On the morning of 7 July 1839, three trains operated by the Habsburg monarchy's first steam railroad company, the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn, arrived at Brno/Brünn, the largest city in Moravia. As one local newspaper correspondent wrote, throngs of onlookers first “caught sight of the smoking locomotive with its line of carriages in quick flight.” In little time the first of three trains from Vienna pulled into the station. “With speed like the wind,” it had covered the roughly 130 kilometers from the imperial capital to Brno in just four and a half hours. The other two trains arrived shortly thereafter. Some of the train's passengers wandered through the city. Prominent state and local officials hosted several notable visitors, including the railroad company's main financial backer, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, and his leading engineers.

That afternoon the three trains departed for Vienna, and within hours horrible news had reached Brno: the third train had slammed into the second train at a small station north of Vienna. Details reported by newspapers throughout the empire varied, but it was clear that a number of people had been injured, several of them seriously. Later investigations showed that the engineer of the third train had exceeded the company's speed limit, resulting in brake failure. The local Brno paper tried to reconcile that day's two momentous events—both symbolic of the Brno's entrance into the modern world. “[W]hose chest was not bursting with pride upon seeing this act of unity and humanity on this cheerful, bright blue day?” the correspondent asked rhetorically. “[W]ho did not comprehend the great importance of this celebration and the boldness and strength obtained and offered up by science?” Yet, he admitted, there remained a disturbing “cloud on the horizon” created by the train accident.Footnote ¹

In the Vormärz era, numerous newspapers, almanacs, and other publications from Brno, Vienna, and Prague correctly predicted that train travel would effect radical transformations: increased trade, industrial development, the mobilization of labor, urbanization, a more efficient government and mobile armed forces, and the rise of the tourist industry, to name just a few. Railroad development promised to connect cities by drastically decreasing the time for travel between them, which in turn would strengthen Bürgertum and bürgerliche values. For many Czech patriots, the train promised to spread national ideas and create a coherent, connected Czech nation. Yet these same publications, and especially those intended for an educated audience sympathetic to liberalism, also fretted about train accidents, even if they used the inherent drama of the events to sell their publications. The 1839 train crash outside of Brno was hardly the last accident for the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn. Train accidents were a common occurrence in the early nineteenth century. The train, liberalism's most potent symbol of commerce, science, progress, and national unity, easily became a source of consternation and a symbol of destruction. The arrival of the railroad revealed deeper worries about technology and change. As they looked forward to the future, liberals feared what lay ahead, aware that they might be helping to release forces beyond their control.Footnote ²

When they wrote about railroads, Austrian authors were not only attempting to make sense of a new experience. They were simultaneously celebrating and questioning Austrian liberalism. They were also taking part in a larger European and American experience with the forces of modernization. They mimicked words and phrases published in the West as they made sense of the immense social and cultural changes wrought by the arrival of the railroad—interpretations that hint at a paradoxical attitude toward technology and even progress itself. Yet there was something peculiar about the way in which Austrian publications spoke about train travel, especially accidents. Although sharing much of the optimism and anxiety expressed by their Western counterparts, their actual experience with the forces of modernization was, as yet, only a partial one. In writing about railroads and railroad accidents, Austrian liberals could discuss a dramatic aspect of European modernization that, unlike political reforms and large-scale worker unrest, existed not in the abstract, but right in front of their eyes. Looking westward at the railroad's successes and failures, they hoped to catch a glimpse of their own future. They also expressed their own, peculiar fears about that future.

Historians of the Habsburg monarchy, of course, have not ignored the railroad. Much of the literature, as elsewhere, has been characterized by nostalgic portrayals of railroad construction and its heroes.Footnote ³ Historians of the Habsburg monarchy—again following a more general trend in the literature on other regions—have investigated more seriously the railroad's immense impact on economic development, the military, and state rule.Footnote ⁴ Yet few of these historians, or historians of the Vormärz era in general, have looked at the effects that this technology had on shaping the emergent liberal culture of the period. In a tantalizingly short essay written for the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the train's arrival to Prague in 1845, Vladimír Macura traced the development of nineteenth-century Czech discourses about the train, discourses that moved between being “naively progressive” and “naively archaistic.” Other contributors to the same volume analyzed the railroad's effect on urban architecture, popular folk songs, and the development of the Czech language, which of course lacked common words for things like “train station” and “railroad.”Footnote ⁵ As these essays and those written by historians of other regions show, many topics related to trains and train travel in Austria await the cultural historian.Footnote ⁶

Nor have historians given due attention to newspapers, journals, and almanacs published in Austria. Historians of the Czech national movement, of course, have looked to Prague's newspapers and other publications as both instrumental in forging a new language and in fostering a sense of solidarity among self-consciously Czech writers and readers.Footnote ⁷ Few historians, however, have followed their lead. Much of the scholarship on Vormärz liberalism has as its focus the political origins of the 1848 revolution and hence has been drawn to sources like the moderately liberal Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung and illegal political pamphlets that were published abroad, often in Hamburg or Leipzig, and then smuggled across the border. Organizations like the Legal-Political Reading Association have been studied as incubators for the development of political liberalism and opposition to the conservative regime, and less as spaces where Vienna's educated elites discussed a wide array of contemporary issues outside of politics.Footnote ⁸ Domestic newspapers, heavily subjected to censorship and for the most part emptied of political content and substantial information about political events abroad, are ignored.Footnote ⁹

