Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

Silesia) by its dominant Catholic heritage and its large population of Polish speakers in the
modern era. At the same time, Upper Silesia is distinguished from other areas along the
contested Polish-German borderland, particularly Poznań/Posen, by its early modern status
as a Habsburg possession, rather than as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, by
its rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, and by its relative distance from
the main national battles between Poles and Germans. The last distinction is crucial, for in
much historiography Upper Silesia is treated as an appendage to the national strife in the
Posen/Poznań area. 14 The latter region contained a core of landed Polish nobles whose
forefathers had constituted the political gentry class of pre-partition Poland; and it was this
group in the nineteenth century who spearheaded the Polish nationalist movement which
Bismarck and his successors fought so bitterly. Upper Silesia entirely lacked this elite Polish
class. Its nobility, often with Polish-speaking ancestry, had long since adopted Prusso-
German culture and patriotic loyalties. Upper Silesia’s German and Polish speakers, unlike
in Posen/Poznań, also shared in common the Catholic faith, making it difficult for
nationalist activists to use religion as a marker of national difference.
The Oppeln/Opole area was thus doubly marginal: It existed on the territorial and
ethnic periphery of the Prusso-German state, but also on the periphery of the main national
battleground of Poznań/Posen. At the same time, Oppeln/Opole was also marginal within
Upper Silesia. Lacking the coal and mineral deposits of eastern Upper Silesia, Oppeln/Opole
did not experience the rapid industrialization of the Kattowitz/Katowice area in the late
14 See Martin Broszat, Zweihundert Jahre deutsche Polenpolitik (München: Ehrenwirth, 1963), William W. Hagen,
Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), Richard Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society and the Struggle for the Eastern Marches
in the German Empire, 1894-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), Lech Trzeciakowski, The
Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles:
The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).
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