Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

These more than 173,000 Upper Silesians in contemporary Poland are the living
artifacts of a historical region which had, for all practical purposes, ceased to exist in 1945.
Along with Poland’s second-largest minority – the nearly 153,000 Germans living mostly
in agricultural areas west of Katowice – these Upper Silesians serve as a stark reminder of
Poland’s tumultuous historical development towards ethnic homogeneity. Before 1945,
Upper Silesia had existed for centuries within Habsburg and Prussian Central Europe as a
distinct political unit and a powerful ordering force for regional identity. Its mixed-
language (and often bilingual) Catholic population largely avoided violent ethnic cleansings
in twentieth century conflicts by defining itself as nationally ambiguous or mutable. While
the development of this Upper Silesian identification has many historical layers, its most
recent expression in 2002 can be tied directly to the dynamics of postwar expulsions.
Germans across Central Europe whose homelands had been ceded to Poland,
Czechoslovakia, or other states in 1945 were brutally expelled into the reduced borders of
defeated Germany. But a vast swath of Upper Silesian society, composed mainly of
bilingual citizens of Polish ancestry – many of whom the Nazis had deemed loyal Germans
just a few years previously – were spared expulsion. These “autochthons,” as they became
known in postwar Poland, were forced to erase public (and often private) signs of their
Germanness to serve the Polish myth of having “reclaimed” ethnically Polish western
territories. 3 Then, in modern democratic Poland, often with no more than a trace of
language ability and with only stories quietly passed down through the generations to link
3 Grzegorz Strauchold, “Die ‘Wiedergewonnene Giebete’ und das ‘Piastische Schlesien’” in Marek Czapliński et al.,
Schlesische Erinnerungsorte: Gedächtnis und Identität einer mitteleuropäischen Region (Görlitz: Neisse Verlag, 2005),
306-322.
2