This article relies on a variety of newspapers, journals, and almanacs from Brno, Vienna, and Prague—cities eventually connected by rail in 1845—and pays particular attention to the articles found in Jurende's Mährische Wanderer (hereafter “Wanderer”), an almanac published in Brno that was well known to the educated (gebildete) reading public in Moravia and beyond. Vormärz-era domestic publications can tell us much about issues not directly related to politics and government. They help us understand how educated elites in Brno, Vienna, and Prague attempted to make sense of their world and hence suggest a reexamination of Vormärz liberalism itself. Newspapers remind us that we need not restrict our understanding of liberalism to something purely political or concern ourselves solely with questions of nationalism. They reveal an intriguing mixture of liberal hopes and liberal doubts. They show that liberals lived in an era in which a politically conservative state also promoted technological advances and that these same liberals did not always fully embrace these advances.Footnote ¹⁰

These same publications also suggest a new way of thinking about Austria's place within a rapidly changing Europe before 1848. It has been tempting to discuss the backwardness—or surprising advancement—of industrialization in Austria relative to Western countries and especially to England. Yet Austrian liberals perceived some aspects of modernization at the same time as their Western counterparts. Newspapers and other publications, in other words, show that Austrian liberals also lived within a modernizing Europe, even if their experiences with modernity differed in scope and kind than their counterparts elsewhere. Rather than seeing the introduction of train travel in Austria as a starting point, we might see it as an exciting and confusing moment of transition in which liberals tried to come to grips with a fast-changing world.

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The Habsburg monarchy's first steam railroad company, the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn (hereafter “Nordbahn”) resulted largely from the efforts of Franz Riepl, a mineralogy expert from Vienna Polytechnic, and Salmon Mayer von Rothschild, the Vienna representative of the famous banking family. As early as 1829, Riepl had proposed to Emperor Francis I a railroad linking Vienna to iron- and coal-rich northern Moravia and the salt fields of Galicia. Although the emperor rebuffed him, Riepl eventually found a supporter in Rothschild, who twice sent Riepl abroad to study railroad travel and railroad construction, first to England in 1830, and then a second time, in 1834, to England and Belgium. Weeks after Francis I's death in 1835, Rothschild submitted his proposal for a rail line to the newly crowned Emperor Ferdinand. Almost a year later, Ferdinand granted a concession for a line running from Vienna to Bochnia, in Galicia, along with branch lines to Brno, Olmütz/Olomouc (or Holomouc), and Troppau/Opava. Rothschild's newly formed joint-stock company, named after Ferdinand and including on its board a number of prominent political figures, including Klemens von Metternich, began issuing stocks. (Rothschild kept two-thirds of the stock ownership for himself.)Footnote ¹¹

Construction began shortly thereafter. The first test run took place in November 1837, and on 6 January 1838, the first passenger train left Vienna for Wagram, 80 kilometers away. Construction—the laying of rails, the building of bridges, and the erecting of train stations—would continue throughout the century. The Nordbahn reached Brno in 1839; Ungarisch-Hradisch/Uherské Hradiště, Prerau/Přerov, and Olomouc, in 1841; Bohumín/Oderburg in Silesia, in 1847; and finally Bochnia in 1856.Footnote ¹² The Nordbahn was to remain, however, one of the few privately owned railroads in the monarchy. Train accidents, like the one outside of Brno in 1839, combined with unexpectedly high construction costs and disappointing stock dividends to dampen initial public excitement among railroad investors. Hence, after 1841, and following the first official attempts to envision an integrated railroad system for the empire, the state took the lead in railroad construction.Footnote ¹³ In 1845, the Olomouc–Prague State Railroad Company opened for business, linking Prague with the imperial capital. Construction continued apace throughout the empire. By 1848, the Habsburg monarchy's railroad network totaled 1,622 kilometers.Footnote ¹⁴

Although the density of the monarchy's railroad system paled in comparison to that of England, such comparisons should not diminish the fact that railroad in the monarchy effected significant economic and cultural transformations, as a quick look at the Nordbahn and Brno demonstrate.Footnote ¹⁵ From 1 November 1839 to 1 November 1840, more than 228,000 people traveled along the Nordbahn's line. From 2 March 1840, when the transport of goods began, until November of the same year, its trains moved almost 29 million kilograms of goods.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1845, more than 650,000 people were riding the Nordbahn annually—more than every other line in Germany save two. The Nordbahn's trains pulled 109 million kilograms of goods that year.Footnote ¹⁷ Brno textile manufacturers, who had already developed impressive factory steam engines and factory systems, solidified their dominant position in the lucrative Vienna market. From Vienna, carriages full of dresses, shirts, and other Brno textiles traveled to Buda and Pest markets. Polish, Hungarian, and Italian buyers from every corner of the empire came to Brno to purchase textile goods for sale in the provinces.Footnote ¹⁸ Weavers and spinners from the countryside came to Brno looking for work. Between 1834 and 1850, the population of the city and its suburbs grew from 10,000 people to 47,359. During that same time period, the number of houses increased by only 45, meaning that many of the new arrivals lived in cramped, filthy conditions.Footnote ¹⁹ Tourists from Vienna, often armed with guidebooks, came to Brno for the day. Not only were thousands of people riding the train, thousands more uncounted Austrian inhabitants saw the train go by, watched it as it pulled into and out of stations, and read about it.Footnote ²⁰ In short, few, if any, Moravians remained unaffected by the construction of the Nordbahn.

