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Surname/Family Name : Ticher Given Name/s : Michael Peter Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : MRes Faculty : Arts and Social Sciences School : Humanities and Languages Thesis Title : Borderline Germans: the Jews of Upper Silesia, 1914-1923

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The thesis investigates the history of the Jewish communities in the industrial towns of the former German province of Upper Silesia in the years during and immediately after the First World War. It examines their responses to questions of national identity thrown up by the war, the plebiscite of March 1921 to decide whether Upper Silesia should belong to Germany or Poland, the partition of the province, the rise of Zionism and outbreaks of violent antisemitism among both German and Polish nationalists. Using sources only recently made available in digital format, such as personal memoirs and local newspapers, it paints a picture of the communities before 1914, outlining their main political, economic, religious and social characteristics. It then shows how their worldview was challenged by the turbulent events of the following decade. The study argues that the position of the Upper Silesian Jews on the border with Poland fostered an extreme version of the situation facing the majority of Jews in the rest of Germany in the Weimar years. They shared with non-Jewish Germans a strong belief in the superiority of German civilisation in comparison with “the east”, which was intensified by their conscious rejection of the values and practices of Jews living in very different circumstances on the eastern side of the border. The eruption of violent antisemitism in the early 1920s, given a sharper edge in Upper Silesia as a result of armed conflict during the plebiscite campaign, threw their assumptions about the essential nature of German culture into question. The study shows that at the height of the crisis in 1923, the political challenge to the mainstream community leaders posed by the emerging force of Zionism developed into a bitter struggle within the Upper Silesian community, primarily over attitudes towards the eastern Jews.

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Borderline Germans The Jews of Upper Silesia, 1914-1923

Michael Ticher

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Masters by Research

School of Humanities and Languages

Arts and Social Sciences

June 2019

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Many people have helped in large or small ways with this project. I would like to thank above all my supervisors, Jan Lánicek and Ruth Balint, who were unfailingly patient and helpful throughout the process.

I owe a huge debt to the staff at many archives – particularly those mentioned below in the Note on Sources – who have opened up new research possibilities by their largely anonymous work in making often obscure material available online. Staff at Heidelberg’s Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Central Archive for Research into the History of the Jews in Germany) and at the Wiener Library in London went out of their way to provide helpful advice in person.

Peter Fraenkel, Ernest Kochmann and Arturo Porzecanski generously shared information about their relatives. The Association of Jewish Refugees in London helped put me in touch with many members of the diaspora in the UK who provided links back to Upper Silesia. Svetlana Stankovic kindly cast a native speaker’s eye on some translations, though of course any errors that remain are mine.

My successive bosses, Emily Wilson and Lenore Taylor, generously gave me time off for a project with no conceivable bearing on my work for them.

I am indebted to the University of New South Wales for the approval of a higher degree research grant, which allowed me to extend my research to German archives.

I am extremely grateful to my immediate family, Therese, Brendan and Frances, who were constantly forgiving of the amount of time I spent on this work. I would also like to acknowledge the members of my family from more distant generations, who left Upper Silesia in the nineteenth century only to be returned, in some cases, in the worst possible circumstances in the twentieth.

Finally I would like to mention one organisation not referred to in the sources, but which provided important background material and inspiration. The Verband Ehemaliger Breslauer und Schlesier (Association of Former Residents of Breslau and Silesia) in Israel produced a remarkable newsletter from 1961 until 2011, when the remaining members became too few to sustain publication. Its last editor, Mordechai Hauschner, wrote in the final issue of his hope that historians would continue to study the Jews of Silesia and “bring what was previously unknown to public light”. I hope this study does so, in however small a way. i Contents Abbreviations iii List of illustrations iv Note on translations and place names iv Note on sources iv Chapter outline vi

1 Introduction 1.1 A corner of the empire 1 1.2 Upper Silesia’s geographic, linguistic and ethnic background 5 1.3 Jews as Germans 8 1.4 Germany and ‘the east’ 11 1.5 German Jews and ‘the east’ 14 1.6 Upper Silesia and ‘national indifference’ 18

2 The Jewish communities before 1914 2.1 Population, language and economic status 22 2.2 Liberalism and its limits 27 2.3 Interfaith harmony and its limits 31 2.4 Antisemitism 37 2.5 ‘German cultural superiority’ 39 2.6 Zionism and national identification 43 2.7 The Ostjuden 46 2.8 Summary 51

3 War, defeat, plebiscite: 1914-1921 3.1 The outbreak of war: Jewish optimism 52 3.2 The growth of antisemitism and Zionism 55 3.3 Korfanty and the Polish claim to Upper Silesia 58 3.4 The Freikorps and German antisemitism 62 3.5 The Jews in the plebiscite campaign 67

4 Partition and division: 1921-23 4.1 Descent into disorder 80 4.2 Partition, emigration 83 4.3 ‘Out with the Polish Jews’: antisemitic riots in Katowice 87 4.4 ‘Pogroms’ in Beuthen 93 4.5 Liberals and Zionists at war 99 4.6 Zionism and the Ostjuden 104

5 Conclusions 111

Bibliography 115

Abbreviations Newspapers AZJ Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (liberal Jewish, published in Berlin) CVZ CV-Zeitung (organ of the assimilationist Centralverein, Berlin) GZ Oberschlesische Grenz-Zeitung (Polish nationalist from 1920, Beuthen) IDR Im Deutschen Reich (forerunner of CV-Zeitung) JLZ Jüdische-Liberale Zeitung (liberal Jewish, Breslau) JR Jüdische Rundschau (Zionist, Berlin) JTS Jüdische Turn- und Sportzeitung (Zionist-oriented sport magazine) JZO Jüdische Zeitung für Ostdeutschland (Zionist-oriented from 1924, Breslau) JGO Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Oberschlesien (community paper, Gleiwitz – also appeared as Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg) KattZ Kattowitzer Zeitung (conservative pro-German, Kattowitz) OM Ostdeutsche Morgenpost (conservative pro-German, Beuthen) OW Oberschlesische Wanderer (moderate pro-German, Gleiwitz) OZ Oberschlesische Zeitung (organ of the Catholic Zentrum Party, Beuthen) VZ Vossische Zeitung (liberal, Berlin)

Note: some papers did not use page numbers. This is indicated in the footnotes by n.p.

Organisations CV Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith) DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party) DIGB Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Federation of German-Jewish Communities) DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party) DSP Deutschsoziale Partei (German Social Party) DSTB Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (German People’s Defence and Resistance Association) JVP Jüdische Volkspartei (Jewish People’s Party) ZVfD Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (German Zionist Union)

Archives CVWL Centralverein files at the Wiener Library, London ZA Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland (Central Archive for Research into the History of the Jews in Germany), Heidelberg

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List of illustrations Figure 1 Map of Germany between 1871 and 1918 3 Figure 2 Map of the Oppeln Bezirk (Upper Silesia) in 1905 4 Figure 3 Map of the Upper Silesian industrial area in 1905 4 Figure 4 Pro-Polish antisemitic propaganda in the 1921 plebiscite 70 Figure 5 Pro-German antisemitic propaganda in the 1921 plebiscite 70 Figure 6 Map showing distribution of plebiscite voting 78 Figure 7 Detail of plebiscite voting map showing industrial area 79 Figure 8 Key to plebiscite voting map 79 Figure 9 The partition of Upper Silesia 84

Figures in italics have been removed from the publicly accessible version of the thesis because of copyright restrictions.

Note on translations and place names All German sources quoted in English are my own translations, except where cited from English-language publications. Sources originally written in Polish appear only where they have been previously translated and published in either German or English. Geographic names are written in their German form to describe events when the town was part of Germany, and in Polish when it was part of Poland – so Kattowitz until June 1922, thereafter Katowice.

Note on sources Primary sources for this study suffer from two main deficits: few records of the Jewish communities themselves have survived, and there was no Jewish regional newspaper covering Upper Silesia until the Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Oberschlesien (Upper Silesian Jewish Community News) began in Gleiwitz in 1936. However, digitisation in recent years of newspapers and other contemporary documents has opened up new opportunities to investigate sources. The invaluable work of the Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa (Silesian digital library) has been particularly important in making contemporary material from the region much more widely available.

Personal memoirs, many unpublished, form a key part of this research, among them the rich resources of the Leo Baeck Institute memoir collection at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Less well known but equally valuable for the region is the material held at Heidelberg’s Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland. These documents are in part the result of work begun in the

1970s by Ernst Lustig (born in Gleiwitz in 1921) to collect all available records on the former Jewish communities of Upper Silesia, for a publication that remained sadly unrealised in his lifetime. They also include numerous extremely valuable responses from former Gleiwitz residents for a project planned by Ernst Ehrlich in the 1950s on the history of the community (also unrealised). Finally, the collection was expanded by Peter Maser and Adelheid Weiser during research that resulted in the 1992 publication of their groundbreaking work Juden in Oberschlesien (Jews in Upper Silesia), planned as the first part of an even more comprehensive documentation. All investigators of Upper Silesian Jewish history are hugely indebted to the efforts of these researchers, and the archivists who have subsequently organised their material in easily accessible form.

The main contemporary sources are reports from regional and national newspapers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Reports relating to the district appeared regularly in the Breslau and Berlin Jewish press, particularly the CV-Zeitung and its predecessor until 1922, Im Deutschen Reich; the liberal Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums; the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau; and the Breslau Jüdische Liberale Zeitung.

Upper Silesia had a thriving regional press of all political shades, particularly in the years immediately following the First World War, when many publications were founded or took on new roles in the battle over German and Polish sovereignty. Among the most significant of those that survive are the Kattowitzer Zeitung (published in Kattowitz), the Oberschlesische Grenz-Zeitung (Beuthen), the Oberschlesische Zeitung (Beuthen), the Oberschlesische Wanderer (Gleiwitz) and the Ostdeutsche Morgenpost (Beuthen). Much of the propaganda material from the 1921 plebiscite campaign has also been well preserved and extensively analysed.

While these primary sources offer rich research opportunities, they are also conspicuously lacking in certain areas. Common to all is the overwhelming dominance of male voices. A few valuable memoirs by women are cited, but even these give mostly fleeting personal insights, and almost no women appear as prominent characters in the history of the community. Also largely absent are the so-called Ostjuden (eastern Jews), whose existence preoccupied the Jewish Germans of Upper Silesia, but whose own voice is rarely heard in the records, either as individuals or through community organisations. Finally, this is essentially a study of German communities, with limited access to Polish sources and viewpoints. Tackling any of these deficits would be a potentially fruitful and valuable way to take the research further.

Chapter outline 1. Introduction The introduction sets the empirical and theoretical parameters for the study, first giving a brief overview of Upper Silesia’s history, economic development and population mix, which is essential to any discussion of its Jewish community. Then three concepts are outlined that inform the events described in later chapters: the debates over German-Jewish identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the framing of the relationship between Germans (both Jewish and non-Jewish) and their eastern neighbours; and recent scholarship on ‘national indifference’ and Upper Silesia.

2. The Jewish communities before 1914 This chapter examines the Jewish population of Upper Silesia in much more detail, illustrating the achievement of broad economic and political influence in the century before the First World War. It identifies its leaders as predominantly liberal in politics, cautiously conservative in religion and deeply immersed in a concept of German culture shared with their non-Jewish compatriots. It finds antisemitism was far from absent in Upper Silesia before 1914, but had no meaningful political expression. Finally, it examines the rise of a political alternative in the form of Jewish nationalism, and relations with the Jews of very different traditions on the eastern side of the border.

3. War, defeat, plebiscite: 1914-1921 This section analyses the profound disruption brought by the First World War and the geopolitical changes that followed in Upper Silesia. It shows how the war encouraged the growth of both antisemitism and the Zionist movement, and turned Upper Silesia into a cockpit of conflict between pro-German and pro-Polish interests following the re-establishment of Poland as an independent state. The impact of this conflict on the Upper Silesian Jews is then examined, first through the influence of the paramilitary Freikorps in fostering antisemitic violence, then through the campaign for the 1921 plebiscite, which asked whether Upper Silesia should belong to Germany or Poland.

4. Partition and division: 1921-23 The final chapter looks at the disintegration of Jewish unity against a backdrop of political instability, economic catastrophe and repeated episodes of antisemitic violence on both sides of the new border drawn through a partitioned Upper Silesia. It focuses particularly on the bitter dispute that broke out in the final months of 1923 between liberal Jews and Zionists over the response to the antisemitic attacks. Finally it examines the proxy role of the eastern Jews in this conflict: apparently central to it, but physically all but absent.

5. Conclusions The study concludes that the events of 1914-1923 shattered the worldview of the liberal Upper Silesian Jews whose devotion to German culture was a central part of their identity. But this does not mean they were “deluded” about the essential nature of the German nation, which was supposedly more accurately read by the Zionists. Rather, the Upper Silesian Jews of all political persuasions shared more with one another than their conflict might suggest, and less with the eastern Jews who were notionally at the heart of that battle.

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1. Introduction

1.1 A corner of the empire For a few years after the First World War, Upper Silesia was a constant presence in the minds of Europeans coming to terms with a rapidly changing map. Newly independent Poland claimed the province in the south-east corner of Germany, and the struggle over its future proved one of the most bitter of the territorial disputes arising from the collapse of the great empires of east and central Europe.

A plebiscite in March 1921, overseen by the war’s victors, offered Upper Silesians the chance to vote for a future with Germany or Poland. They chose Germany by a margin of 60% to 40%, but after a military conflict that cost several thousand lives, the western powers ultimately decided to partition the province.1 In the plebiscite campaign the Jewish population unambiguously declared their allegiance to Germany, but beyond noting that fact scholars have paid little attention to the nuances of their experiences during this period.2 This study aims to look beyond the binary choice of national affiliation offered by the plebiscite at factors that shaped the broader outlook of the Jewish community. Specifically it examines the changing circumstances of the Jews between 1914 and 1923, when the war, Germany’s economic crisis and outbreaks of violent antisemitism threw Upper Silesia into turmoil. The focus is on the industrial belt of Upper Silesia, primarily the border towns of Beuthen (now Bytom in Poland) and Kattowitz (Katowice), which had the most substantial Jewish populations.

At the heart of the study is the nature of the Jews’ relationship with Germany and German culture, where culture is understood not simply as literature, music and the arts, but also as economic development, legal and political institutions, and work practices. Even more than other Jewish Germans, the Upper Silesians had benefited in the nineteenth century from unprecedented opportunities for economic and political progress. That contributed to an overwhelmingly positive identification with Germany, which was reinforced by a largely negative view of the supposedly backward

1 Until 1919 the region (Bezirk) of Oppeln, which corresponded to Upper Silesia, was part of the Prussian province of Silesia. After that date Upper Silesia became its own province in the Weimar republic, but was partitioned between Germany and Poland in 1922. The area covered by the plebiscite excluded small parts of the Bezirk. References to “the province” mean Upper Silesia within its 1919 borders unless otherwise stated. 2 For example, Timothy Wilson, Frontiers of Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918-1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 139; and James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 243.

1 Borderline Germans Introduction

countries and people to their east. It will be argued that the particularly fierce loyalty to Germany shown by the Jews of Upper Silesia was influenced by their position – literally and psychologically – on the border separating Germany from those lands.

They shared with non-Jewish Germans a conception of the east as the home of backwardness and barbarity, in contrast to German civilisation, culture and order.3 And this division was simultaneously reinforced and complicated by the dramatic contrast between the position of German Jews and that of their coreligionists across the border in the lands that had belonged to Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918. It will be shown that these two apparently compatible viewpoints – extreme loyalty to Germany and ambivalence at best towards the Jews of the east – were challenged by the sudden emergence of violent German antisemitism, and led to a deep split among Upper Silesian Jews in how to respond.

