Brendan Karch's imaginative book conjures up German speakers resistant to being “German.” Paul Brykczynski's admirable work highlights Poles who so strenuously rejected Jewish fellow citizens’ efforts to share in the country's fate that they abetted and applauded the 1922 murder of independent Poland's first elected president, killed by an upper-class, ultranationalist artist-antisemite.

Karch's study of Upper Silesia, an area inhabited by one of Europe's largest bilingual populations, advances the cutting-edge debate over the concept of national indifference ignited in recent years by Habsburg historians—notably, Jeremy King, Tara Zahra, Pieter Judson, and Jakub Beneš (for useful orientation, see Maarten van Ginderachter et al., National Indifferentism and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe [2019]). Of pre-modern Upper Silesians, who lived under Austrian and Prussian rulers from the late Middle Ages, Karch says they “were not pre-divided into pre-nations,” as essentialist modern nationalism holds. “They existed in local communities defined by bilingualism, shared religious practice, and a social mixing so natural that it was barely considered mixing at all. Rather than being awakened, Polish and German loyalties had to be constructed” (11). Following the influential historical sociologist Rogers Brubaker, Karch aims to “examine nationalism as an always unfinished mode of categorization rather than as the formation of [fully realized – WH] group identities” (14).

Karch's social-constructivist approach challenges the concept of national indifference because, Karch argues, it “explains a condition rather than a process”—a negative state of “not doing and not believing.” Instead, he seeks out Upper Silesians’ loyalties, whether “earned or lost,” and whether—following Max Weber's distinctions—“value driven” (wertrational) or “instrumental” (zweckrational) (16–18, 302ff).

The ideologically committed nationalists who sought from the late nineteenth century to imbue Upper Silesian Catholics with the metropolitan (Varsovian, Cracovian, Poznanian) intelligentsia's vision of recovered statehood for an imagined Polish nation were value driven. Their followers in Upper Silesia, always a small minority, lived in a self-enclosed nationalist subculture, from which they ventured forth to convince speakers of the local, demotic Polish, often bilingual in German, to enter their metaphysical-ideological fold. One pioneer nationalist complained of “the many irrational people who regard a Pole and a German as hardly different from each other” (66). The vast majority of people were hard to budge from their primary commitment to Catholicism, served by non-nationalist clergy and revivified by pilgrimage, temperance movements, and resistance to the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Bismarck's Germany. The laity were embedded in German institutions, especially German-language schools and the army. Social mobility through mastery of High German and employment in German settings lent their offspring prestige and modest well-being, which did not rule out a home life conducted in their accustomed Slavic tongue (today recognized by the European Union as a separate regional language, schlonsak).

These ordinary Upper Silesians guided their political loyalties by instrumental rationality—by calculation of benefits and advantages gained under imperial German rule or, following Upper Silesia's 1921 partition, as citizens of resurrected Poland or Weimar Germany. (Karch concentrates his analysis on those Slavic speakers who lived under German rule.) Upper Silesians maintained loyalty to Berlin until 1918, despite the rise in their midst of Polish nationalist politicians and press. In the 1921 plebiscite, they voted—by a controversially small margin—for continued German citizenship. Karch shows that in putting clashing nationalisms to a democratic vote by both men and women, propagandists on both sides emphasized not the moral imperatives of ethnic identity but the practical advantages of German or Polish citizenship, such as social benefits, economic prospects, and civil and military security (99, 137ff). Nationalism's endpoint, the unified organic nation-state, proved under democracy to be an ever-retreating mirage, before which the population disaggregated into a congeries of subcultures.

Because Weimar eventually devised, in its part of Upper Silesia, locally administered structures of bilingual, bicultural life that Slavic-speakers found acceptable, Polish nationalism languished there. Nazi racialization of the imagined German Volk sparked analogous impulses among hardline Polish nationalists. Disappointed in Upper Silesians’ bowing to life under Weimar liberalism and Hitlerian authoritarianism alike—which Polish nationalists imputed to a widespread inferiority complex vis-á-vis Germans—they now insisted that Polish ethnicity as they defined it was every Slavic-speaking individual's ineluctable destiny (6, 178, 233, 264–66). The result was a downward spiraling “feedback loop, in which value-driven national radicalism and instrumentally driven national skepticism [among ordinary Upper Silesians] reinforced each other” (21).