Given Brno's important position as a major manufacturing center and its proximity to Vienna, it is perhaps not surprising that it was a Brno almanac that took the lead in promoting railroad construction. Although sadly neglected by historians, the Wanderer was one of the most highly respected publications for the educated middle classes and the nobility in the monarchy. Josef Karel Jurende, a self-taught peasant from Silesia, published his first volume of the Wanderer in 1809 and remained at the helm until 1833, when he handed over the almanac's editorship to Johann Ohéral, who also edited the Brno newspaper Moravia. Published yearly at more than 400 pages in the 1830s and 1840s, the Wanderer, one of Jurende's biographers declared, not only revived the almanac genre, but was also read all over Austria and Germany. It found its way to Turkey, Russia, Switzerland, Denmark, and America.Footnote ²¹ From Vienna, Moritz Saphir, in an article advertising the almanac's recent release, called its contents “immense, manifold, instructive, useful, amusing, and interesting.”Footnote ²² The Wanderer reported on technological and industrial advancements, cultural events, and the latest gossip from abroad. Its pages offered insights into local and regional history and culture. Short stories, travel literature, humorous vignettes, and practical information such as astronomical charts and timetables for carriage travel found their way into the almanac.

By the mid-1830s, the Wanderer had begun to include a chapter on steamships and railroads. Before the train arrived in Brno, much space was dedicated to describing the new technology, its history, and its promised benefits. Naturally, the almanac concentrated on developments in England, beginning in 1835 with a glowing depiction of the construction of the Manchester-Liverpool line, the world's first intercity passenger train, which had opened in 1830. Other articles that year detailed construction projects taking place throughout Europe and the United States.Footnote ²³ Future articles described various methods by which capital for construction projects was gained, train carriage design, and the mechanics of steam power. They paid particular attention to technological advancements, such as the addition of gas lights to the Brussels-Antwerp line to allow for night travel and the introduction of larger wheels in England.Footnote ²⁴

Beginning in 1838, the Wanderer shifted from instructing readers about railroad technology and construction abroad to practical information for train passengers on the Nordbahn. It reported on the corporation's annual meetings, emphasizing only the most positive developments. It spelled out in detail engineering achievements such as tunnels and viaducts and the sheer labor needed for construction. (The last section of the line to Brno, for example, required 14,000 workers.)Footnote ²⁵ But, like other publications throughout Europe, its greatest propaganda on behalf of the railroad was saved for celebratory events that surrounded the opening of a section of track.Footnote ²⁶ Large crowds of between 15,000 and 20,000 people came, for example, to see the train arrive to Uherské Hradiště in 1841. Civil and military authorities were on hand. The railroad station was decorated with greenery, symbolic of the region's lumber industry. Local girls appeared with flowers and recited poetry. Similar scenes, which the company and local officials obviously staged with great care, occurred throughout the Bohemian lands before 1848. All were faithfully reported in the almanac.Footnote ²⁷

Pedagogical purpose, information for the traveler, and a celebration of railroad construction eventually appeared in other Austrian publications as well. In 1839, Jan Purkynĕ published a forty-four page article in Časopis Českého museum describing the many economic, social, and cultural changes that the railroad promised to effect, concluding that the railroad will bring “wealth, industriousness, peace, learning and culture, freedom, and might.”Footnote ²⁸ The inaugural volume of Austria, an almanac modeled on the Wanderer and first published in 1840, included a lengthy article on the technology behind steam power, railroads, and steamships. The railroad, the article explained, is “a quick, secure, dependable, and profitable means of transporting people and goods; a powerful agent for the promotion of national prosperity and for civilization as a whole.”Footnote ²⁹ In 1842, Saphir's Der Humorist, published in Vienna, began running an occasional column on news related to railroads.

Like the Wanderer, newspapers and other publications faithfully reported the openings of various stretches of track. No opening, however, matched the excitement generated by the arrival of the train in Prague in 1845. As 20 August approached, “Prague prepared itself for the opening of the railroad as they would for a great wedding,” Kwĕty exclaimed.Footnote ³⁰ On the day itself, thousands lined the tracks on the way in to the city to glimpse the three trains that had traveled the 251 kilometers from Olomouc. Various battalions of the city's militia lined the platform as the first train passed through a specially constructed gate outside the city's walls decorated with a large sign reading “Willkommen!” and into the station. Thousands more gathered to watch as roughly 500 passengers—important members of the monarchy's nobility, notables from Viennese cultural circles, and the train line's engineers—stepped off the train. Soon thereafter 160 carriages whisked the new arrivals off to the Prague Castle, where they took part in a ball with city leaders and representatives from countries across the continent. That evening, on Žofín Island, Czech patriots listened to music in a hall decorated with flowers and dominated by a statue of Emperor Ferdinand standing above the Bohemian lion. Over the next few days, other Czech-language concerts and plays were held throughout the city. Shopkeepers and factory owners held their own ball. Another monument to Ferdinand was unveiled near Invalidovna, sports contests were held along the Vltava, and one theater staged the German-language one-act play “Only the Train, A Funny Locomotive with Song.”Footnote ³¹

The Wanderer and other Austrian publications shared a similar approach when discussing the promised benefits of the railroad, technological advancements, line openings, or other aspects of train travel. They also spoke in similar ways about the train's remarkable speed, which in turn revealed a number of commonly held liberal values. Even with the quickest express carriage, the trip from Vienna to Brno took more than fifteen hours. On the train, which could also carry vast amounts of heavy materials like coal, the same distance was covered in just five and one-half hours.Footnote ³² With these remarkable changes in mind, Austrian writers mimicked English arguments, often made with mathematical certainty, about how the railroad's speed would lead to increased trade and wealth. “Speed is the mother of advantage, the whole worth of today's age,” which will work to the advantage of salespeople, factory owners, and shop owners, an 1835 article quoted an Englishman as saying. To make his argument, the Englishman said that since the Liverpool-Manchester line saved one hour of travel time for each passenger per trip, and 500,000 people rode the in line in 1834, half a million work hours had been gained for the country. Even more importantly, he continued, the speed and strength of the train could transport tons of goods with immense ease, linking raw material-producing regions to industrial ones.Footnote ³³ Purkynĕ began his two-part article on the railroads for Časopis českého museum by describing how the train “reduced space and reduced time” for trade, the train going “six times as fast as the horse [hence leading to] a sixfold decrease in costs and virtually immense increases in opportunities to multiply the output of transportable products.”Footnote ³⁴ In a growing, competitive market for the transportation of goods and people, speed had become a crucial consideration for customers. The accelerated circulation of capital, raw materials, and industrial products promised to create untold amounts of wealth.Footnote ³⁵

