Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

Zahra has pointed out, the unifying factor in conceptions of national indifference is
actually the presence of nationalism; without efforts to create national bodies there could be
no response of indifference. 37 While indifference is thus fundamentally a reactive, negative
category, the alternative regional, local, familial, religious, ideological, or class loyalties
which could usurp nationalism’s role serve as positive identifiers. They can tell us, in short,
what someone “was” as powerfully as national indifference tells us what they were “not.”
How do these historiographical trends bear on Upper Silesia? The region has been
described as the home of “perhaps the most famously indifferent population in twentieth-
century Central Europe.” 38 Groupist understandings of national identity have proved
particularly ill-suited to describing the complexity of national relations in Upper Silesia. As
late as World War II it made little sense to speak of Germans and Poles as two stable
collectivities in the region – although German and Polish nationalists did so anyway. These
activists’ belief in ethnicism remained remarkably undisturbed by the cool reaction of most
Upper Silesian citizens to their projects, and by the regular signs of national “switching” or
assimilation. The gap between activists and the broader population only grew with the
radicalization of nationalist politics in the decades after World War I.
If Upper Silesians avoided defining themselves as Germans or Poles, then what did they
feel themselves to be? One compelling answer is “Catholic.” The imagined community of
Upper Silesian Catholicism has been explored in detail as an alternate marker of loyalty in
the region and a buffer against nationalization, from the 1890s through at least the 1930s.
The strength of Catholic practice in structuring social bonds and the moral world of Upper
37 Ibid., 105.
38 Ibid., 99.
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