Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

decades. For the period from 1848-1890, political and social conflict in Oppeln/Opole and
its surrounding county was waged mainly on non-national terms. The roughly 100,000
people inhabiting this space spoke different languages, with a local Polish dialect
dominating in the countryside, and German the everyday tongue of Oppeln/Opole. 1 Yet
the impulse to define politics or power struggles as a battle between Poles and Germans
before 1890 was as foreign to most locals as the automobile. Nationalist activists and
historians subsequently created a vision of two stable, nationally divided societies, but these
did not yet exist in the region. The present understanding of the terms German and Pole,
to signify both national belonging and civic membership in ethnically defined nation-
states, was largely incomprehensible to a trader, artisan, or factory worker of the time.
The history of Oppeln/Opole before the arrival of mass nationalism, however, is not a
blank slate. Economic life, regional self-identification, and political loyalties underwent
significant changes, which would establish the fault lines in Upper Silesian society for nearly
a century. Increased literacy, political participation, and industrialization challenged
traditional hierarchies of village life and brought locals into greater contact with fellow
Upper Silesians. Yet these changes were accompanied not by the division of society into
two national groups, but rather by the opposite process: the consolidation of a regional
unity based on ethnic and linguistic diversity. The creation of an Upper Silesian regional
patriotism was tied not to nationalism, but to another, very real and socially relevant
marker of local community: religion. With the exception of civil servants and eighteenth-
century settlers, almost the entire local population was practicing Catholic. The strength of
1 The population of the Oppeln/Opole city and county grew from 103,367 in 1876 to138,023 in 1900. Józef Madeja,
et. al., Powiat opolski: Szkice monograficzne (Opole: Wydawnictwa Instytutu Śląskiego, 1969), 16. Wochenblatt für
Stadt und Land, 16 February 1876. APO, SPO, Syg. 219.
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