The train also transformed the ways that liberals—both in the Bohemian lands and throughout Europe—thought about the relationship between places. As in Western Europe, they celebrated the “annihilation of time and space” between distances that seemed to bring points on the map closer to each other.Footnote ³⁶ One traveler described for the Wanderer the experience of being in Vienna in the morning and in the countryside in the afternoon: “What a contrast! The life in the capital city and in these quiet mountains, and how they have now become so close to each other!”Footnote ³⁷ “A Europe strung together by rail lines,” Purkynĕ observed, will be a Europe “decreased to one thirty-sixth of its previous size.”Footnote ³⁸ “Brno is now pushed closer to the Residenzstadt,” Der Humorist explained in 1839. “The people of Brno … are now Vienna's neighbors.”Footnote ³⁹ When the train arrived in Prague in 1845, Bohemia made a similar declaration: “The capital city of Vienna, the central point of our imperial state, which up to now had been separated from Prague by twenty-four hours of road, is now suddenly with one magical effort moved fourteen to fifteen hours closer.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Often these notions about space had a peculiarly Central European tinge. Celebrating one's new proximity to Vienna might have been a way of currying official favor, yet many Austrian liberals, like their counterparts in Germany, no doubt imagined that shrinking distances between cities would promote the wealth, ideas, and perhaps even political power of Bürgertum. Footnote ⁴¹ In an 1843 article on plans to build state-run rail lines from Olomouc to Prague, Vienna to Trieste, and elsewhere, for example, the Wanderer observed: “The purpose of the railroad is clear: the advancing of great cities toward each other, providing protection and care for advancements in culture and learning, industry, science and arts, [and] the revival of Bürgerthum . . . [T]he great families of the cities are brought closer to each other and their organizations are pressed together.”Footnote ⁴² Similarly, German and Czech nationalists agreed that the train's ability to transform people's lived geography would have profound implications for their respective national projects. Viennese sightseers, when not making the pilgrimage to the Wagram battlefield and other emerging tourist destinations celebrated in the name of the “homeland,” traveled to Brno for the day. A once strenuous journey, one guidebook claimed, could now be accomplished with great ease by “young and old [riding in] the elegant carriages of the splendid Nordbahn.”Footnote ⁴³ Kwĕty, using language similar to that found in German-language publications, promised that the train would bring Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia—and their peoples—closer to each other.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Macura writes, the majority of Czech patriots celebrated the railroad's promise to unify the nation and further communication and contact among co-nationals.Footnote ⁴⁵

But many Czech patriots had their doubts. In his 1848 guidebook, Karel Vladislav Zap noted that Prague's train station placed the city, now a central link between Vienna and Dresden, in the “heart of Europe.” As a transit point from the North Sea to the Adriatic, and from east to west, the train promised to bring wealth and prosperity to the city. But he expressed concern about the fate of the “national spirit,” which “God willing” would be strengthened.Footnote ⁴⁶ Others feared that the train would lead to German emigration to Czech areas and Czech emigration abroad. Still more feared that the train and its accompanying institutions would further strengthen the position of the German language in the empire.Footnote ⁴⁷ Josef Miloslav Hurban, who traveled from Břetislava/Pozsony/Pressburg to Prague in 1839, was similarly unsure about what the train's ultimate effects would be. Speaking of the Vienna to Brno line, he spoke darkly about Brno's future, which he imagined as being situated between Slavic Prague and the imperial capital. The train upset this balance, making Brno a mere “suburb of Vienna.” But he concludes the thought on a hopeful, if unsure note: “The sturdy iron rails do not belong to any one nationality, but provide fruits to all nations—humanity. Therefore they will unite the Slavic elements as well!”Footnote ⁴⁸

In addition to shrinking imagined distances, the train also forced liberals to find words for a radically new experience. “Pascal said, ‘The rivers are meandering streets.’ Now he would have to say, ‘The railroads are streets that run at a gallop’,” an article in the Wanderer proclaimed.Footnote ⁴⁹ Before 1848, trains in Austria could reach speeds of 38 kilometers per hour.Footnote ⁵⁰ By contrast, the Vienna to Prague express carriage, rolling along newly constructed roads, traveled at an average speed of 12 kilometers per hour. The average speed of a postal carriage going from Brno to Vienna was between 7 and 8 kilometers per hour.Footnote ⁵¹ Unlike roads, the railroad shot along a straight line. Turns occurred too gradually to be noticed. Safety concerns and the limits of steam power prevented tracks from exceeding gradations of 10 degrees, meaning that trains, rather than climbing mountains, shot through them. Rather than entering valleys, they ran across viaducts. Metaphors of flight proved more useful in describing the sensual experience of movement, both for the passenger and the onlooker. The opening lines of a poem from the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung und Originalblatt für Kunst, Literatur und geselliges Leben, reprinted in the Wanderer, describes the moment of seeing the train move for the first time: “And look, how it pulls with such magical speed the long row of carriages/The work of art powerfully doing its work, in flight like an eagle.”Footnote ⁵² “The train rushed as with the speed of lightning onward with haste, bursting through cliffs and hills, flying across small rivers and gullies,” Pfleger Moravský wrote of his first train ride. “[A]lways onward, always fast, like a wild wonder from another world.”Footnote ⁵³ As Macura writes, the train's movement suggested liberal ideas about progress, movement from the past to the future, forward to something better. The train, he continues, suggested freedom of movement, but also individual freedom and the freedom of nations.Footnote ⁵⁴

