Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

officials and artisans in Oppeln/Opole sought to protect a small-town mentality, defending
their own classes at the expense of the growing peasant and industrial misery. The Church,
with its extensive network of charity organizations, proved best able to tackle the social
question in Upper Silesia. Upper Silesia became relegated to an economic backwater within
the German Reich, ensuring a steady stream of outmigration and a century of social
conflict over how best to ameliorate the misery of this borderland.
NATIONAL DIFFERENCE BEFORE NATIONALISM
When Poles marched in behind Soviet soldiers to claim nearly all of Silesia 1945, they
couched their presence there not as an occupation, but as a return to natural order.
According to Polish government propaganda, Silesia was returning to its historical roots as a
“Piast” land – one innately tied to the Polish ruling dynasty of the high Middle Ages.
Poland controlled these “reclaimed territories,” the state asserted, through historical right. 2
Reference to the past has served as one of the main rhetorical tools for nationalist activists,
not just in 1945, but throughout the era of nationalism. In order to better understand the
origins of Upper Silesian autonomy and identity, it is essential to reconstruct the region’s
history in dialogue with the nationalists who have represented it for their own ends. While
investigating the history of this region in a linguistic and cultural transition zone, it is also
important to reconstruct ethnic difference as it was understood and interpreted in the era
before mass nationalism – as opposed to its later interpretation by nationalists. While
Prussian officials enacted policies based on hierarchical understandings of the superiority of
2 Grzegorz Strauchold, “Die ‘Wiedergewonnene Giebete’ und das ‘Piastische Schlesien’” in Marek Czapliński et al.,
Schlesische Erinnerungsorte: Gedächtnis und Identität einer mitteleuropäischen Region (Görlitz: Neisse Verlag, 2005),
306-322.
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