Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government during World War II

course in the country as a whole” (108). Events such as Jireš’s altercation derived their drama precisely from the fact that they were not everyday occurrences, argues Jeschke (113). But the exceptionality of Jireš’s case could be profitably underscored from another angle as well. Schoolteachers such as Jireš were a distinct and perhaps even somewhat isolated group in interwar Czechoslovakia, argues Tara Zahra, on account of their national zeal which far surpassed that of the rest of the state’s contemporaneous, “nationally indifferent” population (Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 [Ithaca, 2008], 52–54). Jeschke simultaneously reconstructs the First Czechoslovak Republic’s railways as a social and material world. Newspaper articles detailing conflict on trains and travel accounts penned by passengers are analyzed alongside the bricks and mortar of station buildings, signposts and the politics of the languages they were written in, tunnels and other feats of infrastructural engineering, and the trains themselves—from the ergonomics of their seating to the technical specifics of their horsepower. By repeatedly bringing the railway’s material culture and the legislation and practices associated with it into conversation, Jeschke shows how deeply one influenced the other. Ideology and engineering combined to create Czechoslovakia’s interwar railway network. Jeschke duly understands the railway as so much more than the sum of its rails and rolling stock. It might seem strange to write a history of the railways just as the attention of Europe’s politicians, scientists, and business elites turned to the roads and the skies, but relationships between old and new technologies are not zero-sum: Czechoslovakia’s railways indeed entered a dynamic new phase of motorization and development in a bid to see off precisely the threats posed by the motor age (171). Showcasing the adaptation of an already widely diffused technology, and highlighting the role played by its mass usership in its resignification, Jeschke moves against the direction of travel of earlier histories, bringing his reader along for a most thought-provoking and entertaining ride.