Train travel, full of promise and danger, also disorientated people. The visual stimuli threatened to overwhelm the senses. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has written, the train changed how people conceptualized time and space. It introduced a new way of seeing and created a new relationship among people, nature, and the landscape that now whizzed by.Footnote ⁵⁵ Austrian guidebooks, for example, marveled at the sheer number of sights that the tourist could see while on the train. Indeed, the passenger was supposed to read entries about towns, villages, and landscapes of note as the train passed them by. Traveling on the Nordbahn is a “fast, lightning-like flight that allows the traveler to become familiar with the sights as they quickly fly by,” one anonymous guidebook author explained. Hence, he continued, the entries would be short.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a travel writer for the Wanderer described it, “The journey on the train barely allows us to enjoy the landscape's attractions, but since so much is compressed within an hour, the soul feels animated in various ways.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Others found the experience distinctly unnerving. A writer for the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung claimed to become seasick while traveling on a train from Naples.Footnote ⁵⁸ In A Horrible Train Ride, which was published in the 1840s, the villain, an English train engineer, manages to overpower detective Pinkerton, tie him down in the locomotive car, and rush the train along the line, toward a second, oncoming train. “The fine (locomotive) ‘Mammut’ will fly into the air as if it had wings,” the mad engineer screams at his victim, “and detective Pinkerton will be torn into little pieces, mashed!” (His previous victim, who turned out to be a part of a tragic love triangle, had been overpowered while in her carriage and thrown out the window to her death.)Footnote ⁵⁹ “Countryside, cities, and towns fly by and disappear, as if transformed by someone with magical powers,” Hurban wrote of his 1840 train ride across the Danube from Vienna to Brno, on his way to Prague.Footnote ⁶⁰

Hurban was not alone in seeing in the train, and speed, as something unnatural, otherworldly.Footnote ⁶¹ Nor was he alone in fearing its unnatural powers.Footnote ⁶² An ode recited on opening day in Uherské Hradiště spoke of the “frightful, steam- and fire-spraying strength” of the train.Footnote ⁶³ Exactly one month after the train arrived in Brno, a series of violent thunderstorms plagued the city, causing serious flooding. Many among the public blamed the railroad for provoking thunderstorms and demanded compensation from the Nordbahn. (Presumably they believed that the train released electrical currents in the air, which set off the storms.)Footnote ⁶⁴ “The greatest invention of the modern era, the train, which leaps across space, earns our complete admiration,” a passenger on the doomed Brno-Vienna train of July 1839 reported in Der Humorist. But, he continued, our dead ancestors might “believe it to be a miracle,” or they might “take the locomotive to be an evil wizard and burn it.”Footnote ⁶⁵

These words and sentiments about railroad travel as flight followed a Western example. “You can't imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress than the magical machine. . . . When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description,” the actress Fanny Kemble wrote about her experience on one of Stephenson's locomotives shortly before the opening of the Manchester-Liverpool line. Thomas Creevey, after a short railroad journey in 1829, called the experience “frightful.” “[I]t really is flying,” he continued, “and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening.”Footnote ⁶⁶ By the 1840s, railroad travel as flight—both wonderful and frightening—had also become common currency among European writers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Saphir, rather than celebrate the opening of the first functioning railroad line in Austria, chose to mock, among other things, writers' reliance on metaphors for flight to describe the railroad travel experience, a reliance that he saw as emanating from uncritical enthusiasm for the new technology.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Nordbahn imported technology from abroad—at first, locomotives, rails, and even engineers. Similarly, many who wrote and published about the early experiences of train travel in Austria imported words and metaphors from abroad. Austrian liberal ideas about the train's promotion of trade and commerce often mimicked ideas first developed in England. They repeated ideas about the revival and spread of Bürgertum first heard in Germany. Sometimes Austrian writers literally transposed others' words into their articles. The Wanderer often took whole sections of text from newspapers and journals published in Vienna and abroad. As Macura points out, Purkynĕ's article, which provided the starting point for Czech debates about the promises and pitfalls of railroad travel, was actually a translation of an article previously published in Germany.Footnote ⁶⁹ The poem that the Wanderer reprinted from the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung (“And look, how it pulls with such magical speed the long row of carriages”) belonged to Jakob Schnerr, who wrote the poem for the celebration marking the arrival of the train to Nürnberg in 1835.Footnote ⁷⁰

One should not, however, overstate the point. Hurban, who met Ohéral while traveling through Brno, praised the latter's wide-ranging knowledge and “philosophical soul.” Ohéral, Hurban concluded, belonged to a community of intellectual elites who thrived on debate and disagreement.Footnote ⁷¹ Both Ohéral's and Saphir's publications attempted to translate “Western” ideas into the Austrian context. They, in other words, were participating in a European moment in the history of modernization, even if those experiences only partially resembled those in more “advanced” countries like England. In the train they saw an expression of their greatest hopes for the future. They looked to the West as both a model and inspiration. Yet, as their writings about railroad accidents suggest, they also looked westward, and to the future, with sense of unease.

