Most contemporary human beings have adopted as a given Benedict Anderson's lament that “everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender” (Imagined Communities 1983/1991, 5). As early as 1882, Ernst Renan contested Europe's prevailing nationalist psychosis with his plea: “human history is essentially different from zoology, and race is not everything” (Homi Bhabba, ed., Nation and Narration [1990], 15). Individuals were not organically predetermined to adhere to some blood-based national body; the nation was a national plebiscite. When in doubt, international policymakers should consult the local population (ibid., 20). Amid post-Versailles border shifts and national upheavals in 1921, this advice was taken literally in a German-Polish borderland called Upper Silesia: continental Europe's second-largest industrial area and home to a multilingual, largely Catholic population whose identity remained stubbornly opposed to national categorization. After extensive international press attention and political disputation during the plebiscite, Upper Silesia's national question became a leading grievance that fueled the outbreak of war in 1939; thereafter, sweeping forces and then economic migrations radically decreased the proportion of those who, either as German or nationally heterogeneous, did not identify as nationally Polish.
Considerable scholarship since 1989 has sought to transcend national partisanship when assessing nationality in Upper Silesia from the 1921 plebiscite through the interwar, Nazi, and Cold War eras. Highlights have included collections edited by Kai Struve and Philipp Ther, Die Grenzen der Nationen (2002), and Struve, Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (2003), as well as research by Polish scholars including Tomasz Kamusella, Bernard Linek, and Grzegorz Strauchold; German scholars including Struve, Ther, Günther Doose, Waldemar Grosch, and Juliane Haubold-Stolle; and English-language scholars including Richard Blanke, James Bjork, Brendan Karch, Anna Novikov, Allison Rodriguez, Hugo Service, Peter Polak-Springer, Terry Hunt Tooley, and Tim Wilson. This edited English-language collection presents a culmination of recent scholarship, wherein the chief protagonists are locals resisting the siren calls of nationalists who, in ever more violent circumstances, sought to claim their economically- and geopolitically-strategic homeland for the homogenizing nation-state.
The theoretical lynchpin of recent research is “national indifference,” defined by Pieter Judson as a multivalent sense of nationality, in which individuals negotiate nationalizing pressures to their advantage (xv). As Kamusella notes in his survey of recent scholarship, Catholicism and multilingualism sustained Upper Silesian national indifference alongside emerging German and Polish points of reference, even though after 1918 “no other groups but nations alone were seen as having a legitimate right to statehood” (8). Looking to the 1921 plebiscite itself, Bjork illustrates how bilingual populations, hardly peripheral or repressed as Anderson contended, can maneuver between languages and dialects to navigate political quandaries. While the local dialect reigned at home, German predominated in schools and administration and Catholic sermons proceeded in both languages. Proving that choice of nationality was to be driven more by “the relative emotive qualities of each language” than “proficiency” (112), plebiscite propagandists regularly tried to attract national compatriots in the language of the opposing nationality. As Rodriguez shows, propaganda on each side sold its respective nation with gendered images of virile men and women-as-mothers. Resulting violence, Wilson records, was especially fierce in the so-called Third Uprising following the plebiscite, leaving about three thousand fatalities. Perhaps such trauma stiffened nationalization which, by the interwar period, was enacted through commemorative space and ritual. As Struve highlights, memory of the bloody Third Uprising served mythologies about a heroic national story and right to the land. As Polak-Springer concurs, continuous German praise for Freikorps heroism increased after 1933 to the point that the Nazis completed a fascist monument in 1938, which was then dynamited after 1945 as Polish Communists restored prewar emphasis of the battle site's place in Polish history.
Interwar migration toward high languages in each half of the partitioned province paralleled ongoing national indifference. German-speaking parents resisted sending their children to Polish-language minority schools in western Upper Silesia, Bjork observes, while German-language minority schools in eastern Upper Silesia proved popular. By 1931, persistent bilingualism nonetheless accompanied a sense among priests that, because their flocks could understand both languages, they could preach in the language sponsored by their respective state. In keeping with Bjork, Karch demonstrates that in German Upper Silesia students and parents shunned Polish nationalism and language. Furious at their election defeats, Polish nationalists blamed Polish-speakers, even clergy, for failing to identify with the Polish nation, a trend that intensified with “treason” when Upper Silesians who had voted Polish in 1921 voted Nazi or Communist in 1932 (163). In Polish Upper Silesia's German-minority schools, meanwhile, Novikov observes that German-language instruction about ancient Polish territorial claims and national heroics failed to overwrite students’ national indifference, prompting Polish efforts to classify levels of national belonging that in some ways anticipated the population lists soon to be prepared by Nazi and then Polish Communist authorities.
Continuities abounded through the Nazi-German and Polish-Communist eras. As Polak-Springer reveals, romantic Nazi wartime propaganda, often by the very same nationalist scholars perpetuated preceding claims that 1921 failed to achieve national self-determination (170–71). To cleanse away perceived Polish stains, former Polish research and cultural institutes were retooled for Germanizing campaigns, teachers promoted high German, and most Upper Silesians were classified as category 3—redeemable for the German nation—which ironically implied that “the system succeeded in grasping a remarkably realistic picture of the ‘nationally indifferent’ character of collective identity in the region” (177). As under Nazi rule, Service illustrates, postwar Polish campaigns for ethnic homogeneity were less complete in the industrial region, where Nazi population lists were inverted and applied so that some of the skilled workforce was retained and subjected to Polonization–a nationalizing process that again reinforced non-national identities.
Benefitting from deep research, essays in this collection introduce students and researchers alike to stakes surrounding national indifference in a key borderland. In conversation with each other, they will hopefully encourage continued scholarly discussion that transcends nationally partisan polemics and facilitates historical understanding about how human beings have adopted identities that transcend national categories.