Further specific questions arise within this broad theme. What factors led to Upper Silesia becoming a particularly intense site for the growth of antisemitic movements in the early Weimar years? What role did the Jews play in the 1921 plebiscite, both as actors in their own right and as the objects of German and Polish propaganda? How did their reactions to Polish and German antisemitism differ? And how strong were the attractions of alternative loyalties, such as Jewish nationalism? These are considered in the context of the familiar but still contested debates around the “assimilation” of German Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the many different responses to the question of how to reconcile Jewishness (Judentum) with Germanness (Deutschtum). They also touch on more recent studies of “national indifference” – the idea that many populations, particularly in central Europe, did not embrace the nation as their primary loyalty.4 Theorists of national indifference have singled out Upper Silesia as a prime early twentieth-century example, but the Jewish population has rarely been brought into the discussion.5

3 Mark Hewitson, “The Kaiserreich and the Kulturländer: Conceptions of the West in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1914,” in Germany and ‘The West’: a History of a Modern Concept, ed. Riccardo Bavaj and Martina Steber (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 61. 4 For the most concise summary, see Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” in Slavic Review 69, No. 1 (2010). 5 For the most comprehensive treatment of Upper Silesia, see Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950: Modernity, Violence and (Be)Longing in Upper Silesia, ed. Tomasz Kamusella, James Bjork, Tim Wilson and Anna Novikov (London: Routledge, 2016). 2

Borderline Germans Introduction

This introduction outlines the historical background of the societies in which the Jews lived, in particular the nature of the national allegiances of the non-Jewish population. Subsequent chapters examine in more detail the history of the Upper Silesian Jews before the First World War, and then the impact of the turbulent years after 1918.

Figure 1 (removed from publicly accessible version for copyright reasons)

Germany between 1871 and 1918, showing Schlesien (Silesia) in the south-eastern corner. Source: Reproduced from https://deutsche- schutzgebiete.de/wordpress/deutsches_reich_1871-1918-2/. Accessed January 13, 2019.

Borderline Germans Introduction

Figure 2

The Oppeln Bezirk and part of the neighbouring Breslau Bezirk, 1905. Larger towns formed their own urban administrative area, as well as giving their name to the surrounding rural county. Source: Wikimedia Commons (adapted). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schlesien_Verwaltungsgliederung_1905.svg. Accessed January 13, 2019.

Figure 3

The Upper Silesian industrial conurbation in 1905. The borders of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires met at the point between Myslowitz and Modrzejow. Source: Meyers Großem Konversations-Lexikon, Band 17 (Leipzig, 1909). Reproduced from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberschlesisches_Industriegebiet. Accessed January 13, 2019. Copyright status: public domain.

Borderline Germans Introduction

1.2 Upper Silesia’s geographic, ethnic and linguistic background When Polish and German nationalists looked for historical arguments to bolster their claims to Upper Silesia in the period following the First World War, they found it hard to construct a convincing narrative to suggest its “true” identity lay with either nation. Silesia had been part of Prussia since Frederick the Great annexed it from its previous Austrian Habsburg rulers in intermittent wars between 1741 and 1763. Before the Austrians, Silesia had belonged to the lands of the Bohemian crown. Not since the fourteenth century had it formed part of the kingdom of Poland.6 By contrast two other Geman provinces claimed by the new Polish state – West Prussia and Posen (Poznan) – had fallen to Prussia only with the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. They had been subject to aggressively colonial policies, with the planting of German settlers and changes to the legal, education and land-holding systems designed to suppress the Polish gentry – but which by the turn of the twentieth century had also succeeded in firing an increasingly militant Polish nationalist movement.7

Upper Silesia was different in important respects other than its longer separation from Poland. Its complicated religious and linguistic mix was determined more by voluntary migration and the forces of industrialisation than by deliberate settlement. In the nineteenth century, the province underwent dramatic economic change with the development of coalmining and associated heavy industry, concentrated around the five towns of Beuthen, Kattowitz, Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Zabrze (renamed Hindenburg in 1915) and Königshütte (now part of Chorzów) in the far south-east of the province. Industrialisation turned these villages into large towns and ultimately a giant conurbation, sucking in thousands of workers from the countryside.8 Beuthen’s population multiplied more than tenfold in the second half of the century, from 5,000 in 1850 to more than 51,000 in 1900.9 Kattowitz had just 675 inhabitants in 1825 and was not even recognised as a town in its own right until 1865, but boasted a

6 At the 1919 Versailles peace conference the German delegation cited 1163 as the last time Poland had ruled Upper Silesia. For context see Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 89. 7 William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: the Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980), 121. 8 Lawrence Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force: Upper Silesia, 1865-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 20-21. 9 For Beuthen population figures, see Franz Gramer, Chronik der Stadt Beuthen (Beuthen: Im Selbstverlage des Magistrats, 1863), 235, and Illustrierter Führer durch das oberschlesische Industriegebiet. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Orte Kattowitz, Königshütte, Beuthen, Tarnowitz, Zabrze und Gleiwitz (Leipzig: Woerl's Reisebücherverlag, 1904), 57. 5

Borderline Germans Introduction

population of 31,000 by 1900.10 Zabrze experienced similar growth, then doubled in size again between 1900 and 1910.11 Although wages, working conditions and housing in the Upper Silesian industrial belt were notoriously inferior to other parts of Germany, by the turn of the century it was second only to the Ruhr in economic importance, and the geography of its urbanisation helped shape patterns of language use.12

German-speakers dominated in parts of western and northern Upper Silesia, and formed the greater part of the urban middle-class in the industrial belt. The more heavily Polish-speaking population outside the cities was divided between rural areas and satellite towns of the urban centres, where the native population was supplemented by migrants from Russian-ruled Poland and Galicia (part of the Habsburg empire) who came to work in the industrial basin from the late nineteenth century.13 Neither language group was a united bloc. The native Upper Silesian German-speakers were overwhelmingly Catholic – a hugely relevant point of difference with otherwise solidly Protestant Prussia – but a significant number of Protestants, largely drawn from other parts of Germany, dominated senior posts in the public service and private industry.14 That imbalance in employment opportunities aroused resentment among the Catholic Germans no less than among the Poles.15 The Jewish population was tiny as a proportion of the total, but highly concentrated in the larger towns, almost exclusively German-speaking and generally prosperous, making it an influential group beyond its numbers. They benefited from the pattern of economic development in Upper Silesia, where wealth was concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of landowners and aristocrats, who played an active role in early industrial ventures.16 Even in contrast to neighbouring Lower Silesia, the region was slow to develop a broad and influential middle-class, leaving opportunities for the

10 Peter Maser and Adelheid Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien: Teil 1, Historischer Überblick – Jüdische Gemeinden (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992), 116. 11 For Kattowitz, see Hans Klemenz, “Erinnerungen an Kattowitz 1900-1945,” Mitteilungen des Beuthener Geschichts- und Museumsvereins 25/26 (1963-64): 84. For Zabrze, see T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border 1918-1922 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 17. 12 On economic conditions, see Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, 84-89, 105-120. 13 Tomasz Kamusella, “Language and the Construction of Identity in Upper Silesia During the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Die Grenzen der Nationen: Identitätenwandel in Oberschlesien in der Neuzeit, ed. Kai Struve (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2002), 57. 14 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 142. 15 Hans Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach dem 30. Januar 1933.” (New York, Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection): 11. http://access.cjh.org/589194. Accessed November 1, 2017. 16 Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, 29. 6

Borderline Germans Introduction

Jewish population once it won all but complete economic freedom in the second half of the nineteenth century.17 The situation of the Jews is discussed in detail in the following chapter.

The Polish speakers were almost universally Catholic, but their position was otherwise more complex – indeed “Polish-speaking” itself is a contested description. As a result of Upper Silesia’s long political separation from Congress Poland and Galicia, many people spoke a dialect distinct from high Polish, inflected with German and Czech borrowings (referred to by Polish scholars as Slzonzok, and known disparagingly in German as Wasserpolnisch – water Polish).18 The last census before the First World War, from 1910, found that 1.17 million Upper Silesians spoke Polish, compared with 891,000 who spoke German.19 But this recorded only their “mother tongue” and shed little light on dialect, bilingualism or the use of different languages for different purposes (4 per cent of the population gave their mother tongue as “bilingual”, implying mixed German and Polish parentage).20

Since 1872 German had been imposed as the language of instruction in all Upper Silesian schools, so that even many of those who spoke Polish at home had a good understanding of German.21 As a result the level of functional bilingualism was extremely high, particularly among those identified primarily as Polish speakers, and this also influenced national loyalty. In the 1905 census, 40 per cent of those identifying as Polish-speaking also claimed to be completely proficient in German, and it has been estimated that by the time of the 1921 plebiscite at least half the population could read a newspaper in either language.22 Indeed much of the propaganda in the plebiscite campaign was written in the “wrong” language – pro-Polish newspapers were published in German, and vice-versa. These cross-cutting linguistic, religious and social characteristics of the region defied any simple division of the population along supposedly immutable ethnic lines.

17 Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953) oder Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf, Droste Verlag, 2002), 65-66. 18 Tomasz Kamusella, “The Szlonzoks and their Language: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian Nationalism,” European University Institute Working Papers No. 1 (2003): 16. 19 Kamusella, “Language and the Construction of Identity,” 53. 20 Paul Weber, Die Polen in Oberschlesien: eine statistische Untersuchung (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1913), 7. 21 Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, 12. 22 James Bjork, “Monoglot Norms, Bilingual Lives: Readership and Linguistic Loyalty in Upper Silesia,” in Bjork et al, Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 111-112. 7

Borderline Germans Introduction

1.3 Jews as Germans The Jews of Upper Silesia shared the broad religious and political trajectory of prosperous, urban, bourgeois Jews across Germany in the nineteenth century, characterised by phenomenal economic progress, gradual admission to political and civil rights, religious reform and a corresponding decline in the inward-looking and conservative way of life of traditional Jewish communities. What these upheavals meant for the identity and status of Jews in Germany has been hotly debated. Historians have differed widely on how or whether to apply concepts such as assimilation, acculturation and integration to the relationship between the rising Jewish middle class and their non-Jewish counterparts.

David Sorkin’s thesis that Jews formed their own subculture that operated parallel to the mainstream of the German bourgeoisie has been challenged by more recent work.23 Till van Rahden has argued persuasively against the use of terms such as the Jewish “contribution” to German culture, maintaining in contrast to Sorkin that the Jews formed a core group of the middle-class, neither parallel to it nor on its fringes.24 Van Rahden, whose work on the Jews of the Lower Silesian capital Breslau (Wrocław) forms a key counterpoint to any study of Upper Silesia, suggests that multiculturalism is a more useful way to think about the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. Rather than the Jews adopting a homogenous, pre-existing national culture, advancing to the German bourgeoisie “without their advancement having changed the character of the bourgeoisie”, they were an intrinsic part of its development.25

The debates have called into question the use of many familiar terms. Werner Mosse has disputed the usefulness of the term “identity” itself, and questioned the value of applying any broadbrush evaluation to the German-Jewish relationship.26 Following Van Rahden’s line of argument, the concept of assimilation has also become contentious, requiring qualification at least.27 It has been widely used to refer to those German Jews – the majority in Upper Silesia and nationally – who broadly subscribed

23 David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 116. 24 Till van Rahden, “Von der Eintracht zur Vielfalt: Juden in der Geschichte des Deutschen Bürgertums,” in Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800- 1933, ed. Andreas Gotzmann, Rainer Liedtke and Till van Rahden (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 17. 25 Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (Madison, University of Wisconsin, 2008), 6. 26 Werner Mosse, “Preface,” in The German-Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), xv. 27 Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 10. 8

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to the views of the mainstream representative body, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German citizens of Jewish Faith), founded in 1893. As the name indicates, they had come to see themselves as Germans who were Jewish by religion, rather than as Jews by nationality or ethnicity who happened to live in Germany. In this study the term “assimilated” is used where contemporary Jews applied it to themselves (as they very frequently did), but does not imply acceptance of the view that Jews over time conformed to a pre-existing non- Jewish German culture, rather than forming a vital part of it.

Many German Jews were comfortable with the concept of assimilation, recognising it as the logical outcome of changes within the Jewish community and a chance to reshape their relationship with non-Jews. Michael Brenner has characterised the transaction implicit in the process as the “emancipation contract”:

In return for their participation in European society, the Jews were required to remodel their Judaism, to change it from a comprehensive outlook that had once shaped every aspect of their daily life into a denomination affecting only the private sphere.28

That exchange had implications for the maintenance of Jewish religious and cultural traditions, for the unity of disparate economic and social groups, and for relations between Jews across national borders. It implied that the Jews of each country would look to that state to secure their rights as individual citizens, rather than to seek merely tolerance or protection as a community. Rebekah Klein-Pejšová goes further, arguing that relations with the state were therefore also central to the question of Jewish identity – Jews did not become loyal citizens of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary because they felt German, Polish, Czech, Slovak or Hungarian, but the reverse: “Loyalty precedes identity in modern Jewish history. Identity arises from the loyalty relationship with the state.”29 This conclusion may understate the influence of cultural factors – for example, language – in shaping identity, but the importance of the bond between German Jews and the German constitutional state would become highly relevant when that state’s legitimacy came under threat in the 1920s.

28 Michael Brenner, A Short History of the Jews (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2010), 189. 29 Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2015), 3. 9

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Emancipation of the Jews in Prussia took its first significant step in 1812, when the Edict issued by King Friedrich Wilhelm recognised them as citizens and abolished restrictions such as those preventing Jews settling in towns.30 Prussia’s introduction of the three-class voting system in mid-century, weighting the franchise hugely in favour of landholders and property-owners, gave increasingly prosperous Jews an avenue to political representation at local and regional levels.31 Formal equality of religions was established by the law of the North German Confederation (including Upper Silesia) in 1869, taking national effect two years later with the consolidation of the German empire under Prussian auspices – although formal and informal barriers to Jewish advancement remained, above all in the military, the public service, academia and the judiciary.32 The optimism engendered by legal equality encouraged Jews to look favourably on the state as a guarantor of hard-won rights and potential support for further progress, but they remained acutely aware that non-Jewish Germans did not necessarily interpret their position in the same way.

The expectation that Jews would abandon much of what made them Jewish if they wanted to be accepted as Germans was crystallised in the furious debate sparked by Heinrich von Treitschke’s 1879 essay in the Preussischer Jahrbücher, in which he demanded that Jews “become Germans, feel themselves simply and justly as Germans … because we do not want thousands of years of Germanic civilisation to be followed by an era of German-Jewish mixed culture”.33 In his extensive discussion of the implications of the Treitschke dispute, Marcel Stoetzler notes that Treitschke explicitly argued that emancipation meant the Jews had “traded in and forsaken the right to make claims to separate nationhood … By implication, everything short of an active policy of dissolving Jewish separate identity counts as Jewish nationalism.”34

Peter Pulzer sums up the dilemma such demands posed for Jewish Germans:

The unsolved questions were straightforward: What would Jews have to give up in order to become ‘German citizens of the Jewish faith’? What

30 David Vital, A People Apart: the Jews in Europe 1789-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 66. 31 Ernest Hamburger, Juden im öffentlichem Leben Deutschlands, 1848-1918 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1968), 342. 32 Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: the Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 44. 33 Cited in Marcel Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism dispute in Bismarck’s Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1. 34 Ibid, 147. 10

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were Jews entitled to expect in return for their ‘self-denial’? What would constitute reasonable demands by Gentile Germans of their Jewish fellow-citizens? If the questions were straightforward, the answers were not.35

As the nineteenth century drew to a close the assimilationist position faced a new political challenge with the emergence of Jewish nationalism. For the first time a significant political organisation suggested that the future of the Jews lay not with pursuing their rights as equal citizens and ever greater integration into the European states in which they found themselves, but in their own national identification as Jews. For some that meant pursuing various forms of autonomy within the existing states. In the Zionist conception it meant ultimately physically removing themselves to Palestine, where they would create their own state. That prospect seemed deeply implausible to most in the years before the First World War, and Zionism claimed the allegiance of only a small minority of German Jews.36 But the Zionists’ pursuit of Jewish advancement as Jews – with rights as a national or ethnic group, not merely as individuals – profoundly unsettled the assimilationist mindset. The Zionists’ agitation on behalf of Jews from Germany’s eastern neighbours, including opposition to migration restrictions, put them further at odds with the mainstream, and this was the principal question that would spark tension within the Jewish community in Upper Silesia.