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Train accidents were a common occurrence before the midcentury. In 1830, during the train's initial run between Liverpool and Manchester, a member of parliament and prominent supporter of railroad development failed to get off the tracks before an oncoming locomotive crushed his leg. He died the next day.Footnote ⁷² Accidents across Europe and the United States occurred because engineers were drunk at the wheel. Signaling systems, which, in an age before the introduction of the telegraph, consisted of individuals stationed along the tracks, sometimes failed to warn engineers of stalled or parked trains ahead on the line. Boilers exploded, couplings broke, wheels cracked, and bridges collapsed. People and cows wandered onto the tracks.Footnote ⁷³ Instructions for first-time riders on the Nordbahn included prominent warnings against any attempt to leap from the car, which as one line suggests, occasionally happened when the steam engine's whistle blew.Footnote ⁷⁴ In addition to the crash that occurred soon after the train's first arrival to Brno in 1839, the Nordbahn suffered numerous tragedies in the year that followed. Fire broke out in the Vienna train station, seriously damaging a number of cars.Footnote ⁷⁵ A signaling error at the Břeclav/Lundenburg station resulted in a crash that seriously injured two passengers.Footnote ⁷⁶ The local inhabitants of another Moravian town blamed sparks blown from a locomotive's steam engine for a fire that left seven dead.Footnote ⁷⁷ Viennese quipsters, Metternich noted, dubbed the train to Brno the “Mordbahn.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, reports of train accidents became commonplace in Austrian publications, especially after 1839. Many reported on domestic accidents by reprinting statements made by the Nordbahn's directorship or other railroad corporations. Newspapers, even those associated with the government, seemed eager to report on accidents. The Prager Zeitung, for example, even described an incident in which a passing train frightened a horse, which overturned a cart, injuring a curious onlooker.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Wanderer, as discussed below, dedicated a whole section of the almanac to railroad and steamship accidents. Der Humorist often included train accidents and other mishaps in its column about the railroads. One locomotive ran wild in England, provoking comparisons with a frightened horse. A broken axle on a train going from Aachen to Cologne resulted in passenger cars slipping off the rails and onto their sides. In England, again, two trains going at full speed crashed head-on, leaving the passengers “more or less dreadfully wounded, especially among the women.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Significantly, however, the Wanderer and Der Humorist only described train accidents that occurred abroad, although the former did cover natural disasters that occurred within the monarchy's borders.

Many reports of train accidents were, no doubt, designed to encourage a public hunger for such stories and hence to help sales. But the special character of these stories is revealing. A closer look at the Wanderer, and a section entitled “Reflections, Lessons, and Warnings by Examples,” offers valuable insight into how early liberals might have thought about these accidents. Claims of pedagogical value were simply a cover for a chapter that described, sometimes in gruesome detail, various catastrophes suffered around the known world the previous year. The section had been a part of the Wanderer since 1814. From that time until 1839, that year's introductory section boasted, the almanac had reported on 1,800 tragic events. That same volume divided the section into two parts. The first lavished the reader with various sorts of disasters caused by nature—floods, rockslides, avalanches, frostbite, fires, and wolf attacks. Lightning struck a church in Prussian Silesia, killing a 13-year-old girl there for her catechism. The fires that swept through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg actually melted the ice on the Neva River. A Danube flood left 50,000 inhabitants of Pest and the surrounding region homeless while “parents looked for their children, children their parents.”Footnote ⁸¹

The second section was subtitled “Accidents on Railroads and Steamboats—Explosions,” which by the late 1830s had replaced stories that emphasized “moral failings” such as robberies, court scandals, and suicides. Two men were run over by a night train in Virginia. In England, a train arriving at the Kenyon station crashed into a second, waiting train. The roof of the waiting car was blown off, killing a woman and her child while they stood in the station. Other trains jumped their tracks or caught fire when the steam engine blew.Footnote ⁸² Train and steamship accidents earned their own section of the chapter for good reason. They imparted different “lessons” than did natural disasters, which were described as various sorts of “misfortune” (Unglück) that occurred due to forces beyond human control. Natural disasters were humbling reminders of nature's continuing powers over man. As the mayor of fire-ravaged Hamburg declared, in an age in which human reason has begun to harness nature, such disasters reminded people of “the weakness of our strength and wisdom.”Footnote ⁸³ A train crash, however, was often described as an “accident” (Unfall)—and one that was the direct result of human action or inaction. People and corporations, not nature or God, were held accountable. Calls for firings and monetary compensation often followed. “As they say in America, ‘Victory or death’,” an article in the Wanderer declared, by which it meant that a company's existence depended upon increasing profits, regardless of the consequences. And so the number of railroad and steamboat accidents in the United States rose, the article continued, since safety was second to “how fast and how cheaply” the corporations could get people from one place to another.Footnote ⁸⁴

A look at the Austrian reports of one of Europe's most infamous train wrecks suggests another set of lessons—lessons that differ from those drawn in Western publications. On 8 May 1848, large crowds had taken the train from Paris to Versailles for a celebration of King Louis-Philippe's birthday. For the return trip, railroad officials decided to add a second locomotive to handle the added weight of the crowded cars. Before reaching Paris, the main axle on the lead locomotive broke and the two engines crashed, sparking an enormous fire that engulfed passenger cars near the front of the train. As was the custom, the carriage doors had been locked. More than fifty people were burned alive.Footnote ⁸⁵

