I cannot help wonder what things were like in Europe in the time just before World War One. Did people from different lands interact with each other as normally, travel to different places, talk to one another, and so forth, and the war hit like a shock? Or was everything tense among different peoples to begin with. Europe was called a tinderbox, but was it just among the governments or did it affect the common people too?

Most of the common people didn't have the financial resources to go travelling, they were busy earning a living back home. The majority didn't travel far from the place they were born, maybe a hundred miles but that was a long trip for most people.
Tourism was for the rich and some artists and a few others. Newspapers had correspondents who sent letters and sometimes telegrams. Travelling for business wasn't much of a thing back then since most of the business was local and the rest was done by telegrams and letters.
Becoming a sailor was more or less the only way for a working class boy to get out and see the world.
Most of the common folk didn't speak any foreign language either, didn't need it anyway. Understanding the lingo from two or three valleys over could be hard enough, much less a foreign language.
My father went to school for 6 years and then it was time to start working. Learning a foreign language wasn't even something they could dream of. Reading, writing, basic maths, some history and that was basically it.
Foreign lands was somthing exotic that they could read about in newspapers sometimes.
My uncle went to the US just in time for the depression in 1929, eventually he got sent home courtesy of the Swedish embassy. The cover story was that there was no "snus", wet tobacco powder put behind the lip in a little lump to suck on the tobacco juices (filty stuff), in the US so he had to come home ....

Tom - you might like to watch “Great Continental Railway Journeys” on YouTube, it was a superb series about pre-WW1 Europe in which the host (Michael Portillo) used Bradshaw’s Touring Guide book published in 1913 to cover most European countries, I think it was a series of 8 or 10 sixty-minute docos. As a sample here’s Dresden to Kiel – his standard introduction to each program sounds exactly like what you’re asking about…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu898CnyT1A

There are certainly different perspectives and answers to the OP's question...

One counter-point is offered by my maternal grandmother and her 7 sibs... Arrived in the USA from Hungary in 1906. G'ma, at age 6 in '06, came from the wonderfully diverse Austro-Hungarian Empire to Brooklyn, NY speaking 4 different languages (Magyar, Czech, German (Viennese...) and some Romanian...). Admittedly, her fam was "middle class" in a smallish town in the somewhat backward and parochial Kingdom of Hungary. France, Germany, Belgium, Austria all had established tourist / tourism businesses. Common folk in these countries did a fair amount of train travel (albeit mostly within one's country... crossing borders was not the EU of today.) All of central Europe - and specially so France, Germany, Belgium and Holland - had well-developed public education systems that took many citizens up through the equivalent of 12th grade US HS.

As one went further east towards Poland and Russia, and SE into the Balkans, states were poorer, less-educated, less traveled, more local-parochial in outlook and politics. Austria was more generally educated, Hungary and the Czech / Slovak populations much less so.

There are many perspectives and many clues to the convoluted answer... 2 books about WWI come to immediate mind for their interesting revelations and insights into this general topic: Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", and Yaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Schweik (Svejk)" - which tell the stories of private soldiers in the German and Austrian armies, respectively. Well worth the reads!

The period from 1900 - 1914 was a boom time for most of western Europe, standards of education and living were greatly improving, a time of sweeping modernizations and change. Over to the east was a vastly different story...

Oh, and thinking people in many countries were worried that a cataclysmic war lay somewhere in the not-distant future (owing to the growing Balkan turmoil and the growing sickness of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, among other things). Which is why my G'ma's fam moved to the USA. In 1906!

Cheers! Bob

I highly recommend The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman. A very good overview of Europe before the war from various perspectives.

What made me think of the topic was reading "The Vampire Chronicles", a collection of vampire-themed stories from the past 250 years. Many of the authors did a lot of travelling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-but presumably these people were not the norm.

Agreed. I would say vampires were (and are) exceedingly rare.

KL

This awesome book is a have to read how everything came together for Europe.
http://www.geertmak.nl/en/books/de-eeuw-van-mijn-vader-my-father-s-century/
From the tittle it says Dutch perspective, but is way more than that.
You learn how the developments are leading to what the 20th Century Society looked at when completed. Phenomenal!

From what I have understood so far, is that especially military tensions in Europe rose very quickly immediately prior to 1914. Before that life appears to have been relatively normal, apart from countries expanding their armies. Conscription was vastly expanded.
In contrast to what Robin said, Europeans on the mainland were not as isolated as Swedes were. Europe had a vast railway network before 1914 and 100 miles travel could easily get you into different countries. People from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg could reach each other easily.
But I agree that travel abroad seems to have been a thing of the educated or the better-of, not the commoners. Not that they could not, but they seem to have lacked the interest or motivation.
I could not read anything about vastly spread or deep rooted hostility or even hatred between people or even nations in the west at that time. However I am not schooled in anything related to the Balkans. Looking at the demography there, things might be quite different.
At any rated John Keegan's First World War taps into your question, showing that the political hand was far from always aware of what the military hand was doing, extending even between branches within the military.

Read Jack Beatty's The Forgotten History of 1914

There was a world of things going on in the years up to WW1 and plenty of crises to go around before the events of July and August.

Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August despite its age is still an excellent book on the world before the war and the events leading up to it.

Then there's always probably the best writer on all topics WW1, Hew Strachan.

All agree that the Grand Tour of Europewas the thing people did before 1914. It was the thing you did as a young person. Mark Twain managed it and left his uniquely American account in Innocents Abroad

But remember Bram Stoker never left the UK and yet created a very real portrait of Eastern Europe and a certain undead count.

You'd have a hard time doing better than Eric Hobsbaum's books on this era.

His "Age of Empire" covers the period you asked about, but I have his whole series and they are terrific.

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Empire-1875-1914-Eric-Hobsbawm/dp/0679721754

Tim this is an awesome series. I haven't competed the Dresden episode yet but is so interesting to me. I lived in Germany for 8 years after getting out of the Military. I left just after the reunification. I never got to Dresden. I would love to go there. I was back in Munich in Sept. 2017. A lot had changed in just 25 years.

Yes it is awesome Jeff & I was way off with the number – it was 31, here’s the full list…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Continental_Railway_Journeys

although maybe the OP would only be interested in Series 5 Ep 1 Not sure why this thread’s in this forum, surely more suited to the History Club forum (way down the list of Forums)?