1.4 Germany and ‘the east’ Prussia’s incorporation of Silesia in the second half of the eighteenth century came just as concepts of western and eastern Europe were being formulated and characteristics ascribed to each part, in contrast to the older division of the continent into north and south.37 As Larry Wolff describes, Frederick the Great’s conquest “detached Silesia … from the idea of Eastern Europe”, and the most important part of that idea was that what became known as eastern Europe lay “on the philosophical

35 Peter Pulzer, “Emancipation and its Discontents: the German-Jewish Dilemma,” in The German-Jewish Dilemma: From the Enlightenment to the Shoah, ed. Edward Timms and Andrea Hammel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 12. 36 Stephen Poppel, Zionism in Germany 1897-1933: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 33. Poppel gives a peak figure of 9,000 members of the Zionist movement before 1914, from a total German Jewish population of about 500,000. 37 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilisation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4. 11

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frontier between civilisation and barbarism”.38 Crucially for the future of Upper Silesia and its Jewish population, it would lie decisively on the “civilised” side of that frontier. The intellectual impetus for the division between east and west came primarily from France, but for Germans it resonated particularly in relation to their nearest eastern neighbour. Wolff writes:

Precisely because Poland was so geographically accessible to Germans, in some respects even intimately related to Germany, it was interpreted as alien and backward with all the more intellectual energy.39

Germany’s understanding of its position in the world went through further changes in the nineteenth century as its economic and military power grew. Formal national unity in 1871 brought together territories as far apart as Elsaß-Lothringen (Alsace- Lorraine) in the west and Königsberg on the Baltic, and raised new questions about how – and even where – Germany saw itself. Was it part of what we would now call the west? A great central European power? Or something unique to itself that transcended geographical descriptions? As Mark Hewitson has argued, Germany’s long-standing hostility towards France and ambivalence about Anglo-American materialism made identification with “the west” less than straightforward. Terms such as “civilisation” and “cultured countries” (Kulturländer) were more commonly used to locate Germany’s place in the world.40

But it was clear to Germans of all political stripes that wherever Germany was, the east beyond the border was not part of its civilised, cultured, clean world – Hewitson goes so far as to describe the east as Germany’s “most consistent ‘other’”.41 The left, until the Bolshevik revolution, saw the Tsarist autocracy as irredeemably reactionary, while the right characterised eastern backwardness increasingly in racial terms and foresaw inevitable conflict between Germans and Slavs.42 Vejas Liulevicius has described the remarkable durability of the rhetorical terms used by Germans to describe the east: “The main trope was that of Kultur, a value identified with Germanness, opposed to barbarism and oppression in the East.”43 And David Blackbourn’s brilliant essay on

38 Ibid, 169, 331. 39 Ibid, 333. 40 Hewitson, “The Kaiserreich and the Kulturländer,” 58-61. 41 Ibid, 64. 42 Vejas Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 78. 43 Ibid, 5. 12

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perceptions of landscape in Germany’s own eastern provinces makes clear that the idea of Kultur extended as far as a supposedly intrinsically German way of “civilising” and cultivating the land:

The ‘unhealthy, remote marshy and watery wasteland’ of the Slavs was transformed by the ‘long unflinching work of the settlers’ into the ‘resplendent green of the flourishing meadows’ ... Travel writers ... assured readers that Germans in the east had been Kulturträger und Befruchter: they had brought ‘culture’ (meaning green fields and meadows, as well as towns and guilds) and made the land fertile.44

“The east” was a flexible geographical concept – it could mean anywhere from the Balkans to the Baltic, and even parts of Germany itself.45 Nor were the people of the east always clearly defined. When the German army crossed the border into Russian- ruled territory in the first weeks of the First World War, it distributed leaflets promising victory over the “Asiatic hordes”, the end of “eastern barbarism” and the introduction of “western civilisation”.46 The Austro-Hungarian authorities appealed to the Poles of western Galicia in almost identical terms, encouraging them to enlist to fight Russia by reminding them “that they belonged to a Polish nation whose historic role was to be a bulwark defending ‘western Europe against the barbaric Asiatic deluge’.”47 But in other formulations it was the Poles themselves who were seen as the eastern barbarians – not least in Upper Silesia, where there was a physical border very close by, one that Germany periodically tried to close against easterners. Here it was harder to be ambiguous about where the Kulturland of Germany ended and its opposite – literally described as Unkultur or the “half-Asian” territories - began.48

The journalist and popular author Oskar Klaussmann (born 1851), who was brought up in Beuthen, returned to Upper Silesia from Berlin just before the First World War

44 David Blackbourn, “‘The Garden of our Hearts’: Landscape, Nature, and Local Identity in the German East,” in Localism, Landscape and the Ambiguities of Place: German- speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930, ed. David Blackbourn and James Retallack (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 153. 45 Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, 3. 46 Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1969), 121. 47 Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (London: Penguin, 2015), 94. 48 Peter Polak-Springer, Recovered Territory: A German-Polish Conflict over Land and Culture, 1919-89 (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 26. 13

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to write a memoir and travelogue about its development. He found it had achieved cultural miracles, despite its frontier status:

Upper Silesia has become a Kulturland, which can self-confidently take its place among the other cultural regions of the German empire … The distinctive traits that unfortunately previously characterised Upper Silesia – dirt and disorder – have completely disappeared … It must have been a labour of Sisyphus; the population has not only rapidly increased, but is also very mobile, and less cultivated elements from Austria and Russia come over constantly, who to some extent render useless all efforts made with the population.49

The elevation of Upper Silesia to this exalted status stood in stark contrast to the towns of its immediate neighbours across the border. Until 1918, the three great land empires of eastern Europe – Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary – met at the famous Dreikaisereck (three emperors’ corner), the junction of the Przemsza river and its tributary outside Myslowitz (Mysłowice), less than 15 kilometres from Kattowitz. In the very early days of the First World War, the correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung told of how he crossed the wooden bridge over the Przemsza that linked “the clean little German town of Myslowitz” with its counterpart on the Russian side, Modrzejow. He wrote:

Is it really possible that in such a short journey the transition from the Kultur of the west to the Unkultur of the east could be revealed in such glaring clarity? Even in Morocco I have never seen such a filthy hole as Modrzejow, over whose tumbledown houses and stinking hovels the German flag now proudly flies, almost like a symbol of world-historical irony.50

1.5 German Jews and ‘the east’ Like the Frankfurter Zeitung reporter, who encountered many Jews among the “ragged people” across the border, non-Jewish Germans who travelled east often cited

49 A. Oskar Klaussmann, Oberschlesien vor 55 Jahren und wie ich es wiederfand (Berlin: Phönix-Verlag, 1911), 309-311. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/910/edition/836. Accessed May 23, 2017. 50 Frankfurter Zeitung, August 28, 1914, n.p. 14

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the notable Jewish presence in their descriptions of the “dirt” they found there.51 But German Jews had their own reasons for enthusiastically endorsing the dichotomy between German civilisation and eastern barbarism. As Steven Aschheim argues, they prized their bond with German culture, inculcated through secular education, above all else. The passion for assimilation was part of the perception that German cultural superiority was self-evident:

The proclaimed synthesis between Germanism (Deutschtum) and Judaism (Judentum) was made easy even for the most committed of modern German Jews, because they fully acknowledged the excellence of German culture.52

Their engagement in German culture was also an essential marker of the huge divide in the Jewish world between west and east. Life under the Tsars and the dual Habsburg monarchy had left the predominantly Yiddish-speaking eastern Jews much poorer and more disadvantaged than their western counterparts, with no realistic aspirations – in Russia at least – to civil rights or legal equality in the foreseeable future. In the 1880s and again in the early years of the twentieth century they faced organised antisemitic violence on a large scale, driving many to seek refuge in the west. The Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah) that sparked radical changes in religious practice and political outlook in the west was entirely alien to the orthodox traditions of the east.53 Liberal democratic politics of the kind that increasingly attracted bourgeois German Jews at the end of the century were of little use to the vast majority of eastern Jews, faced with a repressive Tsarist regime and an often aggressively hostile non-Jewish population.

From the 1880s Germany began to receive significant numbers of Jews from Russia’s Polish territories and Austrian-controlled Galicia, as well as Russian-ruled regions further east. Scholars have rightly questioned the use of the blanket term Ostjuden (eastern Jews) to describe them.54 It carries the baggage of mostly pejorative stereotypes that cannot do justice to such a huge and multi-faceted population; and the term itself adopts the perspective of the west (or Germany) as “normal” and the

51 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 335. 52 Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: the East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 19. 53 Vital, A People Apart, 637. 54 Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6. 15

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east as “other”. But it is relevant in helping to reveal the mindset of assimilated German Jews, particularly those in border areas such as Upper Silesia, in the period under discussion (the term came into general use in Germany during the First World War).55 It appears repeatedly in the contemporary German-language Jewish press, which is frequently cited in later chapters. Commentators, even those broadly sympathetic to easterners, did not hesitate to speak of the Ostjudenproblem – meaning problems caused by the migration of Jews from the east to Germany. Insofar as this study is concerned with the attitudes of German-speaking Jews, it makes sense to use their own language, with the appropriate caveats above.

The easterners represented everything assimilated German Jews hoped to have left behind: the ghetto, material impoverishment, the Yiddish languge and the obscurantism of traditional religion. Worse, the easterners stood out from the crowd – many still wearing the traditional kaftan, beards and sidelocks – and were perceived to threaten the hard-won status of acculturated German Jews by embodying the most enduring antisemitic stereotypes. Aschheim notes the double standard of German Jews’ sensitivity to any hint of antisemitism towards themselves, while maintaining views towards the eastern Jews that were sometimes barely distinguishable from those of the most strident German nationalists. In some cases they exactly mimicked non-Jewish German attitudes to Poles and Russians, using the same “half-Asia” insults.56

What lay behind this double standard, of course, was the German Jewish rejection of the ghetto past. The Ostjuden who settled in Germany were regarded as being in the process of recreating that very past ... An important element of the specifically German Jewish sense of identity, in fact, was based upon differentiating comparisons with Ostjuden. The German Jew was to be understood in terms of the explicit differences that divided him from the East European Jew.57

For many Upper Silesian Jews, proximity to “half Asia” only served to reinforce their fierce sense of Germanness. The Jews who lived in the border regions considered themselves “vanguards of Germany” according to Max Gruenewald, born in Königshütte in 1899, later a rabbi and a leading light in the establishment of the Leo

55 Ibid. 56 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 31. 57 Ibid, 46-47. 16

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Baeck Institute: “Nationalistic feeling was strong, and that included the rabbi.”58 The literal border powerfully reinforced the psychological gulf between Upper Silesian Jews and those who lived in very different circumstances in the non-German lands. The historian Eva Reichmann, born in Upper Silesia’s predominantly liberal administrative capital Oppeln (Opole) in 1897, remembered feeling pity for the Ostjuden, but also a strong sense of difference from them. The Oppeln Jews “understood themselves as the custodians of German culture, not a Polish or even a transnational Jewish culture”.59 Marcin Wodziński, writing about the historian Markus Brann’s pride in Silesian Jews’ rejection of Yiddish in favour of high German, wrote:

For the assimilated Silesian Jews, the border between West and East, between the civilised and the barbaric worlds, ran ‘a couple of miles east of the Oder river’, which marked the border between Silesia and Poland.60

This was not simply a metaphor – the border made a visible difference. One former resident of Myslowitz recalled the stark contrast between his town and its twin, Modrzejów, on the other side of the Przemsa. The percentage of Jews in German Myslowitz was modest, whereas in Polish Modrzejów they dominated. In Myslowitz there was nothing to distinguish Jews in their outward appearance from the rest of the population, while in Modrzejów they were immediately recognisable from their clothes alone.61 Mary Fulbrook recounts that even in the 1920s and 1930s Jewish life was very different in Będzin, a flourishing and diverse town formerly in Russian Poland, from that of the towns barely 20 kilometres away inside Germany. Many Jewish men in Będzin still dressed in traditional fashion – except those who did business in Germany, for whom it was “expedient not to go in these places in a beard and Jewish outfit”.62

58 Max Gruenewald, oral history interview, June 14, 1971. (New York, Leo Baeck Institute archives): 4. http://access.cjh.org/1328065. Accessed February 6, 2019. 59 Kirsten Heinsohn, “Deutsche Juden in Oppeln 1871-1944,” in Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West: neue Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte in Schlesien, ed. Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 265. Reichmann became the director of London’s Wiener Library after the Second World War. 60 Marcin Wodziński, “Languages of the Jewish Communities in Polish Silesia (1922-1939),” in Jewish History 16 (2002), 133. 61 Withold Rainer, “Jüdischer Mitbürger in Myslowitz vor 60 Jahren,” Laurahütter Heimatblatt, January 23, 1969, n.p. 62 Mary Fulbrook, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 34. 17

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The Jewish communities on the German side of the border had moved psychologically a long way from Modrzejów, Będzin and “the east” by 1918. The following chapter traces in more detail the history that helped mould their worldview and in particular their profound identification with the German nation. It will be argued that their loyalty to Germany, explicitly expressed in the 1921 plebiscite, was not the result of a purely instrumental calculation that weighed up dispassionately where their best interests lay. Nor was it primarily a response to perceived Polish antisemitism. Rather, it was an exaggerated expression of the identification with Kultur that characterised the German middle-class as a whole, driven to extreme lengths by the Upper Silesian Jews’ eagerness to distinguish themselves from their eastern Jewish neighbours.

1.6 Upper Silesia and ‘national indifference’ Until recently very little had been written in English about the Upper Silesian plebiscite years, and almost nothing about its Jewish community. James Bjork asserts that for the best part of a century English-speaking scholars showed “astonishingly little interest in a vote that once held the rapt attention of Europe”.63 But in the past decade Upper Silesia has been rediscovered – not least by Bjork himself – as a key example of “national indifference”, and its jumble of linguistic, religious and regional loyalties have been unpicked from behind the binary German/Polish choice imposed by the 1921 vote.64 Proponents of the indifference thesis have challenged the teleological view that nationalism – embodied in the modern European nation-state – inexorably overwhelmed older or rival identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Instead, they suggest, in many regions the population remained ambivalent, flexible or indifferent towards the idea of the nation, despite the insistence of nationalist movements that such entities were age-old and immutable.65

Such studies have found fertile ground in central and eastern Europe, and Upper Silesians have attracted particular attention as an example of people who did not fit neatly into the ideal of the state that matched the pre-existing and unchanging nation – Tara Zahra has called them “perhaps the most famously indifferent population in

63 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 3. 64 Recent examples include Bjork, Kamusella, Wilson and Novikov (eds), Creating Nationality in Central Europe, and Polak-Springer, Recovered Territory. 65 Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities,” 98. 18

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twentieth century central Europe”.66 While such characterisations rarely include detailed discussion of the Jewish population, they provide an important backdrop to an understanding of the national conflict in Upper Silesia in the plebiscite years.

