Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

succeeded in eliminating Polish from church sermons and in using selective terror to push
wide-scale linguistic Germanization in public spaces. Nazis briefly savored national victory
through brutal racial policies, but World War II then brought a reversal of their superficial
successes. Polish language use spiked around Oppeln/Opole after 1939, spurred by the large
numbers of Polish wartime laborers working on local farms. Fears of racial fraternization
and the reversal of decades of assimilatory work spread among regional officials, but the
Nazi war machine prioritized the need for Upper Silesian crops and soldiers over a
clampdown on Polish usage. Upper Silesia thus ended its era of German rule under the
myth of German ethnic homogeneity, when the reality looked markedly different.
Just a few years later, the province would exist under another false myth, one of Polish
ethnic homogeneity. In the epilogue, the dual processes of national verification and
repression of native Upper Silesians by the new Polish government are explored as a
continuation of the Nazi logic of racial homogeneity. The Polish regional government,
while arguably more thorough in its efforts to erase German culture than the Nazis had been
in erasing Polish culture, still could not eliminate everyday practices of German language
use among the bilingual population. It was precisely this repression and feelings of
marginalization within the Polish nation-state which led local bilingual citizens to sustain
an underground minority loyalty across generations. While those who had lived in interwar
Poland primarily came to see themselves as Upper Silesians, locals in villages around
postwar Opole/Oppeln declared themselves a German minority. Thus did history come full
circle, and through this modern saga, generations of Upper Silesians revealed the very
instability of the national categories which sought to divide them.
34