In Shifting Lines, Entangled Borderlands, Jan Musekamp has written a history of the Prussian Ostbahn that spans over a century from its initial conceptualization and construction through the interwar period, when shifting borders reconfigured the political, social and demographic landscape around its tracks. Throughout the text, Musekamp is interested in a variety of perspectives on the Ostbahn—from the public and private actors who funded, designed and constructed the railway, to the merchants and smugglers whose livelihood depended on its traffic to and the riders themselves, including affluent tourists and desperate migrants, who may have rarely interacted but appreciated the mobility afforded to them by the railroad. Throughout the period Musekamp explores and especially prior to World War I, the Ostbahn functioned as a vital conduit for the movement of people, goods, and ideas.

Musekamp identifies several key impacts of the Ostbahn. First, as was the case with railroads elsewhere, the railroad in the Ostbahn dramatically reduced travel times, effectively shrinking the space between once distant locations. Second, the railroad itself as well as the stations it passed through became spaces of encounter and shared experiences for people of different nationalities and classes. The bulk of the book focuses on the period before World War I, where the reader bears witness to the growth of rail travel, which allowed both for the ever faster transit of goods and people as well as the establishment of complex social, economic, and political arrangements around the various stations he examines. This final chapter and epilogue explore the rupture of nineteenth century ties and their ambivalent resuturing from WWI through the present day.

This book is organized as a railway journey of sorts, with chapters that focus on particular locations along the route of the Ostbahn, starting in Berlin and extending eastwards. This structure has both strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, Musekamp is able to reconstruct the lost worlds of each location, from the now forgotten border post of Aleksandrów to the sea and land crossing in Königsberg. However, sometimes this structure leads to repetition, since the political, economic, and ideological factors that influenced the railroad’s development in each place are not entirely distinct. This may lead to confusion for non-experts in the region. A summative conclusion that highlighted the differences as well as the similarities in each of these places might have been helpful here. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the narrative is organized through fixed locations along the Ostbahn, Musekamp never entirely loses site of the journey itself; the mobilities that constituted the railroad and were also enabled by it.

Musekamp’s book follows up on the work of scholars who have examined borderlands in central and eastern Europe and found that these were sites of encounter and co-existence that could simultaneously strengthen and challenge national narratives. Along the railroad, similar dynamics existed. For example, in Aleksandrów, Polish nationalists separated by national borders sustained a lively trade in ideas and smuggled goods. The German nationalist iconography of the Dirschau Bride existed in some degree of tension with the international exchange of engineering technology and standardization that made its construction possible. For the Jewish and Lithuanian migrants from Kaunas, Eydtkuhnen functioned as the “termin[us] of a transatlantic corridor that transmigrants were not supposed to quit” which ended in Ellis Island (190), a particular variant on the expansion and dilation of space that Musekamp so ably catalogues.

Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Musekamp insists on viewing the railroad itself as an “independent, nonhuman actor” (12). While it is true that the railroad enabled various events and processes, some of which were unintended or unimagined when it was constructed, it is unclear how viewing the railroad as a “nonhuman actor” helps one to understand or appreciate this fact. Musekamp’s theoretical framework is more successful when he describes how political, economic, and social imperatives often operated at cross-purposes. His refusal to forget the human dimensions of the rail is also laudable. Finally, Musekamp’s deep knowledge of the region shines through on every page. Shifting Lines, Entangled Borderlands deserves a wide readership of scholars interested in the vanished transnational landscape created by the Ostbahn.