Zahra and other proponents of the indifference thesis in relation to Upper Silesia have focused on the two elements identified by Pieter Judson as supposed national markers – religion and language. Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (cultural struggle) of the 1870s, identifying Catholicism as an enemy of the Reich, could hardly have been designed better to alienate the overwhelmingly Catholic Upper Silesians. One outcome was the emergence of a coherent Polish nationalist political movement in all Germany’s eastern provinces by the turn of the century, but the religious make-up of Upper Silesia meant that most German-speakers there were no less estranged from an aggressively Protestant German state than their Polish-speaking counterparts. Bjork’s exhaustive study finds that the church and the Catholic Zentrum (Centre) party became the strongest elements of resistance to both German and Polish nationalism. The bulk of the clergy were “nationally indifferent”, giving German- and Polish- speaking Catholics (who between them made up a good 90 per cent of the population) a point of unity transcending their national loyalty.67

Tomasz Kamusella’s focus on the Szlonzok language highlights the second principal factor cited as pushing Upper Silesians away from an identification with either Germany or Poland. Far from being a separate ethnic group walled off from Germans and Poles, Slzonzoks in Kamusella’s characterisation moved easily (or sometimes uneasily) between such language-defined nationalities:

In everyday community and family life they spoke the Upper Silesian Slavic dialect and/or Germanic/Slavic creole. In church they strove to use standard Polish alongside Latin, and in offices and in the army they spoke standard German.68

For some, these language shifts could lead to a more permanent change in how they defined themselves. Hunt Tooley argues that as a result of immersion in German- speaking central Europe for centuries and the importance of proficiency in German for social advancement, many Slavic Upper Silesian families had come to identify as

66 Ibid, 99. 67 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 8. 68 Kamusella, “Language and the Construction of Identity,” 63. 19

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German.69 And Kamusella agrees that “almost every Upper Silesian Slavophone Catholic almost invariably became a member of the German national group once he obtained secondary or higher education”.70

When the victorious powers came to remake the boundaries of Europe at the Versailles conference after the First World War, their thinking ran roughshod over such nuances. The US president Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points, laid out in a speech to the US Congress on January 8, 1918, and widely considered the blueprint for the postwar European settlement, do not use the word “self-determination” most readily associated with him, but they do make clear that nationalities formerly under Tsarist or Habsburg rule, “whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured”, should be accorded every opportunity of “autonomous development”. Wilson’s thirteenth point called unequivocally for a state including “the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations”.71

Germany by no means accepted that any of its prewar land fell into that category, but there were clear differences between Upper Silesia and its other eastern territories that were largely lost to Poland – West Prussia and Posen. Relationships between Germans and Poles in these areas had become poisonous in the first years of the twentieth century.72 But in Upper Silesia, the ambiguities of national identity made for a less confrontational daily existence. Hans Reichmann, a Jewish German born in 1900 who grew up in Hohensalza, Posen (now Inowrocław in Poland), recalled how his liberal-thinking father rejected the “exaggerated nationalism” he found in Posen:

He came from Upper Silesia, where Poles and Germans also lived side by side, but without that proximity having led to the sharp and constantly perceptible tensions that I remember from my youth.73

When Reichmann himself moved to Beuthen in 1914, he found that the “sharp distinction” between Germans and Poles he had experienced in Posen no longer

69 Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, 12. 70 Kamusella, “Language and the Construction of Identity,” 61. 71 Trgyve Throntveit, Power Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 252. 72 For a detailed account, see Hagen, Germans, Poles and Jews, 159-265. 73 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 3. 20

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applied, either at school or in the city, and that most of his schoolfriends spoke more than one language.74

One consequence of this ambivalence towards nationalism was that Upper Silesia retained a strong regional identity, despite the nationalising efforts of both the Polish and German camps. This manifested itself after the war in the brief flowering of the Zentrum-backed League of Upper Silesians (Bund der Oberschlesier/Związek Górnoślązaków), which promoted autonomy and even flirted with ideas of national independence for Upper Silesia between 1919 and 1921.75 During the plebiscite campaign, both Germany and Poland acknowledged the pull of regionalism by promising greater levels of autonomy for the province in the event of their victory.76

But the plebiscite pushed Upper Silesians into making an unambiguous choice. As a minority with a history of persecution, Jews across central Europe had good reason to be conscious of the dangers posed by demands for displays of national loyalty. They ran the risk of rejection by nationalists on grounds of “betrayal” during the war (as in Poland) or of being identified too closely with a neighbouring state (such as German- or Hungarian-speaking Jews in Czechoslovakia).77 The new international force of Jewish nationalism – not confined to the overtly Zionist parties – further clouded the question of Jewish loyalty to the nation states within which they suddenly found themselves. In many cases nationalists were suspicious of their cross-border connections, their bilingualism, their privileged economic status or their religious insularity, as Klein-Pejšová has persuasively shown in the case of Czechoslovakia.78

But in Upper Silesia the situation was quite different. There, it can be argued, it was the Jews who had clear and unequivocal loyalty (to Germany) among a relatively indifferent or ambiguous population. They were more likely to be monolingual than their neighbours, were repelled by Polish antisemitism and lukewarm about Zionism at least until the 1920s. Above all, they genuinely subscribed to the perceived values of German Kultur. The next chapter looks in more detail at the particular characteristics of the Upper Silesian Jewish community that helped shape that outlook.

74 Ibid, 10. 75 Ibid, 64. 76 For Germany, see Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, 259. For Poland, see Sigmund Karski, Albert (Wojchiech) Korfanty (Dülmen: Laumen-Verlag, 1996), 259. 77 For Poland, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915-1926 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 12. For Czechoslovakia, see Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Empire: a New History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2016), 438. 78 Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalties, 14. 21

2. The Jewish communities before 1914

2.1 Population, language and economic status The Jewish communities of Upper Silesia evolved in unique conditions that shaped the province’s politics and economics, as outlined in the introduction. Rapid development of mining and heavy industry, the Catholicism of most of their non- Jewish German neighbours, the strong current of regional identification and the proximity to the Russian and Austro-Hungarian borders together made Upper Silesia quite different from almost everywhere else in Prussia, or indeed the whole of Germany. In this chapter the development of the Jewish communities before 1914 is examined in more detail: their size; economic and social position; political leanings; relations with non-Jewish Upper Silesians and with the Jews across the border to the east. Without a picture of the essential characteristics of these communities, it is difficult to make sense of their reactions to the events of 1918-23.

What do we know about the Jews of the Upper Silesian industrial towns? In the broadest terms, by the end of the nineteenth century they were disproportionately prosperous, only cautiously progressive in religion but much more confidently liberal in politics. Their influence in the towns had remained high even as their share of the population diminished. And that influence depended on their status in the complicated Upper Silesian ethnic and linguistic mix as successful Germans, for which the first necessary condition was literacy in the German language – the language that had “opened the door for them to liberal Europe”.1

Writing in 1927, the Beuthen lawyer and historian Wilhelm Immerwahr, who was himself Jewish, maintained that in the early nineteenth century the Jews were almost the only Upper Silesians who could read and write in German, “in the midst of illiterates and those who could only understand Polish”.2 Even if that is an exaggeration, literacy in German remained a key building block of Jewish advancement throughout the century. The art dealer and writer Hugo Perls, born in

1 Konrad Fuchs, “Zur Bedeutung des oberschlesischen Judentums: Ursachen und Wirkungen”, in Gestalten und Ereignisse aus Schlesiens Wirtschaft, Kultur und Politik, ed. Konrad Fuchs (Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 1992), 74. 2 CVZ, February 25, 1927, 99.

22 Borderland Germans The Jewish Communities of Upper Silesia

Rybnik in 1886, recalled that the Jews were important in the town “because they could read and write – because they were the German element”. 3

Like other Upper Silesians, the Jews inevitably came into contact with a second or even third language, but personal testimonies suggest they spoke only German except where business demanded otherwise. The Jewish adults in Perls’ town spoke only as much of the Polish dialect as was necessary to do business with the rural population.4 Similarly Hans Liebermann, born in Beuthen in 1900, recorded that neither he nor his family could speak Yiddish and he learnt only a few words of Wasserpolnisch. Both he and his wife Lotte (born Lotte Orgler in Oppeln in 1907) remembered that their shop- owning fathers had to know a little Polish to communicate with Polish customers, “but the great majority [of Jews], especially in the city, were Germans, and spoke German”.5

The number of Jews was small, but heavily concentrated in the towns. Studies of Upper Silesia that refer to Jews in passing typically note they made up less than one per cent of the population of the province by the time of the 1921 plebiscite.6 This bald fact underplays their numerical significance in the urban centres, as well as their economic power. In the nineteenth century the urban Jewish population in the industrial belt grew rapidly, comprising as much as 16.5 per cent of the total in Gleiwitz (1867), 11 per cent in Beuthen (1862) and 13 per cent in Kattowitz (1867).7

Figures collected by Peter Maser and Adelheid Weiser suggest Beuthen’s Jewish population grew from barely 200 at the start of the nineteenth century to more than 2,500 in 1914.8 The Kattowitz community – like the city itself – began to grow much later, but expanded so quickly that by 1910 it had outstripped Beuthen, boasting almost 3,000 people.9 The Jewish population of Gleiwitz, ultimately the smallest of the three, remained relatively constant at just under 2,000 between the mid-

3 Hugo Perls, Eine kleine Stadt in Oberschlesien, Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, New York, 5. http://access.cjh.org/594326. Accessed April 17, 2016. 4 Perls, Eine kleine Stadt, 5. 5 Hans Liebermann, oral history interview, August 15, 1978. Emmanuel Ringelblum Oral History Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accession Number: 1995.A.1257.22. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510476. Accessed February 21, 2017. 6 For example Wilson, Frontiers of Violence, 139. 7 For Gleiwitz and Kattowitz, see Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 98, 116. For Beuthen, see Gramer, Chronik der Stadt Beuthen, 236. 8 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 76. 9 Ibid, 116. 23

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nineteenth century and the 1920s.10 As the huge expansion of coal, iron, steel and other industrial activity in the region gathered pace, the rise in Jewish numbers was outpaced by the much faster growth of the non-Jewish urban population. Nevertheless, the 1905 census figures show Kattowitz was then the town with the highest proportion of Jews anywhere in Germany (7.59 per cent) of those with more than 1,000 Jews.11 Beuthen at 4.21 per cent and Gleiwitz at 3.17 per cent (down from 4 per cent only five years earlier) fell significantly behind only Berlin and Frankfurt, and were roughly on a par with Breslau and Posen.

Pulzer points out that the very rapid urbanisation of German Jews in the nineteenth century meant they moved from “places with strong Jewish cohesion to places with weak cohesion”.12 But if this was true of the huge metropolis of Berlin (with well over 2 million people by 1910), where a quarter of Germany’s Jews then lived, or of Frankfurt and Breslau (both approaching half a million), it was more questionable in the much smaller towns of Upper Silesia, none of which boasted more than 100,000 inhabitants by 1914. They were large enough and economically powerful enough to matter, yet also small enough for their relatively substantial Jewish populations to remain a genuine community.

The raw number of Jews in Upper Silesia belied their economic influence. According to Sidney Osborne, Jews contributed between 30 and 55 per cent of tax revenue in Kattowitz and smaller towns to the south-west such as Ratibor (Racibórz), Rybnik and Neustadt (Prudnik) even at the end of the First World War.13 Where did that wealth come from? The century between the 1812 Prussian Edict of Toleration and the beginning of the First World War was one of unparalleled progress for the Upper Silesian Jews, as for German Jews more generally.14 At the beginning of the nineteenth century most Jews in Upper Silesia made a living as petty traders or in one of the few businesses open to them, primarily innkeeping, later expanding into more settled retail opportunities.15 By the first decades of the twentieth century Gleiwitz still

10 Ibid, 97. 11 Jakob Thon, “Die Juden in den preußischen Städten,” in Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 2, No. 12 (1906), 189. 12 Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 5. 13 Sidney Osborne, The Upper Silesian Question and Germany’s Coal Problem (London: Allen & Unwin, 1920), 163. 14 Beata Dudek, “Das Wirtschaftsleben der Juden in Schlesien – die Städte Beuthen O/S und Glogau,” in Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West: neue Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte in Schlesien, ed. Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 138. 15 Ibid, 139. 24

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boasted no fewer than 13 Jewish-owned inns, and most of the shops in the more desirable locations were in Jewish hands.16 In Myslowitz, the village on the German side of the three emperors’ corner, anyone who wanted to learn the names of most of the Jewish residents needed only to look at the hotels and shops selling books, cigars, groceries, men’s and women’s clothes, tobacco, confectionery, hats and shoes.17

As the region developed into an important industrial centre, initially through the rise of mining, some Jews prospered well beyond the status of shopkeepers. From as early as the 1820s the Friedländer family and other Jewish businessmen in Beuthen invested in mines, smelting and iron production, later diversifying into banking, timber and the coal trade.18 Simon Friedländer founded the first Beuthen bank in the 1830s and his grandson Otto became one of the most prominent bankers in Silesia.19 The Goldstein family in the timber industry, the Guttmanns who developed steam mills in Beuthen, the Loewys and Huldschinskys in mining and many others entered the realms of Upper Silesia’s wealthiest individuals through their success in industry.20 Another branch of the Friedländer family, in Gleiwitz, made millions through their involvement in the coal and chemical industries.21 In the second half of the nineteenth century many more Jews at a less exalted level found avenues to success in the free professions, above all as lawyers and doctors. Heinemann Stern, a teacher and later leading light of the Centralverein, who arrived in Kattowitz in 1909, estimated that the number of Jewish doctors, dentists, lawyers and chemists in the town was equal to or greater than their Christian counterparts.22

Walter Grünfeld, born in Kattowitz in 1908, traced the influential middle-class Jewish networks in his own family: his father and one uncle were successful architects; another uncle became an orthopaedic surgeon and a third was a director of the mining firm Rawack & Grünfeld in Beuthen; three aunts married lawyers in Beuthen, Gleiwitz and Kattowitz respectively; and a fourth married Felix Benjamin, who also had a leading role at Rawack & Grünfeld and was the nephew of its founder, Louis

16 W. Guttmann, ZA 2/16, 34, 3-4. 17 Rainer, Jüdische Mitbürger in Myslowitz. 18 Dudek, “Das Wirtschaftsleben der Juden in Schlesien,” 142. 19 Werner Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: the German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820- 1935 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1987), 101. 20 For the Goldsteins, see Mosse, Jews in the German Economy, 141. For the Guttmanns, see Dudek, “Das Wirtschaftsleben der Juden in Schlesien,” 147. 21 Fuchs, “Zur Bedeutung des oberschlesischen Judentums,” 78-79. 22 Heinemann Stern, Warum hassen Sie uns eigentlich? Jüdisches Leben zwischen den Kriegen (Düsseldorf, Droste Verlag, 1970), 81. 25

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Grünfeld.23 Osborne, writing in 1920, maintained that Jews had “taken part in the cultural, commercial and industrial development of the province in a measure entirely out of proportion to their numbers”, citing their very high numbers in secondary education, and leading positions in trade, industry and the liberal professions.24

But any characterisation of late Wilhelmine Jews as typically middle-class masks a very large range of wealth and social standing, and risks overlooking how recently conditions had improved. Till van Rahden has taken issue with such generalisations, citing Jacob Toury’s much-quoted claim that by 1870 more than 60% of German Jews lived in “safely bourgeois” conditions.25 Using the Breslau tax roll records, Van Rahden shows that such figures tend to understate the number of Jews in the lower middle-class and below.26 Personal accounts from Upper Silesia shed light on the diversity of experience encompassed by the description “middle class” or bourgeois, and the trajectory of Jewish economic life. Gunter Kamm (born in Beuthen in 1905) helpfully lists in his memoir the occupations of his direct male ancestors for three generations, which serve as an archetype of Jewish economic progress from small business and retail to the professions. His great-grandfather (born in 1798) was a baker and farmer; his grandfather (born 1838) a cabinet-maker, who opened a furniture shop; his father (born 1874) a successful salesman in the same trade, owning several houses; and Kamm himself was a lawyer.27

Mally Dienemann, who arrived in Ratibor after marrying the rabbi Max Dienemann in 1904, found the Jews there living a “comfortable, rich, bourgeois life”.28 But by no means all Upper Silesian Jews, even those who ran small businesses, were as prosperous. Emanuel Kirschner, later the cantor of the main synagogue in Munich, wrote of his upbringing in late nineteenth century Beuthen, where the family of 10 children lived in two windowless rooms attached to his father’s bakery, in a block

23 Walter Grünfeld, Rückblicke: Dem Andenken von Herrn Dr Walter Grünfeld 1908-1988 (Zug: privately published, undated), 19-20. 24 Osborne, The Upper Silesian Question, 163. 25 Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 27. 26 Ibid, 31. 27 Gunter Kamm, “Erinnerungen an die jüdische Gemeinde Beuthen O/S” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1977), 2. http://access.cjh.org/3917982. Accessed March 20, 2016. 28 Mally Dienemann, “Aufzeichnungen” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1939), 2. http://access.cjh.org/939510. Accessed 25 April, 2017. 26

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owned by fellow Jews, the Guttmann family.29 A generation later Hans Liebermann grew up above his father’s hardware shop, which gave the family a sustainable income, but one that was never enough for them to take a holiday. That line of work was typical, Liebermann maintained, because so many other avenues – including agriculture, heavy industry, academia and skilled crafts controlled by guilds – were closed either formally or informally to ordinary Jews.