The crash of the Versailles-Paris train caused a European-wide sensation, similar to that following the Lisbon earthquake nearly a century before. Austrian writers, like their counterparts in other parts of Europe, did not shy away from providing their readers with gory, horrific details of the tragedy. “It is difficult to imagine anything more horrible than hundreds of people [returning home] . . . locked in the carriages, seized by flames, burned alive or suffocated, or wretchedly mutilated,” the Wanderer's article on the accident began.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bohemia described how some people managed to escape their cars only to see lovers and family members burned alive. The feeling of being hopelessly trapped predominates: “One poor woman, who was in the fourth carriage, tried to save herself by going through an opening in the doors; she had her arms and head out and cried for help. A pair of young men rushed over and tried to pull her out; but her body could not fit through the opening. She lost hope, folded her hands . . . and sank into the flames.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Austrian publications diverged from their Western European counterparts, however, when it came time to make sense of the crash. In England, France, and some German states, the tragedy provoked a prolonged debate about the policy of locking carriage doors and the introduction of more safety measures. The debates were less about the value of the technology itself than about how to make it safer.Footnote ⁸⁸ The Illustrated London News, whose first number included a long, gruesome story about the Paris-Versailles accident, followed up with a story about changes that the Left Bank Railroad made to its operating procedures, which included leaving passenger doors unlocked. Less than a month later, it announced that the Great Western Railway Company, “in deference to the wishes of the public, and agreeably to the suggestions made a short time since Parliament,” had followed suit.Footnote ⁸⁹ As in France, the Nordbahn prohibited passengers from leaving the car in case of an accident or other “possible disturbances.” Instead, passengers were asked to remain as calm as possible and only exit after receiving permission from the conductor.Footnote ⁹⁰ In his guidebook to riding the Nordbahn, Johann Hofmann makes a special note of these last two regulations, emphasizing that they “will eliminate many instances of misfortune.”Footnote ⁹¹ Yet the Versailles crash provoked very little public discussion of the pros and cons of locking doors—as well as other safety measures—in Austria. Only Der Humorist broached the issue, albeit in indirect ways. One article reprinted, in full, a plea by a Belgium paper to no longer attach a second locomotive to overburdened trains.Footnote ⁹² A second, written before the changes describe by the Illustrated London News had taken effect, stated that in England, where the normal rate of speed is 29 kilometers per hour, only the Great Western Railway Company locked its doors. Various publications, the article concluded, were demanding that this last holdout end the policy.Footnote ⁹³ There was no discussion, however, of Austrian practices. Accidents may have been the product of human error, but in Austria the ability to prevent them lay largely outside the power of writers, publishers, and the general public.

But Austrian publications had many uses for train crashes that took place outside of Austria. The Wanderer and other publications, it should be remembered, wrote almost solely about train accidents that occurred abroad. Sensational depictions of accidents in the West were, no doubt, intended to increase sales. They allowed readers to enjoy a bit of Schadenfreude at the expense of the more technologically and industrial advanced countries of Europe. More importantly, looking westward provided a sometimes unnerving glimpse at the future. And whereas other European writers focused on specific safety measures to be implemented, Austrian writers spoke vaguely about the dangers of train travel, and, in particular, of excessive speed. The Wanderer quoted a passenger on the doomed Versailles-Paris train of 1842 who related: “Fast as an arrow the train flew forward; it was around 5:30. In a few minutes, fast as the wind . . . we passed Bellevue and Meudon, and found ourselves approaching a tall bridge” before he heard an explosion, and then saw flames.Footnote ⁹⁴ Pražské noviny suggested that the whole catastrophe could have been avoided if the trains had been moving at a “temperate speed.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, according to Austrian reports, many accidents occurred because engineers were either trying to remain on schedule or, worse, were flaunting speed limits. In England, the Wanderer reported, citizens took it upon themselves to sit on the banks of the Thames, looking for speeders. Other engineers failed to apply the brakes gradually when entering the station, discovering, too late, that they could not halt the train's momentum. In one case, the locomotive broke from the cars behind it, reaching 100 English miles per hour before being brought under control. In another, the engineer fell asleep. His train sped into the station, crashing into a second, waiting train, launching several passengers from their carriages.Footnote ⁹⁶ Before breaking the world speed record on England's Great Western Railway, Austria reported, the engineer made sure to have the company provide his wife and children with a generous pension should he perish during the attempt.Footnote ⁹⁷ Speed was magical, tempting, and dangerous.

This obsession with speed suggests a larger metaphor. Excessive speed resulted in disaster; temperate speed meant increased wealth, circulation, and the promotion of bürgerliche values. “The faster, the better” an enthusiast in Vienna tells Pinkerton at the beginning of the story. By the end of the story, the moral, both for the trains and modernization more generally, seems to be the opposite.Footnote ⁹⁸ Critiques of speed, in other words, provided a venue to express worries about the Habsburg monarchy's entry into the modern world. The railroad appeared to herald a new age characterized by haste and volatility.Footnote ⁹⁹ Modern life, an article in the Wanderer about accidents in the United States declared, was a “life full of sudden change, of good luck and bad luck . . . today one is rich, tomorrow poor again.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Train travel and train accidents also allowed Austrian readers to relate, on one level, with the processes of modernization that had begun to accelerate in the West. Yet these writers' direct experience with the full force of modernization was limited. A return to the Illustrated London News of 1842 is instructive. This was a year that saw several attempts on Queen Victoria's life, a disastrous military campaign into Afghanistan, prison reform, and—so it seemed to the privileged classes—widespread unrest and violence among the lower classes. The Reform Act of 1832 was still a major topic of discussion. Train accidents, both domestic and foreign, made up only a small portion of the frightening collage of disasters that filled the publication's pages. Unlike the Wanderer and the Humorist, the London Illustrated News placed train accidents alongside depictions of a whole range of less earth-shattering tragedies—shipwrecks, suicides, an explosion in a druggist's store, a coal wagon accident, and a prison stabbing.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For Ohéral, Saphir, and others, however, the experience with the train was one encounter with modernization that they shared firsthand with their counterparts in England. Yet for them, and unlike their English counterparts, train accidents were novelties that deserved special, detailed, and voluminous mention. Train accidents, like train travel itself, constituted an experience with the forces of modernization that, before 1838, had existed only far away, in the abstract. Train travel and train accidents allowed Austrian writers and readers to feel like they were sharing in a common, European moment of industrialization and progress. And in writing about railroads, they were also speaking about changes—not all of them praiseworthy—that were to come.