An interesting chapter traces the paradoxical freedom of Upper Silesian Jews from persecution from 1933 until the expiry in 1937 of the League of Nations provisions protecting them. As for Hitler's Silesian Catholic Slavic-speaking subjects, most escaped classification as internal enemies and played the pragmatic role of “good Germans” and trusted soldiers to war's end. Likewise, after Germany annexed Polish Upper Silesia, Nazi authorities placed most Slavic speakers into safe categories of the infamous Volksliste (248ff). After communist Poland absorbed the whole of Silesia, these instrumentally loyal Nazi subjects, labeled “autochthons,” found themselves forced into loyalty to the new Poland, or they fled—by the hundreds of thousands—to the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, there to be rapidly assimilated as Germans “from the East.”

In 1945, the communist strongman Aleksandr Zawadzki publicly denounced “the notion, which fatally and harmfully reflected itself in the psyche of Silesia, that when Poland arrives, Silesians are Poles, and when the Germans arrive, they are Germans” (283). Communists from the Polish heartland flooded into Upper Silesia to extirpate all traces of the German presence. Anti-communist Slavic speakers found themselves governed as a suspect, formerly colonized people. Arrogant communist Polonization policies drove Upper Silesians into wounded silence or exile. “Polish nationalism devoured its native-born”—if wayward—“children” (286).

Beyond massive postwar expulsions of those labeled German, heavy out-migration of disillusioned Upper Silesians to West Germany occurred after 1956 and again after 1989. Yet, still today, several hundred thousand Upper Silesians proclaim themselves officially to be Poland's largest minority group, the Ślązacy. Still more embrace this as a secondary identity alongside Polishness, while the current integral-nationalist government scorns both groups as self-denying Poles and would-be Berlin-Republic Germans. In the end, Upper Silesian separatism from metropolitan Poland and embrace of a history enfolded within Germany survive with surprising vigor.

Karch's book should inspire historians of Germany to look again to the German-French, German-Danish, and German-Slavic borderlands for analogous instances of resistance to centralizing, monolingual nationalism. If German historiography has not yet found questions of national indifference a challenge, it may be because the salience of regional identities and religiously permeated subcultures is so well recognized.

Yet Karch leaves Upper Silesia's stories only half-told. How did the bilingual common people, for centuries mostly ill-used subject villagers under magnate lords, lead their daily lives and understand themselves, both subjectively and emotionally? In historiography, if not in prose fiction and art, this question calls for answers. Karch highlights those targeted for “awakening” by Polish nationalists, while those who were drawn toward Deutschtum remain largely offstage. The everyday dynamics of this multicultural island call for social-psychological and cultural—not only political—illumination.

* * *

Paul Brykczynski demonstrates the axial significance of the 1922 murder of newly elected Polish president Gabriel Narutowicz by a follower of the National Democrats (Endeks), the country's powerful right-wing, nationalist, obsessively antisemitic movement. Historians of Germany will be struck by parallels to Weimar's fateful political murders, especially that of the German-Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau and of Adolf Hitler's trial following the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch (cf. Martin Sabrow, Der Rathenaumord. Rekonstruktion einer Verschwörung gegen die Republik der Weimar, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 69 [1994]).

Narutowicz's election in the Polish parliament eclipsed the widely anticipated ascendance of the preceding, interim head of state, the charismatic Marshal Józef Piłsudski, advocate of an (ambiguously defined) multinational, if Polish-dominated, center-left political system. Narutowicz, supportive of the marshal (who miscalculatedly had declined the presidency), prevailed over strenous Endek opposition with votes reinforcing the Pilsudskiite camp from the party of national minorities, including Ukrainian, Belarusian, German, and—red flag to antisemites—Jewish deputies too. To the right, this was a flagrant and shameful violation of its sacred “Doctrine of the Polish Majority,” which demanded that all significant parliamentary acts be passed without participation of deputies deemed by Endeks as non-Polish—above all, the Jewish deputies.

