Introduction Europe Materializing? Toward a Transnational History of European Infrastructures

Abstract

After a series of false starts, a ‘Museum of Europe’ recently opened in Brussels, albeit as a temporary exhibition marking fifty years since the Treaties of Rome. The museum, which is still seeking a permanent home, is dedicated to building a sense of common European identity through a narrative of European history.¹ Part of the museum’s proposed permanent exhibit is devoted to a series of active maps, the last of which, representing European history after 1945, is in a room fashioned to resemble a railway waiting room. Visitors can gaze up to a moving map, which, like the flipping departures board ‘in a large European railway station’, shows the ‘arrival’ of nations in Europe. ‘After the centuries of Unity through faith and the decades of Unity through the Enlightenment [represented in other maps], the Unity through the project evolves year for year, as shown by a digital counter.,² While this narrative of Europe’s history is at best questionable, the metaphor of the train for the project of Europe is by no means inept.³ If anything, it is too apt: while it is meant to support an optimistic story of steady modernization, the associations between Europe and material networks, particularly trains, are not so easily channelled. Observers in this waiting room might just as easily think of other trains, and darker sides of European history and modernity: the trains that never arrived, such as the pre-war Berlin–Baghdad Railway or many sections of the German-Dutch Betuwe line project, never stopped, leaving certain towns and places off the map of ‘European’ progress, or, like the trains in the brutal machinery of the Holocaust, never returned.