The professional structure of German Jewry was the retail trade. In [Beuthen] there were maybe 1,500, 1,800 Jews, but on the [Jewish] holidays when the stores were closed, you thought it was a public holiday - 60-70% of all the retail stores were in the hands of the Jews, for there was no other outlet. And the second outlet, in the academic world, was medicine and jurisprudence. Why? With these professions you [did not have to] be connected with institutions, who would not accept Jews.30

Peter Pulzer has argued that this persistent occupational asymmetry of German Jews – the predominance of occupations in independent trades, retail, banking, the law and medicine – did not necessarily stem only from the external constraints mentioned by Liebermann, but that they stuck to employment patterns after emancipation “for which there was no longer an obvious economic rationality”.31 Whatever the causes, the Upper Silesian Jews fitted the broader pattern of employment for their coreligionists throughout Germany.

2.2 Liberalism and its limits By far the majority of Upper Silesian Jews who engaged in political activity leaned towards liberalism on the local stage, and conventional assimilationist positions in the Jewish world. Jews had been represented in civic affairs in Upper Silesia remarkably early, even before the 1812 Edict of Toleration, which lifted many restrictions on Jewish occupations and residence, and in theory made them equal citizens with Christians.32 In Beuthen, Leiser Reichmann became the first Jew to take on a public

29 Emanuel Kirschner, “Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, Streben und Wirken” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1937), 13. http://access.cjh.org/498689. Accessed March 13, 2016. 30 Hans Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 31 Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 11. 32 Vital, A People Apart, 66. 27

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position in the town’s affairs in 1808, and by 1821 there were no fewer than four.33 Beata Dudek has traced the influence of several families – above all the Sorauers, Richters, Guttmanns and Friedländers – on Beuthen’s civic and economic life throughout the nineteenth century. Their prosperity also gave them voting rights, so much so that by the late 1840s more than a quarter of the eligible voters in Beuthen were Jewish.34

That advantage persisted after 1850, when Prussia introduced the three-class voting system, which meant that citizens who accounted for the highest third of taxable income in each district had the same electoral weight as those in the middle third, who in turn had the same as the bottom third. (The franchise also excluded men under 24 and all women until after the First World War.) In Prussian assembly elections only 3.6 per cent of voters were in Class 1 in 1888, with 85.6 per cent in Class 3; by 1913 the proportions had changed only slightly – to 4.5 per cent and 79.8 per cent respectively.35 In Beuthen there were “maybe 60 people who had as much influence as 3,000 in the second class and 100,000 in the third class”.36

Wealthy Jews shared generously in the benefits of this weighted system in elections for both local councils and the Prussian assembly. In Breslau, Jews made up 26 per cent of the voters in the first class in 1888 and 19 per cent in the second class, though they were only five per cent of the overall population.37 In Upper Silesia they exerted similar influence – at the local level a single wealthy Jew in a small town might have the power to nominate one-third of the councillors.38 This preponderance of Jewish voting strength translated to a healthy representation of Jews among elected representatives. From the late 1870s to the mid-1890s, roughly half the councillors in Kattowitz were Jewish.39 That proportion diminished as the non-Jewish percentage of the population increased, but as late as 1908 it was still very large – 16 of the 42 councillors in Kattowitz were Jews, according to the local correspondent of the

33 Markus Kopfstein, Geschichte der Synagogen-Gemeinde in Beuthen O/S (Beuthen: W. Nothmann, 1891), 23. 34 Beata Dudek, Juden als Stadtbürger in Schlesien: Glogau und Beuthen im Vergleich 1808- 1871 (Hamburg: Kovač, 2009), 112-113. 35 Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1985), 233. 36 Hans Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 37 Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 179. 38 Georg Zivier, Deutschland und seine Juden: Ein Buch gegen Vorurteile (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe Verlag, 1971), 90. 39 Stefi Wenzel, Jüdische Bürger und kommunale Selbstverwaltung in preußischen Städten 1808–1848 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), 221. 28

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Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums,40 and many continued to play a prominent role even after the weighted system was abolished in 1918. In Gleiwitz, about 25 per cent of councillors were Jewish in the years before the First World War.41

Typically the Jews involved in local and regional politics were aligned with the various left-liberal parties that eventually became the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party – DDP) in 1918. Among those who made a public impression in the plebiscite years was Walter Grünfeld’s father, the architect Hugo Grünfeld, who led Kattowitz town council from 1908 to 1919 and held official positions even after partition in 1922.42 Hugo Grünfeld had been an active supporter of the Freisinnige Volkspartei (Liberal People’s Party), a forerunner of the DDP, and at the turn of the century unsuccessfully attempted to start a liberal newspaper in Kattowitz to further its aims.43 In Beuthen, DDP leader Max Bloch took a prominent role before the plebiscite in the German campaign.44 Ernst Behrendt, a First World War veteran and holder of the Iron Cross, headed the German trade union roundtable in Beuthen and was a city council member for the DDP and a national committee member of the Centralverein.45 Arthur Kochmann, also a leading light in the DDP, was a lawyer in Gleiwitz, a long-serving councillor and then member of the Prussian parliament from 1919 to 1924, as well as president of the Gleiwitz Jewish community and representative on numerous regional Jewish bodies.46

Three key beliefs bound these men together: political liberalism, assimilation as understood by the Centralverein, and German patriotism. In at least two of those they found a vigorous ally in Max Kopfstein, the rabbi of Beuthen from 1889 until his sudden death in 1924, whose influence dominated the Jewish community. Kopfstein, born in Hungary, was 33 when he arrived in Upper Silesia. He quickly made his mark, writing and publishing a history of the Beuthen Jewish community within two years of his arrival, and over the next 35 years he developed into “unquestionably the most significant personality in Upper Silesian Jewry”.47

40 AZJ, April 3, 1908, 163. 41 W. Guttmann, ZA 2/16: 34, 1. 42 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 110. 43 Grünfeld, Rückblicke, 13. 44 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 303-307. 45 Ernst Gottfried Löwenthal, Bewährung im Untergang: ein Gedenkbuch (London: DVA, 1965), 22. 46 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 104; Löwenthal, Bewährung im Untergang, 102. 47 CVZ, September 13, 1924, 552. 29

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Kopfstein’s reputation extended well beyond the local region. He was on the board of the German branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the multinational philanthropic and lobbying organisation based in Paris. He was active in the German rabbis’ assocation, the Centralverein, the Upper Silesian Cultural Association and numerous other Jewish and non-confessional bodies. Like the Jewish civic and political leaders, Kopfstein was vocal in his support for Germany during the plebiscite campaign. On a personal level he appears to have inspired genuine and widespread respect. The Zionist Gunter Kamm said he was “held in the highest regard by Jews and non-Jews alike”.48 For Margot Frohmann (born Margot Reichmann in 1898), whose family identified as entirely assimilated and extremely liberal, Kopfstein was “a great man, of great tolerance”:

Although he knew our family was relatively freethinking and several family members had been baptised, he always had the same friendly attitude to me ... and was completely understanding when I gave up religious study.49

Others occasionally struck a slightly less admiring note. Marcus Melchior, a Danish rabbi who came to nearby Tarnowitz in 1922 and became a fervent Zionist while leading the small conservative synagogue in Beuthen, found Kopfstein rather self- centred, dedicated to “the subject of Kopfstein” and obsessed with his status as chief rabbi (Oberrabbiner), but nevertheless possessed of tremendous dignity and kindness.50

Kopfstein’s religious and political leanings placed him unambiguously in the mainstream of German Jewry. He sat firmly in the assimilationist camp exemplified by the Centralverein, committed equally to Judentum and Deutschtum, and seeing no contradiction between the two. He spoke at the establishment of the first branch of the CV in Beuthen, on 1 April 1906,51 and the following year was a delegate at its national convention in Berlin.52 By the time of his death Kopfstein was deeply enmeshed in the CV and related organisations. In the two-page tribute carried by the CV-Zeitung on Kopfstein’s death, Rabbi David Braunschweiger of Oppeln, president of the

48 Kamm, “Erinnerungen an die jüdische Gemeinde Beuthen O/S,” 2. 49 Margot Frohmann, “Autobiography” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1982), 6. http://access.cjh.org/439046. Accessed March 13, 2016. 50 Marcus Melchior, A Rabbi Remembers (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1965), 101. 51 Im Deutschen Reich, April 1906, 259. 52 Marjorie Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: the Struggle for Civil Equality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 67. 30

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Centralverein’s Upper Silesia branch, hailed Kopfstein as “the loyal, good Jew, the loyal, good German”.53

Kopfstein presided over the handsome Beuthen synagogue (completed in 1868), referred to in some later accounts as the “organ synagogue”, which held as many as 1,500 people.54 The installation of an organ was one of the key markers of a community’s religious tendencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Upper Silesia had very few, despite the overwhelmingly liberal political leanings of its Jewish population.55 Heinemann Stern put that down to the strength of a religiously conservative minority, with supporters among the wealthiest members of the community, who ensured the liberal majority could not enforce its will on all matters without endangering Jewish unity.56 In Beuthen, earlier symbols of reform such as choral singing and sermons in German (rather than Hebrew) had been introduced to synagogue services in the 1840s.57 But traditionalists continued to regard an organ as unnecessary or inappropriate, and it was not until 1904 that the liberals prevailed.58 The arrival of the organ led to the establishment of a breakaway conservative synagogue or shul, described elsewhere as the “Orthodox prayer house”, next door to the main synagogue.59 Even as late as 1920, the Jüdische-Liberale Zeitung could write that Beuthen was “still quite far from being able to count as liberal” in religion.60

2.3 Interfaith harmony and its limits Van Rahden notes in relation to Breslau that the period between 1916 and 1925 marked a severe deterioration in relations between Jews and non-Jews, due initially to the war, but also to the political tension over the future of Upper Silesia.61 The prewar situation in Upper Silesia itself needs careful examination, principally for what it says about the radical nature of the changes that broke over the region after 1918.

53 CVZ, September 13, 1924, 553. 54 Lamberti, Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany, 108. 55 Magnus Davidsohn, whose father was the cantor in Beuthen, names Oppeln and Leobschütz (Glubczyce) as the only other organ synagogues in Upper Silesia. See JGO, No.23, December 2, 1937, 1. 56 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 86. 57 See Dudek, Juden als Stadtbürger, 315; and Kopfstein, Geschichte der Synagogen- Gemeinde in Beuthen, 34. 58 Dudek, Juden als Stadtbürger, 288. 59 See Kamm, “Erinnerungen an die jüdische Gemeinde Beuthen O/S,” 2; and JGO, No.23, December 2, 1937, 2. 60 JLZ, December 3, 1920, n.p. 61 Van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 231. 31

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The religious conservatism of the Upper Silesian Jewish communities certainly did not translate to intolerance towards the non-Jewish denominations. On the contrary, relations appear to have been overwhelmingly friendly among the various religious leaders, of which Kopfstein was a prime example. The (non-Jewish) Oberschlesische Wanderer said on his death that he “prized confessional harmony above all”.62 The official announcement of his death from the Beuthen Gemeinde praised his successful efforts to foster religious harmony in the city, and his good understanding with the representatives of other faiths.63 The conservative rabbi Melchior corroborated that picture, noting that one Catholic prelate in Beuthen had even played the organ in the synagogue at times.64 The story was the same in Gleiwitz, where Rudolf Schlegel (born 1902) cited the fact that the rabbi, Dr Samuel Ochs, walked with his Protestant and Catholic counterparts in the annual Whitsun procession as an example of the “exemplary tolerance and harmony between the religions”.65

Jews made a point of becoming involved in non-confessional civic bodies and voluntary associations. In 1880, among many committee positions held by Jews in Beuthen were those of Dr Louis Mannheimer and the rabbi, Ferdinand Rosenthal, on the Poor Relief Society, and Dr Otto Friedländer’s wife Jenny on the Women’s Fatherland Society.66 Mannheimer was among the small group of almost perpetual representatives on such bodies, having been a town councillor for 30 years by 1898, and similar representation continued in the twentieth century.67 Bequests and grants from prominent Jewish men were sometimes made explicitly for non-Jewish causes, such as Simon Loewy’s bequest of 300 marks in 1871 for the benefit of “poor Christians” and the coal baron Max Rawack’s endowment of 5,100 marks to be invested to support annually “three worthy Christian citizens in need”.68 Jews also

62 OW, September 2, 1924, n.p. 63 JLZ, September 5, 1924, n.p. 64 Melchior, A Rabbi Remembers, 120. 65 Rudolf Schlegel to Wilhelm Lustig, ZA B2/16: 33. 66 Adressbuch der Stadt Beuthen O.-S. und der ländlichen Ortschaften des Kreises Beuthen, (Beuthen: Wilhelm Förster, 1880), 57, 60. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/4694/edition/4335. Accessed March 3, 2016. 67 For Mannheimer, see Im Deutschen Reich, January 1898, 45. For numerous later examples of secular bodies in Beuthen, see the Adressbücher from 1906-07, 1910-11 and 1912-13. 68 For Loewy, see Adreß-Buch der Stadt Beuthen O.S. einschliesslich des Verwaltungsbezirks Schwarzwald und der Gemeinde Rossberg, 1899 und 1900 (Beuthen: Georg von Mejer, 1899), 186. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/96592/edition/91119. Accessed March 3, 2016. For Rawack, see Adreß-Buch der Stadt Beuthen O.S. einschliesslich des Verwaltungsbezirks Schwarzwald und der Gemeinde Roßberg, 1906-07 (Beuthen: Georg 32

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invested heavily in the town’s physical appearance, including Christian churches. The timber merchant Moritz Goldstein helped pay for the construction of Beuthen’s wooden church built in native Silesian style (Schrotholzkirche), among other donations.69

Many accounts from the pre-First World War period stress the surface harmony between Upper Silesian Jews and Christians, often in rather glowing terms. Peter Maser maintains that relations in Beuthen were “characterised by an atmosphere of good neighbourliness”.70 Wilhelm Lustig (born 1886) assessed conditions in his home town of Gleiwitz as “all but ideal”.71 The liberal Margot Reichmann said she “knew the Evangelical and the two Catholic churches just as well as the Beuthen synagogue”.72 But this picture clearly needs some qualification, for two reasons: first, co-operation between religious institutions did not necessarily reflect the views of the wider communities; and second, most of the judgments stem from memoirs written after the Holocaust, which may tend to idealise the pre-Nazi era. Looking at a wider selection of recollections, a more nuanced picture emerges of relations with non-Jews, which for the most part could be characterised as tolerant, but not necessarily intimate.