* * *

After 1843, stories of train and steamboat accidents disappeared from the Wanderer. Other publications like Der Humorist continued to report on train accidents through 1847. Still, there is a sense that by the mid-1840s a moment had passed. Prague had been connected with Vienna. Train travel, both within the monarchy and throughout Europe, had become more common and safer. Bystanders, now aware of the train's speed, no longer wandered onto the tracks. Passengers became more familiar with the basic safety tips urged upon them by the Nordbahn's directorship. Rather than relying on hires from abroad, the Norbahn began training their own engineers, and as time went on the training became more thorough and rigorous. Similarly, the training of signalers improved. By 1847, state authorities had installed telegraph lines along the rails from Vienna to Přerov, which allowed officials to send out warnings about stalled trains on the tracks and to prevent trains from overtaking each other. The telegraph also ensured that personnel in stations along the line had their clocks and watches set to the time established by the main station clock in Vienna, hence ensuring that departures and arrivals followed the same, exact schedule.Footnote ¹⁰²

There was, no doubt, another reason why train accidents disappeared from the pages of Wanderer pages in 1843. That year, when one in every three Brno textile workers was unemployed, a group of textile workers recently laid off in favor of cheaper laborers from the countryside attacked their replacements—the most spectacular labor uprising in the Bohemian lands until Prague's cotton printers and Silesian weavers rose up the following year.Footnote ¹⁰³ Individual acts of heroism, personal tragedies, and—most significantly—injuries and deaths caused by factory machines now dominated the Wanderer's section on “Reflections, Lessons, and Warnings by Examples.” By the mid-1840s, train travel and train accidents had lost their novelty. Cities like Brno had begun to experience the massive upheavals that industrialization would bring.

Austrian liberalism was a loose collection of similar political principles and calls for reform that, like the Czech national movement, has received deserved attention from historians of the Vormärz era. Yet we should not forget, as Pieter Judson writes, that nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism embraced certain “values and perceptions” that eventually became a dominant “cultural force” throughout the monarchy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Liberalism constituted a way of making sense of the modern world. Asking how Austrian liberals made sense of dramatic changes, such as the introduction of the railroads, shows how they copied, created, and wrestled with those values and perceptions. They looked to England, as one writer for Der Humorist wrote, as both “the cradle of fantastic [technological] innovations” and proof positive that railroad development would dramatically increase commerce, industrialization, and wealth—a development that required each European state to build railroads in order to keep pace.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Many Austrian liberals shared with German liberals the dream of destroying the distances between Central Europe's great cities, which would be to the advantage of Bürgertum and bürgerliche values about trade and the circulation of ideas. Czech nationalists imagined that the railroad would unite a nation through connections and circulation, even if some feared that railroad lines would allow Germandom to overwhelm a Slavic peasantry.

Yet not every vision that the railroad conjured proved comforting. The Wanderer and other Austrian publications, and the ways that they wrote about the railroad, also point to seemingly paradoxical attitudes toward technology, industrialization, and progress taking place among early liberals below the shroud of political repression and censorship. They often marveled, for example, at the train's incredible speed, as well as its ability to shrink travel times and reduce imagined distances between points. Yet many writers found the speeds disorientating. The most enthralling aspect of train travel—the experience of hurtling through space—was not only an inherently modern one. It whitened the knuckles. Flying was both exhilarating and unnatural. Humankind, not nature, became responsible for the horrible disasters like the train accident; yet there existed nagging worries that humankind was also unleashing forces that no one could control and that Austrians had entered an age of frightening uncertainties.

Austrian liberalism, as revealed through reports on train travel and train accidents, consisted of a faith in science, technology, industrialization, and progress that mixed with fears of the unknown that lay ahead. The reports also suggests ways in which Austrian liberals took part in a common European moment, even if they used Western words to make sense of that experience. When the first train arrived to Brno, Austrian liberals had not yet felt the full force of the changes wrought by industrialization and other early-nineteenth-century convulsions that had already begun to transform England. Still, Austrian liberals perceived the changes around them as radical, inspiring, and fearful. In this respect, another comparison with the German states deserves mention, where, as James J. Sheehan writes, early liberals “viewed social and economic development with a mixture of fear and confidence.” Further, Sheehan writes, the Vormärz era was one in which “familiar habits were shattered before new ones [had been] fully formed . . . [when] old and new patterns do not simply coexist, but blend and intertwine within institutions, ideologies, even in the minds of individuals.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The years leading up to 1848 constituted an era in which Central Europeans, and the Austrian liberals of Brno, Vienna, and Prague in particular, searched for words to describe radically new experiences. It was a time of uncertainty and jarring change in which new technologies, and those interpreting those technologies, transformed basic concepts of time, space, and movement as the monarchy rushed forward into the modern world. And, uncertain of the many changes to come, they looked westward, and to the future, with a mixture of hope and anxiety.