Upper Silesia was a space of nationalist struggle between Germany and Poland from the end of World War I to the collapse of Communism. After a two-month, undeclared war in the region following the 1921 plebiscite, the League of Nations divided the region between Germany and Poland: the western part continued as Provinz Oberschlesien and the eastern part became Województwo Śląskie (Voivodeship Silesia). This partition had important repercussions for much of the twentieth century because neither the Polish nor the German side was willing to accept it until the Treaty of Warsaw (1970), which meant that both sides continued to make irredentist claims on the region throughout the early postwar period. From the interwar years to the Nazi invasion of Poland to the postwar period, Upper Silesians experienced aggressive and violent attempts by nationalists to secure their allegiance to either Germany or Poland. The most tumultuous years unfolded during and just after World War II. Whereas the Nazis declared that they were securing “reconquered territories (wiedergewonnene Länder)” that had been wrongfully taken from Germany, the Communist regime in Poland asserted that it was taking back for its nation “recovered territories (ziemie odzyskane).”

As Peter Polak-Springer demonstrates in his new book, the ethnic claims of both German and Polish nationalists denied the complexity of this region and of the people who lived there. Controlled by Prussia since 1740 and forming the southeastern frontier of the Kaiserreich, Upper Silesia had long been dominated by a German-speaking state, but most of its inhabitants understood both German and Polish and they tended to avoid thinking of themselves in the ethno-cultural categories of “German” or “Polish.” Indeed, some locals even seemed to express indifference to national identifications—to the frustration of nationalists on both sides of the border.

Yet, as Polak-Springer shows, the intransigence of locals to ethno-cultural nationalism was either ignored or used by both German and Polish activists in their struggle over Upper Silesia. Polak-Springer analyzes this struggle in five succinctly argued chapters that move from the interwar years to the early 1950s. A short epilogue broadly traces the region's history from the mid-1950s to the present. The first two main chapters situate the comparative project within an interwar “irredentist culture” (49) of nationalistic struggle that involved Polish and German nationalists using a wide range of strategies and media to advance their cause of expansion to the west and east, respectively. For example, in 1927 the Provinz government promoted a half-hour-long silent film, The Land Under the Cross: A Film of Upper Silesia's Difficult Times, which depicted Upper Silesia as a region that had suffered at the hands of the Poles and international diplomats. When news of this film crossed the border, the Polish regional government supported the making of a film of its own, Silesia, Poland's Pupil, which celebrated the “eternal ‘Polish character’” (70) of Upper Silesia. Both German and Polish activists sought to utilize local Silesian traditions to advance their respective nationalistic agendas.

The last chapter on the interwar years explores similar attempts by both the Nazi and the so-called Sanacja regimes to assert the cultural superiority of “Germanness” and “Polishness” over each other (“Sanacja” is the name commonly given to the Polish reigime formed in 1926 after Józef Piłsudski's coup d’état). This nationalist struggle to homogenize the cultural landscape of Upper Silesia at the expense of the other's culture “marked an early and ‘soft’ form of the politics of ethnic cleansing that would be imposed on the borderlands in full force during 1939–50” (90). The violence of those years forms the focus of the book's final two chapters, which offer rich details related to Upper Silesia. Yet, most of the material presented and the interpretations offered will likely be familiar to students of Central Europe—especially in the chapter on Nazism, where Polak-Springer reconstructs the imperialist and nationalistic discourse of the Nazis while paying close attention to the limits and shifts of Nazi policies on the ground. The author's arguments about the Communist period are more original. While a substantial Polish literature now exists on the nationalization of Communism, Polak-Springer adds an important dimension to our understanding of early postwar Poland by illuminating the “culturally racist demonization of niemczyzna [Germandom]” (223) that informed the worldview of the Communist leadership. In June 1945, the Polish Western League (Polski Związek Zachodni, or PZZ) sought “to construct and maintain the hatred of the Polish nation toward niemczyzna” (205).

While Polak-Springer shows the entangled histories of German and Polish nationalism and emphasizes the importance of national indifference in Upper Silesia, his most significant contribution lies in the continuities he draws from the 1920s to the early 1950s. To many readers, the German continuities will likely be less striking than they will be for the Polish case, but here again, Polak-Springer's argument deserves careful attention. In his interwar chapters, he provides a rich analysis of the nationalistic ideology of Silesia's governor, Michał Grażynski, who established “a militant, nationalist, and authoritarian borderland regime” (41) that stigmatized Germans and Jews. Grażynski worked with the Western Territories Defense League, an organization founded in 1921 that changed its name in 1934 to the PZZ, and continued to exist until 1970 as the Society for the Development of Western Territories. Polak-Springer compellingly shows that the nationalization of Communism had deep roots in Polish history.

In doing so, he has written a fine book based on extensive research in German and Polish archives. If his contributions to understanding nationalism have been stressed here, that is because the subsidiary argument about national indifference on the part of the local population is less richly developed than is the argument about the nationalistic discourses and policies of the region's political elite. To be sure, Polak-Springer discusses national indifference occasionally throughout the book and includes interesting examples that illustrate what he broadly characterizes as national indifference. One such example occurred in 1931, when the German Communist Party organized an event in opposition to what the Rote Fahne (Red Flag) called “the Polish-German nationalist hype over Upper Silesia” (80). Yet, the bulk of the evidence he presents points in the other direction, namely, to fervent nationalistic struggles over the region between Poles and Germans, and it is for this compelling argument that his book should be read by historians of Central Europe.