Before discussing the majority view, two tiny groups of Jews can be identified with untypical attitudes towards their non-Jewish neighbours. Georg Zivier grew up in the very unusual environment of the estate of the Prince of Pless (south of Kattowitz), where his father Ezechiel, a respected historian of Upper Silesia, was the archivist. He singled out extremely wealthy German Jews from small towns in the region, some of whom converted, who were on very familiar terms with “real Germans”.

They lived a life of luxury, sunning themselves in summer on the fashionable beaches of Heringsdorf, Scheveningen, Biarritz and Rapallo, and enjoying winter fun in the Alps.73

Some, such as the Friedländers, were even grudgingly admitted to the rarified circles of the prince and his aristocratic English wife, Daisy Cornwallis-West, who were on

von Mejer, 1907), 33. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/96590/edition/91118. Accessed March 3, 2016. 69 Max Tau, Das Land das ich verlassen mußte (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe Verlag, 1961), 23. 70 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 84. 71 Wilhelm Lustig to Ernst Ehrlich, November 5, 1959. ZA B2/16, 79. 72 Frohmann, “Autobiography,” 7. 73 Zivier, Deutschland und seine Juden, 98. 33

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good terms with the highest echelons of German society, up to and including the Kaiser. In this extraordinary enclave of Upper Silesian privilege, the princess overcame her antisemitic prejudices only to the extent of admitting there were some “very nice Jews”, but also condemned the “Jew money grabbers … hungry for gold” who allegedly profited during the First World War.74

At the other extreme another very small group of Upper Silesian Jews, the Orthodox, intentionally kept very much to themselves. Benjamin Adler, whose well-off parents came from over the border in Chrzanów, estimated there were only 30-50 Orthodox families in Beuthen. He sniffed at Jews who wanted to assimilate for seeking out social contact with Christians, whereas “Jews who wanted to remain Jews” avoided them.75 Max Gruenewald, also from an Orthodox family in Beuthen, remembered his mother speaking of “chadishmonim, the Protestants, and their counterparts, the tofelmonim, the Catholics, with the same disgust”.76

In the middle lay the vast majority of mostly liberal, mostly middle-class Jews who had no such hostility towards Christians, but also no desire to renounce their identity as Jews. Very few, no matter how secular, moved in the Jewish and Christian worlds without recognising the distinction. Hans Liebermann remembered that his family’s social contacts in Beuthen were also almost entirely with other Jews.77 His wife Lotte, from a highly assimilated and non-religious background, nevertheless said that in Oppeln “you had your Jewish friends and that was it … it wasn’t encouraged that you would get into the non-Jewish community”.78 Heinemann Stern, not an Upper Silesian native but one of the most detailed and perceptive observers of Kattowitz in the second decade of the twentieth century, found the Jews there were “socially isolated”, interacting with their non-Jewish work colleagues in friendly, but rarely close, fashion.79

The prevalence and acceptance of marriages between Jews and non-Jews gives some indication of the point at which social integration of the communities ended. Figures

74 Daisy, Princess of Pless, by herself (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928), 399, 405. The vast Pless Castle was the headquarters of the German Supreme Army Command in the east between 1915 and 1917, regularly hosting Hindenburg, Ludendorff, the Kaiser and civilian political leaders. 75 Benjamin Adler, ZA 3/46, 11. 76 Max Gruenewald, “Childhood Memoirs” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, undated), 10. http://access.cjh.org/567114. Accessed April 17, 2016. 77 Hans Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection.. 78 Lotte Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 79 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 82. 34

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for the whole of Silesia in the early years of the century show rates that were comparable to or slightly higher than other parts of Germany (about one in ten Jews married a non-Jew).80 These rates rose gradually throughout the country in the years before the First World War, a fact that worried Jewish organisations of all tendencies.81 In 1912 the leading Zionist Kurt Rosenbaum spoke on the subject in Kattowitz, railing against the “extraordinary damage” mixed marriages did to Jewry in “social, economic and above all national” terms – a view greeted with animated applause from the crowd.82 Contemporary observers in at least one town, Gleiwitz, believed there were very few such marriages in the first quarter of the century.83 A few known cases suggest those that did take place were viewed with considerable unease by Jews and Christians alike. The Jewish novelist Max Tau (born in Beuthen in 1898) referred to a friend of his father’s named Gotthard, from Königshütte, who married a Jewish woman around the turn of the century, to the alarm of his parents. “The old prejudices had deep roots” in that area, Tau wrote, even though he portrayed Gotthard himself as the very model of ecumenism, respecting Jewish, Protestant and Catholic holy days equally.84

Two marriages in prominent families reveal similar anxiety among liberal Upper Silesian Jews. Rabbi Kopfstein’s own son Felix (born 1886) married a Christian, Gertrud Eckert. According to the Beuthen lawyer and Gemeinde representative Gunter Kamm, the rabbi had always expressed his disapproval of mixed marriages, and was so distressed at his son’s decision that he offered his resignation, which was refused.85 The other case, even more colourful and ultimately tragic, involved Susanne Kochmann, daughter of the head of the Gleiwitz Gemeinde, Arthur Kochmann. She met an Italian major, Giuseppe Renzetti, who had come to Upper Silesia as part of the allied forces supervising the 1921 plebiscite, and their liaison caused “great uproar” in the town.86 William Guttmann, a contemporary witness, recorded in his memoir that non-Jewish Germans did not object to the fraternisation, as the Italians were viewed

80 “Eheschließungen im Jahre 1904,” in Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, vol. 2, 10 (October 1906), 159; and “Die Eheschließungen im Jahre 1906,” in Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, vol. 4, 12 (December 1908), 190. 81 Vital, A People Apart, 262. 82 JR, February 16, 1912, 53. 83 Wilhelm Lustig, ZA B2/16, 79, and W. Guttmann, ZA B2/16, 34. 84 Max Tau, Das Land, 21. 85 Kamm, “Erinnerungen an die jüdische Gemeinde Beuthen,” 3. Felix Kopfstein became a prominent liberal judge in the Weimar years. He escaped to Palestine in 1940 but drowned off Haifa when his ship was inadvertently blown up by the Jewish paramilitary group Hagana. 86 Schlegel, ZA B2/16, 33. 35

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in a much more favourable light than the hated French occupiers. However, the Kochmann family opposed the relationship “solely on the grounds that Renzetti was a Catholic”:

It was inconceivable to the Kochmanns that the girl – the granddaughter of a rabbi [Jakob Cohen of Kattowitz] – should marry outside the faith. But the couple did not give up the fight and succeeded in breaking down the resistance after a struggle that lasted several years. They finally got married in 1926.87

Jewish participation in non-religious clubs and associations also helps to shed light on the nature of their relationship with the Christian population. They took part enthusiastically in typically middle-class organisations devoted to activities such as music, reading, sport and hiking, as well as groups related to particular occupations, such as lawyers and teachers, interconfessional women’s groups, and the chamber of commerce in each town.88 Friedrich Kuschnitzky, a Gleiwitz lawyer who survived to play a role in post-1945 politics, characterised this participation as a genuine cohabitation between Jews and non-Jews, “in the consciousness that they belonged to the same people”.89 But there are some indications that Jewish involvement dropped away after the First World War, and that not all groups operated on such immaculately non-confessional lines.90

The Gleiwitz branch of the German-Austrian Alpenverein (hiking and climbing club) was founded and led by Jews, above all Wilhelm Lustig, but the umbrella organisation and many other branches were openly antisemitic and regarded as a breeding ground for Nazism by the 1920s.91 The explosion of youth walking clubs known as Wandervogel in the early years of the century also revealed starkly antisemitic

87 Cited in Peter Fraenkel, Susanne and the Nazis: a Tale of Intrigue and Heroism (unpublished manuscript, 2011), 7, 24-25. http://peterfraenkel.co.uk/susanne_and_the_nazis_2011.pdf. Accessed March 13, 2016. This marriage had consequences far beyond any interfaith tensions. Renzetti was a fascist who became a confidant of Mussolini and a close associate of leading Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s, including Goering and Hitler. The connection with Renzetti helped to protect Arthur Kochmann, who refused to leave Gleiwitz, for some years during Nazi rule. But in 1943 Kochmann – the last remaining Jew in the town – was deported to Auschwitz. Susanne Renzetti remained friendly with Nazis in exile in Italy as late as the 1970s. 88 See for example Dr Mannheimer, Louis Grünfeld, Simon Guttmann, Sigismund Goldstein and others, Adressbuch der Stadt Beuthen O.S. 1899-1900, 185-187. 89 Friedrich Kuschnitzky to Ernst Ehrlich, November 9, 1959. ZA 2/16: 79. 90 For decline after 1918 see W. Guttmann, ZA 2/16: 34. 91 Ibid. 36

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impulses. Hans Preiss, who abandoned the profoundly pro-German liberalism of his father in the years after 1918, cited the refusal of non-confessional Wandervogel groups to accept Jews as he charted his ideological journey towards hardline Zionist beliefs via the experience of Jewish hiking groups in Kattowitz.92

2.4 Antisemitism Just as general statements of religious harmony should not be accepted without scrutiny, so the prevalence of antisemitism in prewar Upper Silesia also demands careful examination. Documentary sources from the turn of the century indicate that pre-modern forms of antisemitic expression were by no means unknown in Upper Silesia. A 1903 local history of Beuthen, produced by the teachers of the town’s Catholic secondary school, included in a list of folk tales a story titled “The eternal Jew”, alleging that “occasionally you may come across a lonely wanderer in our area, whose face is as wrinkly as a pear, with a snow-white beard and hair, and whose legs reach only to the calves”.93

Reports of antisemitic incidents involving actual Jews dot the newspapers of the era. In 1898 a tenant in Chorzów accused his Jewish landlord of ritual murder, on the basis of a human bone found in the house – subsequently found to be related to the owner’s son’s medical studies. “Anyone who knows the local population will have no doubt that the ritual murder tale found listeners willing to believe it,” Im Deutschen Reich reported.94 In 1905, local newspapers reported that a mob several hundred strong had surrounded the house of a Jewish trader in Beuthen for three nights, after a rumour spread that he had murdered a Christian girl.95 And at Christmas the same year, the Oberschlesische Grenz-Zeitung (then a liberal German-oriented paper) scolded “fanatical” elements who had turned calls to shop with local traders into an appeal not to buy from Jews.96

Contemporary witnesses typically play down the prevalence of antisemitic attitudes in Upper Silesia, at least until 1914. The charismatic Zionist rabbi Joachim Prinz (born

92 Hans Preiss, ZA 2/16: 88, 67. For the conflicts surrounding the establishment of Zionist youth groups in Kattowitz, see Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 88. 93 Heimatkunde von Beuthen (Oberschlesien), 1. Teil (Beuthen, Lehrerkollegium der Städischen Katholischen Realschule zu Beuthen O/S, 1903), 57. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/10671/edition/9910. Accessed April 19, 2016. 94 IDR, vol. 6-7, June-July 1898, 341. 95 IDR, vol. 2, February 1905, 101. 96 IDR, vol. 12, December 1905, 657. 37

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1902), who grew up in Oppeln, reported “not the slightest trace of antisemitism” before the war and “a relationship between Jews and gentiles that could be considered ideal”.97 Gertrude Weissbluth (born Gertrude Wachsner in 1900) recalled that antisemitism in her Beuthen junior school was “not the rule”, except among a few students.98 There were some exceptions – Hans Liebermann was one who maintained antisemitism was a constant presence.99 Outright hostility to Jews from non-Jewish Germans appears to have been rare, but perceptions of less obvious antagonism vary dramatically. Both Max Tau and Liebermann referred to the visit of the Kaiser to Beuthen in 1911, when he was introduced to all the town’s assembled religious functionaries, with the exception of Rabbi Kopfstein – while Tau saw the incident as an innocent mix-up, Liebermann invested it with antisemitic overtones on the part of the mayor.100

References to antisemitism in organised bodies are all but non-existent, other than among “certain Turnvereine” (the frequently nationalistic German gymnastic associations).101 Heinemann Stern mentions the existence of some openly antisemitic German nationalist organisations operating in Upper Silesia before 1914, but warns of a more insidious latent antisemitism expressed in unguarded remarks, such as those of an otherwise congenial colleague, a social democrat, who told him: “When we go down Grundmannstraße [the main street of Kattowitz] and see all the shops in Jewish hands, we don’t like that – it sparks something inside us.”102 Stern acknowledges that such incidents were only occasional warnings in a situation where Jews could mostly expect “prestige, respect and influence”, yet also recalls the question put to him before the war by his then four-year-old son (subsequently used as the title of his memoir): “Why do they hate us?”103

Among the Polish-speaking population, traditional antisemitic tropes also came with a modern political twist, since the Jews (with the Protestants) were identified not simply as Germans per se, but as part of the German ruling elite that ran private

97 Michael Meyer (ed), Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: an Autobiography – the German and Early American Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 19. 98 Gertrude Weissbluth, “Es soll die Spur von ihren Erdentagen nicht in Aeonen untergehn: Entwurf einer Familiengeschichte” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1961), 6. http://access.cjh.org/418364. Accessed April 17, 2016. 99 Hans Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 100 Max Tau, Das Land, 16; Hans Liebermann oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 101 Zivier, Deutschland und seine Juden, 96. 102 Ibid, 84. 103 Ibid. 38

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businesses and occupied a disproportionate number of public positions. With the rise of political Polish nationalism in the early years of the twentieth century, Polish workers and agricultural labourers – with their occasional German Catholic allies – took aim at the unfair advantage accorded to wealthy city Jews by the weighted franchise. James Bjork writes that the Polish Catholic press and parish priests routinely referred to German liberal newspapers as Jewish:

In everyday Catholic discourse, criticism of liberalism was often closely intertwined with attacks on the urban Jewish community that formed the Progressive party’s most reliable constituency.104

Clearly antisemitism existed among both Germans and Poles. But the implications of each appeared different. The perception among Upper Silesian Jews that antisemitism had free rein on the Polish side of the border reinforced their cultural attachment to Germany with pragmatic concerns for their economic and civic security.105 While antisemitism among Germans was not to be taken lightly, the most striking aspect of the pre-war period is the absence of organised political movements harnessing antisemitism to their advantage, and the lack of serious violent incidents of an antisemitic nature. By contrast, parts of the Polish nationalist movement explicitly adopted antisemitic positions, but the Poles seemed to pose no threat to German rule over Upper Silesia, and therefore the German Jews for the most part felt safe. And their faith in the long-term security of their position was underpinned by a profound attachment to the culture they shared with non-Jewish Germans.