Violent antisemitic riots in the streets of Warsaw followed Narutowicz's election, peaking in the new presidentâs murder by reputable painter Eligiusz Niewiadomski. On trial, he declared his original intent to kill Piłsudski, whom he charged with fathering a “Judeo-Poland” (129). Niewiadomski's defense tellingly revealed the shock caused by postwar realities. Instead of the New—polonophone—Jerusalem imagined by the partition era's passionate nationalists, there was wartime destruction, bloody fighting with Soviet Russia, widespread impoverishment and corresponding crime and disorder, struggle to build a competent and uncorrupt officialdom, enmity between Polish political parties, and seemingly malevolent minorities comprising a third of the population.

Brykczynski enlists the theoretician of fascism Roger Griffin in interpreting the Endek camp's aggressive assault on the burgeoning Piłsudskiite state. At fascism's “‘mythic core’ lies a ‘palingenetic populist ultranationalism.’” The nation must battle with “the forces of degeneration,” victory rewarding it with “a new age of national regeneration and glory” (13). Historians of Germany have long accepted such an approach to Hitlerism. In Brykczynski's analysis, Endek “good Poles” faced Jews, who were frequently diabolized, and their non-Jewish “stooges” (157). But he errs, I think, in concluding that Endeks could offer the country nothing beyond antisemitic paranoia. This was the emotional-psychological oil in the machinery of a powerful engine of Polish Christian middle-class formation, at the Jews’ expense and with maximum exertion of state patronage, in the private business sector, higher education, and civil and military staffing alike. Of course, such political and economic antisemitism flowed from deeper cultural and social springs.

Exploring the debates following the assassination, Brykczynski discovers a stunning retreat on the center-left, even though the Narutowicz affair seemed initially, even to those on the right, to discredit the president's opponents and the country itself in foreign eyes. But soon the mighty Endek press recognized that the general population tolerated the murder and briskly refashioned its perpetrator as a national martyr. Narutowicz's defenders could never bring themselves to condemn his assassination as an antisemitic act—the killer having taken him to be a Jewish tool—nor to associate Jews with the deed. It was a case of gingerly confronting antisemitism's workings without plainly recognizing its presence. Henceforth, the Piłsudskiites tacitly acquiesced in the Polish majority dogma, “effectively allowing the National Democratic brand of nationalist and antisemitic discourse to become the dominant, if not yet hegemonic, mode of speaking publicly about the nation” (152). Brykczynski recalls William Sewell's theorization of social structures and the noncontingent events that constitute historical breaking points and structural new beginnings (Theory and Society, 25:6, 1994). Brykczynski's analysis “aptly illustrates the power of violent action to transform discursive structures” (163).

Brykczynski's understanding of the Jewish role in Polish politics is colored by his determination to relativize what he takes as a common view of Polish society as deeply antisemitic (169n30). His study aims to advance an “‘eventful history’ of antisemitism in interwar Poland” and to conceive antisemitism generally as “a dynamic political phenomenon rather than a static ideology or primordial sentiment” (11). Yet he also dismisses Jewish grievances over antisemitic violence after 1918, while branding the Zionists’ and most other Polish Jews’ understandable embrace of the Paris Peace Conference's Minority Protection Treaty imposed on Poland as “foolish” and “needlessly provocative and offensive to the sensibilities of all Poles, including the left” (137, 147). As was true among most non-Jewish Poles at the time, and Polish historians since then, the great extent of anti-Jewish violence, not so murderous as destructive and demoralizing, which erupted in the Polish heartland in 1918 and continued sporadically through the 1920 Polish-Soviet war, has never been frankly recognized. Such hints and inklings of it as were sensed have, instead, been firmly repressed in memory. But recent scholarship renders this averted gaze unsustainable.