Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

a world defined not by their own subjectivity, but rather by the nationalists who saw them
as oddities unable to fit national divisions. These labels therefore privilege a nationalist
frame. Those that lived in these spaces had little consciousness of being hybrids or having
liminal identities. Upper Silesians made sense of their world not as an in-between space lost
between nations, but rather as a real, lived space defined for most by bilingualism, Catholic
practice, and economic hardship. It was this subjectivity which local citizens used to frame
their understanding of their communities, regions, states, and worlds, rather than any sense
of living hybrid or cosmopolitan lives.
Local and regional studies that address the agency of their subjects to construct their
own loyalties are best positioned to answer the fundamental, often overlooked, question of
how Poles and Germans came to be, and why some chose neither loyalty. The relative
success of these three possible outcomes in Oppeln/Opole, as defined by the interplay
between nationalist activists and local citizens, forms the basis of the work that follows.
Gathering evidence for this “interplay” of forces was not a transparent task. One recent
work on Hungarian-Romanian national relations in contemporary Cluj shows the benefits
of ethnography and personal interviews for a truly in-depth study of the salience of national
divisions in everyday life. 61 Such options were not feasible as the evidential basis for a
history which ends with World War II. Local citizens who were indifferent to the nation,
meanwhile, were unlikely to form clubs or otherwise leave behind historical records of their
apathy. This dissertation must thus rely to a significant degree on the records of nationalists
themselves. Rather than take their claims at face value, I attempt a careful reading of
nationalist activity against the grain, seeking out failures, contradictions, or disjunctions in
61 Rogers Brubaker, et. al., Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
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