2.5 ‘German cultural superiority’ The memoirs of Upper Silesian Jews are filled with references to their youthful love of literature, music and theatre. In that respect they were little different from their bourgeois Jewish counterparts elsewhere in Germany, or from their non-Jewish friends. Beuthen and Kattowitz competed for cultural supremacy, as Margot Reichmann recalled:

Kattowitz was a more modern city than Beuthen, particularly in theatrical and musical life. More visiting artists came there, so it could offer especially good performances and concerts ... In Beuthen there

104 Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, 141. 105 Guttmann, ZA 2/16: 34, 2. 39

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was also good theatre, since the very entrepreneurial director there understood how to attract talented young performers, of whom many went on to become well-known actors and actresses. The famous Wittenberg quartet also came regularly to Beuthen.106

The Jews were at the centre of this world. Heinemann Stern wrote of Kattowitz:

It was the smallest of the large cities of the region, but nevertheless the cleanest, brightest – I would not dare to say beautiful – and enjoyed an intellectual and artistic vivaciousness unmatched by any city twice its size in the west or the south [of Germany] ... A certain jealous rivalry existed with neighbouring Beuthen, which was bigger and richer, but above all considered more solid – and rightly so. In this emotional life the Jewish element played a leading role, not just because of its numerical strength, but also its effectiveness. And just as intense was the Jewish intellectual and social life, undertaken by a broad range of educated and engaged personalities.107

Several factors gave cultural life in the industrial belt an edge that it did not necessarily have elsewhere. The natural and architectural landscapes, both scarred by the massive industrial developments that gave the cities their reason to exist, were ugly to native-born and migrants alike. The region was variously condemned as “one of the least attractive parts of Germany”108 and “undescribably devoid ... of any beauty”.109 Max Tau may have invoked the reputation of Kattowitz as “the little Paris of Upper Silesia”, but even he had to admit that you had to be born in Silesia to appreciate its beauty.110 It was little wonder that Upper Silesians focused so devoutly on other cultural offerings. Further, the province’s location, far from other cultural centres of Germany (with the exception of Breslau, 200 kilometres to the north-west) but close to the poverty of the Polish lands and Galicia, made the Germanness of its culture particularly important to Jews and non-Jews alike. The industrial cities, with their networks of clubs and associations, sophisticated economic infrastructure as well

106 Frohmann, “Autobiography,” 10. 107 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 78. 108 Frohmann, “Autobiography,” 1. 109 Melchior, A Rabbi Remembers, 99. 110 Max Tau, Das Land, 30, 79. 40

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as lively artistic and intellectual life, were seen as the last outposts of modern, urban Germany – a “bulwark of Germanness” as the mayor of Beuthen would later call it.111

For Lotte Liebermann, brought up in a comfortably middle-class family in Oppeln, this conscious orientation towards the west manifested itself in holiday destinations. By the time she was a young adult she had travelled to Italy, France and central Europe, but never further east than Kattowitz: “Travel to Poland, or Warsaw, wasn’t that important because no one really cared. You travelled to Vienna, to Budapest, to the Adriatic Sea, to Switzerland … But no one ever travelled to Russia and to Poland.”112 The Jewish author and law professor Kurt Schwerin (born in Beuthen in 1902) identified this very particular cultural frontier mentality as a crucial factor in the national loyalty of the Silesian Jews:

The immediate vicinity of Poland, combined with a feeling of “German cultural superiority”, produced and enhanced a “patriotism” which, in times of national distress, such as the period following the First World War, turned into fierce nationalism.113

Such cultural nationalism found concrete expression in an exhibition showcasing Upper Silesia called “Work and Culture” in Breslau in October 1919. Its program, endorsed by numerous prominent Jewish representatives of the region, canvassed a litany of familiar themes around the effect of German Kultur on the east, sharpened by the political conditions after the war. The organisers wanted to show how Upper Silesia had been made “from a wilderness into a land of blessed production” and an “undisputed Kulturland”:

What do we want to achieve? Certainly not what the Polish nationalist press credits us with. Creating an exhibition of propaganda, in the worst sense of the word, … is worlds away from our aim. In our view we Germans have no need to do that, due to the simple fact that it is German work and German Kultur that have shaped Silesia and Upper Silesia … What we want is no less than to remove any suggestion that

111 Bernard Stephan, “Beuthen Als Bollwerk des Deutschtums,” in Die deutsche Stadt Beuthen O/S und ihre nächste Umgebung, ed. Erwin Stein (Berlin: Deutscher Kommunal-Verlag, 1925), 37. 112 Lotte Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 113 Kurt Schwerin, “The Jews in Silesia: an Attempt to Assess their History, and their Economic and Cultural Activities” (New York, Leo Baeck Institute Archives. Box 1, Folder 7, Kurt Schwerin Collection, 1972), 95. http://access.cjh.org/475276. Accessed July 9, 2017. 41

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our culture is not homogenous, that it is a blend, something contrived or grafted…114

The identification of German Jews with this Kultur was so complete that some argued the Jews were responsible for its development in Upper Silesia, even in pre- emancipation times. Wilhelm Immerwahr, the Beuthen lawyer and historian, stressed that Jewish migration to the region since the middle ages had come overwhelmingly from the west, not from Poland. In his account they had brought trade, artisan crafts, mining and agriculture to areas that were in part “Slavic and uncivilised” in the early nineteenth century. “It was the Jews who put down the roots of German learning and German ways in the soil of the towns.”115 Immerwahr was no insular patriot – a self- taught linguist, he spoke English and Italian, and was fluent in Polish to a level where he would translate Polish poetry into German and was qualified to address the courts in Polish.116 Yet his adherence to the essential Germanness of the Upper Silesian Jews led him to somewhat extreme and contentious historical conclusions.

One interesting Jewish dissenter from this fiercely pro-German view of Upper Silesian culture was the novelist Arnold Zweig (born 1887). Zweig’s father Adolf, who moved to Kattowitz in 1896, was a very early Zionist and co-founder of the Kattowitz branch of the movement in 1905.117 Arnold Zweig immersed himself in the classics of German literature and music from an early age, but his upbringing in Kattowitz and First World War experiences on the eastern front led him initially to Zionism rather than liberalism.118 In his essay Oberschlesische Motive (Upper Silesian Motifs – written in 1920 but not published until 1926), Zweig derided the way Germans “trembling with traumatic fever” at the prospective loss of Upper Silesia to Poland, had suddenly discovered their love for its beauty, overlooking the realities of industrial life there.

114 Oktobershau 1919: Führer durch die Austellung Arbeit Und Kultur in Oberschlesien, Breslau 1-31 Oktober 1919 (Breslau: Selbstverlag der Austellung, 1919), 6. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/22229/edition/19518. Accessed October 14, 2016. 115 CVZ, February 15, 1927, 99. 116 Paul Immerwahr, “Justizrat Wilhelm Immerwahr (1865-1935).” Mitteilungen des Beuthener Geschichts- und Museumsvereins 25-26 (1963-64), 221. 117 Georg Wenzel (ed), Arnold Zweig 1887-1968: Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern (Berlin-DDR: Aufbau, 1978), 5. 118 Zweig ultimately gave his loyalty to East German socialism, after numerous ideological shifts. See Hans-Harold Müller, “Arnold Zweig (1887-1968),” in Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West: Neue Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte in Schlesien, ed. Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 360. 42

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The lack of reproach, rebellion or radical condemnation of this kind of existence and this [capitalist] spirit can only be explained – other than by our own foolishness – by the fact that the burden fell not on our necks, but on those of the Polish workers, ‘the Poles’ in short, who provide the muscle in Upper Silesia’s body (nothing more, nothing less), whose language no one taught us or suggested we learn, whose way of life no one interpreted for us, and whose rights to better conditions were shielded from us by the Germanising delirium of a presumptuous state that expanded across all borders. The artistic people – we left Upper Silesia as soon as we could, and kept quiet as we fled.119

Zweig was a lonely voice in his refusal to link love of German culture with mainstream pro-German politics, and in his attraction to Zionism. But from modest origins in Upper Silesia, Jewish nationalism grew into an important and increasingly aggressive counterpoint to the mainstream assimilationists.

2.6 Zionism and national identification Zionism had a very early foothold in Upper Silesia, although as in the rest of Germany all forms of Jewish nationalism attracted only a small minority of followers before 1914. In 1882 a teacher, Selig Freuthal, and a businessman, Moritz Moses, founded a B’nai B’rith club in Kattowitz, the first of its kind in Germany, with the goal of helping Romanian and Russian pogrom victims migrate to Palestine. The movement quickly expanded to other parts of Silesia, and in the same year Freuthal and Moses began publishing Der Colonist, the first newspaper in Germany dedicated to the question of Jewish settlement in Palestine.120 Two years later the town was the venue for the founding conference of the Hibbat Zion movement, an event regarded as the founding moment of organised international Zionism. Kattowitz was chosen partly because of its proximity to the border with Tsarist-controlled territory, where most of the 30-odd delegates came from, but also because it was the only town in Germany where a branch of Hovevei Zion (lovers of Zion) had been established.121 Hovevei Zion

119 Arnold Zweig, “Oberschlesische Motive,” Menorah 4, no. 5 (May 1926): 288. 120 Jehuda Reinharz (ed), Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus 1882-1933 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981), xxii. 121 Vital, A People Apart, 391. 43

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promoted the first attempts to establish economically viable settlements in Palestine, but the 1884 conference failed to put support for them on a sustainable footing.122

When the 25th anniversary of the conference was celebrated in 1909, more than 1,500 Zionists descended on the town to hear the secretary-general of the World Zionist Conference, Nahum Sokolow, and other luminaries expound on the significance of Kattowitz and the growth of the movement since 1884, and particularly since the first World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.123 The 1909 event was organised and hosted by Arnold Wiener “with incomparable zeal” on behalf of the Upper Silesian region, but Wiener and other local Zionists such as Dr Isidor Dobrzinsky appear to have attracted few followers until the 1920s, when both were still active in the region.124

Zionist meetings had been held in the industrial district as early as 1903, when the well-known Berlin activist Alfred Klee came to speak. The Zionist paper Die Welt reported that his lecture, titled “Why are not all German Jews Zionists?”, was a brilliant success in Gleiwitz and Beuthen, where he supposedly attracted a crowd of 600 people and the movement immediately signed up 83 new members.125 According to Die Welt Klee was attacked by “the well-known protest rabbi” Kopfstein in the discussion that followed his Beuthen speech, but the Zionist “brilliantly had the last word”. (The “protest rabbis” had objected strenuously to the Zionists’ plan in 1897 to hold their first congress in Munich – it was eventually moved to Basel.)126

Perhaps a more telling indication of Zionist progress in the region is a reference in the 1909 commemorations to Moritz Moses, who had been one of four local representatives at the 1884 conference.127 Die Welt remembered Moses as “a voice crying in the wilderness in Kattowitz for as long as he lived”, suggesting Zionist gains against the dominant liberal-assimilationist narrative had been hard to come by.128 Heinemann Stern found the first stirrings of Zionism during his time as a teacher

122 Poppel, Zionism in Germany, 17. 123 Die Welt, November 19, 1909, 1031-1034. 124 For Wiener, see Melchior, A Rabbi Remembers, 118. For Dobrzinsky, see Siegfried Fraenkel, “Zur Lebensgeschichte meines geliebten Sohnes Michael Fraenkel” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1949), 3. http://access.cjh.org/497855. Accessed March 13, 2016. 125 Die Welt, October 30, 1903, 11. 126 Jehuda Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1893- 1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), 174-176. 127 Yosef Chrust, “The Jubilee of the Katowice Conference,” in Katowice: The Rise and Decline of the Jewish Community; Memorial Book, ed. Yosef Chrust and Yosef Frankel (Tel Aviv: The Society to Commemorate the Jews of Katowice, 1996), 20. 128 Die Welt, November 19, 1909, 1031. 44

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between 1906 and 1909 in Tarnowitz, then a town of 13,000 people with 100 Jewish families, just north of Beuthen.

The movement had not yet gained a proper foothold; it played no role in community life, but it did begin to draw young people into its orbit. For the older generation, Jewish nationalism seemed nothing more than a youthful enthusiasm, whose mostly hot-headed words and deeds they regarded more with amusement than indignation.129

But in the years between Stern’s move to Kattowitz in 1909 and the outbreak of the First World War, conflict sharpened between the Zionists and the advocates of the Centralverein position (of which Stern was one). Around 1912 two meetings in Kattowitz brought their differences into the open: the first a great gathering of Zionists that attracted an unprecedented number of young Ostjuden across the border; the second a Centralverein meeting addressed by the prominent Berlin leader Eugen Fuchs, which led to an exchange of heated accusations and a profound change in the attitude of the Centralverein to the Zionists. Where previously they had stressed the need for unity and the accommodation of political differences, now the atmosphere turned confrontational.130 The immediate cause of the uproar in the Fuchs meeting on November 25, 1912, appears to have been a claim by the Orthodox rabbi of Königshütte, Salomon Goldschmidt, that Jewish nationalism as conceived by the Zionists was so divorced from the Jewish religion that they even accepted that baptised Jews could be good Zionists.131 Goldschmidt, whose cantankerous temperament also led him into regular conflict with Kopfstein, had become a passionate anti-Zionist after visiting Palestine and clashed frequently with local Zionists.132

The context for this rise in tension was the radical change that came over the Zionist movement in the immediate prewar years, when a second generation of activists, led by Kurt Blumenfeld and others, sharpened the attack on the liberals. Ostensibly the change in direction, cemented by a resolution at the Zionists’ 1912 Posen congress, centred around a new stress on making Palestine a central part of every Zionist’s “life

129 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 77. 130 Ibid, 87. 131 IDR, vol 1, January 1913, 27. Heinemann Stern refers only to Goldschmidt “repeating a claim from the press, which the Zionists denied”. See Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 87. 132 Gruenewald, “Childhood Memoirs,” 8. 45

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program”, implying an individual commitment to emigration, rather than leaving the Palestine question to negotations among international diplomats, as Herzl and his successors had advocated.133 But that theoretical requirement masked both a tactical imperative – to take the fight more aggressively to the liberal mainstream – and a broader question of culture that was of particular relevance to a border region such as Upper Silesia. The new wave of Zionists drew a distinction between a subjective reading of the Jews’ situation – that they themselves felt entirely German – and an objective one, which recognised the reality of antisemitism as a persistent and apparently ineradicable fact of German life.134

For the assimilationists, rejection by Christian Germany “only seemed to spur [them] on to renewed efforts at acculturation and repeated affirmations of devotion to Germany and German culture”.135 The early Zionists by and large agreed that Jews were so deeply embedded in German culture that any claims for Jewish nationalism on the grounds of a universal Jewish culture were ludicrous.136 The second generation who now took control of the movement did not deny that they were culturally German. But some among them began to look towards the Ostjuden as the bearers of an authentic Jewish culture, while others such as Franz Oppenheimer engaged in tortuous intellectual gymnastics to reconcile their Jewish nationalism with the belief that “the Jewish culture, as it has been preserved from the Middle Ages in the ghettoes of the east, stands infinitely lower than the modern culture which our nations bear”.137 It was on the question of the Ostjuden that the bitter fights between Zionists and liberals in Upper Silesia would primarily turn in the postwar years.

