vienna. After 1919, this ambiguous relationship of the state to the city was replicated by the Czechoslovak authorities. Despite centuries of close links between the two Danubian neighbours, it was arguably only through this tram that Bratislava could be seen as a suburb of Vienna, for suburbs are a modern phenomenon which developed with and through the railway. The Pressburgerbahn allowed for transnational connection between Austria and Hungary/Czechoslovakia at the height of nationalism. Pressburgers used the train to enjoy Viennese culture – there was a much-loved ‘theatre service’ that left either city in the late evening after the end of performances – while the Viennese swarmed to Bratislava to enjoy the cheaper food and shops. The tram brought Viennese modernism right into the heart of Bratislava, as the tram’s interior had been designed by Otto Wagner, the art nouveau architect most famous for the Postal Savings Bank on the Ringstraße. More than any other phenomenon, the Pressburgerbahn symbolizes Bratislava’s liminality in the first half of the twentieth century, both in geographic as well as in national terms.

Histories of transport have long been the domain of retired engineers writing descriptive studies aimed at other retired engineers who enjoy playing with railway models in their garages. While I would never dare deride this hobby, transport links deserve to be studied more analytically. Their study can provide fascinating insight into the history of (metaphorical and physical) links between places. They are, in a word, μετάφορες; they deserve to be treated as such!

Felix Jeschke