2.7 The Ostjuden Only months after taking up his position as Beuthen rabbi in 1893, Kopfstein called a meeting to found an association to combat vagrancy (Verein Gegen Wanderbettelei), which by his own account quickly numbered 200 members.138 The stated purpose of the association was to eliminate the “degrading and demoralising” practice of begging from house to house by making small grants to poor Jews passing through the town. It is clear from Kopfstein’s remarks that those passing through came from the east:

133 Poppel, Zionism in Germay, 50. 134 Ibid, 104. 135 Ibid, 104-105. 136 Reinharz, Fatherland or Promised Land, 130-131. 137 Poppel, Zionism in Germany, 58. 138 Kopfstein, Geschichte der Synagogen-Gemeinde in Beuthen, 55-56. 46

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“Since Beuthen has the advantage of lying close by the famous ‘three emperors’ corner’, the number of supplicants is rising by the month.”139

Kopfstein’s anxiety about Jewish vagrants from the east was no idiosyncratic local initiative, but part of a national campaign that united increasingly “respectable” German Jews from the mid-nineteenth century. In fact the desire to prevent poor eastern Jews entering Germany was behind the formation of one of the first successful national Jewish organisations, the Deutsch-Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Federation of German-Jewish Communities - DIGB) in 1869.140 In 1872 the DIGB canvassed the possibility of setting up a “cordon” of Jewish communities along Germany’s eastern border to bribe or otherwise force perpetrators of “idle and demoralising habitual begging” back across the frontier.141 Aschheim argues that to those who shared the views of the DIGB, the Ostjuden were not just a constant source of embarrassment, but were also held at least partly responsible for stoking antisemitism against all Jews, threatening the hard-won economic and legal advances of their German coreligionists and the “fragile fabric of local Jewish integration”. 142

Itinerant Jews from the Russian territories and Galicia requesting help had been a familiar sight in established German Jewish communities for centuries, and were “received into the homes of German Jews with a mixture of sympathy and annoyance”. 143 By no means all came looking for charity. In late nineteenth-century Beuthen, Emanuel Kirschner recalled that even his father’s tiny bakery welcomed a lunch guest almost every day. They might be on commercial business – long-bearded flour traders from Poland, who would produce food from the pockets of their kaftans, since their “over-pious” outlook led them to distrust the meat they could acquire in Beuthen as insufficiently kosher. Or they might simply be “foreigners passing through – alias Schnorrer [beggars]”.144

The increasing numbers of Jews fleeing Tsarist pogroms and the dire economic conditions in Russian Poland gave the question a sharper political edge from the 1880s onwards, just as antisemitic political movements were gaining ground in Germany. German and international Jewish organisations reacted by centralising

139 Ibid. 140 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 21. 141 AZJ, July 30, 1872, 605-607. 142 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 22, 34. 143 Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 107. 144 Kirschner, “Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben,” 13. 47

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charitable giving and designed aid programs that would discourage easterners from settling in Germany. From the late 1880s the Alliance Israélite Universelle – with which Kopfstein was closely aligned – began to explore ways in which the refugees could be made to return to Russian territory, or to encourage them to transit through Europe as quickly as possible on the way to the United States.145

Not all German Jews shared these attitudes. In 1885 and 1886 Prussia controversially expelled more than 30,000 Poles, of whom a large minority were Jews.146 Matthew Fitzpatrick’s analysis shows that the impeccably liberal Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums argued against the expulsions not only on humanitarian grounds, but also because the Ostjuden were essentially German-speaking, “infinitely capable of assimilating into German society” and, crucially, of becoming culturally German (kulturfähig).

Far from a burden, Ostjuden were hard-working and kulturfähig, untainted by Polish sympathies and capable of supporting the German Kulturnation.147

The migration of the Ostjuden to and through Germany was only part of a wider debate over the eastern border. Annemarie Sammartino has argued that despite the deployment of as much as 10 per cent of Prussia’s police force, and occasional mass expulsions, Germany never succeeded in effectively sealing its border.148 The extent to which state measures were directed against Jews specifically is disputed. Fitzpatrick contradicts the claims of Wertheimer, among others, who argued that Upper Silesia was particularly thorough in denying residence to eastern Jews, in contrast to its acceptance of non-Jewish Poles employed in the mining industry.149

Whatever the mechanism, and despite Upper Silesia’s proximity to the border, it seems that the number of Ostjuden who succeeded in settling there was much lower than in other parts of the country. In 1910 only 5.68 per cent of Jews in the whole of Silesia were recorded as foreigners, compared with more than 10 per cent in Baden,

145 Vital, A People Apart, 319-320. 146 Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 93, 133. 147 Ibid, p134-135. 148 Annemarie Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 21. 149 Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 52. For the opposing view, see Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire, 124. 48

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Hesse and Bavaria, 20 per cent in Berlin and an astonishing 58 per cent in Saxony.150 But because of its position as a railway junction, Kattowitz was a key entry point for the Ostjuden, of whom many were in transit to other parts of Germany or to the United States. In 1908, an anonymous correspondent to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums complained that the town’s location as the gateway from Galicia and Poland was stretching the community’s resources to the limit.151 Kattowitz Jews in positions of authority felt duty-bound to offer material support to their coreligionists, even though culturally and socially they felt much closer to their non-Jewish German compatriots.152

If the physical presence of the Ostjuden who settled in Upper Silesia was small, they loomed large in the gathering conflict between Zionists and assimilationists. Despite the view of the AZJ in the 1880s, rejecting the culture of the Jewish east as inferior, or non-existent, was a persistent thread among the liberals. In October 1912 Julius Goldstein wrote on behalf of the Centralverein in response to a sensational article earlier in the year by his Zionist namesake Moritz Goldstein:

The Ostjude may accept [Moritz] Goldstein’s remedy that he live only as a Jew both in the cultural and national sense, because he lives in an environment which has no culture ... We, the Jews of the West, are, and can only be, Germans as far as any culture is concerned ... not because of our desire to assimilate, but because our whole being is so strongly tied to the Western cultural tradition.153

And those who lived on the border felt the contrast most acutely, as the publisher and historian Felix Priebatsch recorded:

A few miles east of the Oder ran the border between the European West and Eastern Europe. That impinged on the Silesian Jews more sharply than the wider German population. Although most of them lived close by the Polish border, did business there and spent time with a partly Polish-speaking population in the villages and small towns, they always firmly stressed their western orientation. They felt themselves to be

150 Statistics from the Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, collated in Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 190. 151 AZJ, April 3, 1908, 163. 152 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 43. 153 IDR, October 1912, 448. 49

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more cultivated than their co-religionists who lived in the east and rated a western and German cultural education more highly than anything. At times of decision, such as the Upper Silesian plebiscite, they stood with Germany without wavering or hesitation.154

The conflict between liberals and Zionists in these prewar years played itself out partly in battles over the right of foreigners (that is, primarily Ostjuden) to vote in community elections. Liberals, opposed by Zionists and the Orthodox, tried to disenfranchise non-German Jews through legal manoeuvres and other means that occasionally even reached the level of physical violence.155 Frustratingly little detail is known about how this point of difference was expressed in the main towns of Upper Silesia. According to Heinemann Stern the struggle was harder-fought there than almost anywhere else, but there is little other evidence for the effects on electoral contests in the local Gemeinden.156

What we do know is that the liberals were rattled. In February 1914 a proclamation (controversially published in non-Jewish papers) was signed by more than 300 prominent Jews from all over the country.157 It accused Zionists in forthright terms of infiltrating non-Zionist organisations and promoting a “national Jewish chauvinism” that could only put Jews at odds with their Christian fellow citizens, “from whom we differ only in religion”. Among the signatories were seven of Beuthen’s Jewish leaders, at least five of whom were recent Gemeinde office holders, suggesting they viewed the Zionists as a realistic threat to their hegemony in the town.158

The Zionists remained a small minority in Upper Silesia, as in Germany as a whole – at best 10 per cent of the national Jewish population by some estimates.159 Actual membership of the Zionist Union was much lower than that, less than 10,000 nationally before 1914.160 But the war would mark a dramatic change in their

154 Felix Priebatsch, “Geschichte der Juden in Schlesien,” Menorah 4, no. 5 (May 1926): 260. 155 Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 128-135. 156 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 86. 157 Berliner Tageblatt, February 5, 1914. 158 Adressbuch der Stadt Beuthen O.S. einschliesslich des Verwaltungsbezirks Schwarzwald und der Nachbargemeinde Rossberg. 1912-1913. (Beuthen: Georg Meier, 1912), 121-122. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/3544/edition/4367. Accessed March 3, 2016. The five were Leopold Cohn, Louis Grünfeld, Ernst Kaiser, Dr Neumann and Anselm Schmidt. Another signatory was Grünfeld’s nephew Felix Benjamin. 159 Max Birnbaum, Staat und Synagoge 1918-1938: eine Geschichte des Preußischen Landesverbandes jüdischer Gemeinden (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1981), 16. 160 Poppel, Zionism in Germany, 33. 50

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prospects, as in so much else. And the debates over antisemitism and the Ostjuden would move from theory to troubling practice.

2.8 Summary This chapter has shown how the Jewish community largely prospered and rose rapidly to positions of influence in Upper Silesia during the nineteenth century. The majority of Jews, whatever their religious tendency, subscribed to liberal politics and a profound belief in both the benefits of the German state and the superiority of German culture. In 1914 numerous potential threats to that unprecedented stability and well- being could be identified, but all seemed eminently capable of being contained. The economic and political strength of the Jews had been somewhat diminished by population trends, but there seemed no reason they could not continue to play an influential role in the wider community. Antisemitism could never be ignored, but it formed no part of the platform of the dominant political parties in Upper Silesia, and did not manifest itself in co-ordinated attacks on the legitimacy of the community. Internally, the challenge raised by Zionism over the status of German Jews provoked robust debates, but the numbers involved remained small and the questions essentially theoretical.

The one development that no one could have foreseen was that the status of Upper Silesia as part of Germany would come under serious challenge. In itself that was something the Jews regarded with horror. But the process by which it came about – through a catastrophic war accompanied by seismic political upheaval and economic ruin – would put the Jews in extreme peril. The forces unleashed by the First World War and their specific impacts on Upper Silesia are the subject of the following chapter.

3. War, defeat, plebiscite: 1914-1921

3.1 The outbreak of war: Jewish optimism In 1914 the status of the Upper Silesian Jews appeared secure. As we have seen, most identified strongly with both German culture and the German state. Their economic position was generally healthy. And by and large relationships with non-Jews in the urban centres were harmonious. But the events of the war years, and Germany’s ultimate defeat, would challenge their understanding of the relationship between Germanness and Jewishness in profound ways. This chapter analyses how the Upper Silesian Jews responded to developments between August 1914 and the decision to partition the province in October 1921, particularly the tumultuous events leading up to the plebiscite of March 1921 and the armed conflict that followed.

German Jews, like other Germans, greeted the outbreak of war with mixed emotions. Alexander Watson, among others, has recently questioned the common assumption that Germans were actively enthusiastic about a war to gain territory in the summer of 1914. Rather, he argues, widespread support for mobilisation was fostered largely by fear of a Russian invasion and collective readiness to defend the homeland.1 German Jews had additional reasons to back the war, hoping for the defeat of Tsarist antisemitic repression and believing that their wholehearted participation would help to overcome antisemitic accusations in Germany that they were insufficiently patriotic. They were encouraged in that belief by the famous speech of the Kaiser on August 1, 1914, in which he declared that he saw “no more parties in my Volk. Among us there are only Germans.”2 Zionist leaders, too, called on their followers to “show once more that we Jews, proud of our ancestry, belong to the best sons of the fatherland” and to put their entire “heart and soul and capacity” at the service of the nation.3

Hans Reichmann in Beuthen wrote of the community’s reaction to the earliest days of the war:

In the synagogue our rabbi [Kopfstein], one of the best speakers and one of the most undisputed patriots of the town, began to read out the

1 Watson, Ring of Steel, 72. 2 Ibid. 3 JR, August 7, 1914, 343.

52 Borderline Germans War, defeat, plebiscite: 1914-1921

names of the first casualties from the Jewish community. We listened with sadness and pride. We were all certain that commitment to the fatherland and the sacrifice of Jewish blood would erase the last antisemitic impulses of the German people forever.4

In the late summer and autumn of 1914 it appeared as though Upper Silesia itself might be threatened by the Russian advances in neighbouring Galicia. Both Jewish and non-Jewish sources credit Kopfstein for helping to prevent panic in Beuthen, when many were on the point of fleeing to the west.5 That danger soon passed, but the war in Galicia threw up questions for the Upper Silesian Jews that could not be answered simply by repeatedly demonstrating their loyalty to Germany.

Most obviously, the invading Tsarist troops were committing countless atrocities against Jews in late 1914, sending thousands west as refugees.6 But it was also clear from the earliest days of the war that vast territories were liable to change hands as a result of the conflict – whether permanent gains made by Germany or Russia or, as it turned out, by new states born of their defeat and the disintegration of Austria- Hungary. In either case, the loyalties of the population to potential new rulers would be at stake, and those populations included very large numbers of Jews, whose national affiliation therefore came sharply into focus.

In the very early days of the war, as German troops crossed the border to confront the Russians, both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans entertained hopes that the Polish Jews would welcome Germans as their liberators from Russian oppression. In September 1914 a joint proclamation of the German and Austro-Hungarian army chiefs was published in Hebrew and Yiddish, promising Polish Jews equal rights and religious, economic and cultural freedom under German rule.7 Posters and leaflets were prepared in a controversial collaboration between the German military and the Zionist-dominated Komitée für den Osten (Committee for the East, originally the Committee for the Liberation of Russian Jews) foreshadowing “an era of equality, human dignity, freedom and unrestricted employment” for Jews in the event of a German victory.8

4 Hans Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 13. 5 Der Oberschlesier, vol. 4 (April 1925), 44. 6 Watson, Ring of Steel, 183. 7 AZJ, September 11, 1914, 435. 8 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 121. The collaboration provoked younger Zionists to denounce those who agreed to tie the movement so explicitly to the German cause. 53

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The Breslau Jüdische Volkszeitung reported from Modrzejów, just across the border from Kattowitz, on August 7, 1914, that the German soldiers were “received everywhere with jubilation as liberators from the yoke of Russian serfdom and tyranny”. In what seems an extraordinary case of wish-fulfillment, the paper wrote: “The poor afflicted Polish Jews already felt themselves to be German, and want to stay that way.”9

Kopfstein worked closely with the military leadership during these days to make the wish a reality. The rabbi went with a Catholic priest, Augustin Schwierk, to towns across the border including Sosnowiec and Będzin, where they spoke to meetings of the local population urging support for Germany, Kopfstein in German and Yiddish, Schwierk in Polish.10 But not all saw this attempt to ally Polish Jews with the German cause in a favourable light. Heinemann Stern recounts how he crossed the border near Laurahütte (Siemianowice, seven kilometres from Sosnowiec) without any hindrance in the early weeks of the war and met a Jew from one of the border communities on the Polish side:

He was very happy with the new situation, including the German occupation. ‘Yes, yesterday we prayed for the Kaiser.’ I was baffled. ‘Who told you to do that?’ He replied: ‘The rabbi from B[euthen].’ Honestly, a smart piece of advice! What use are the prayers of Polish Jews to the Kaiser? And if the Russians had come back and found that the Jews of M[odrzejów] had been praying for the Kaiser in the synagogue ...11

The Russians did not come back to the borderlands, but nor did relations between the occupiers and the Polish Jewish population develop as the Germans had hoped. In particular the Jews felt betrayed by Germany’s ultimate recognition, following the collapse of the Tsarist regime, that an independent Polish state had become inevitable.12 The nature and boundaries of that new state therefore came sharply into

9 Cited in AZJ supplement, August 14, 1914, 2. 10 Der Oberschlesier, vol. 4 (April 1925), 44. A poster announcing one of the meetings, in Sosnowiec on September 3, 1914, is held at the Silesian Library (Biblioteka Śląska) in Katowice. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/96803/edition/91232. Accessed August 27, 2017. 11 Heinemann Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, p95 12 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 279. 54

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focus as the war dragged on, under increasingly testing circumstances for Jews on both sides of Germany’s eastern border.

3.2 The growth of antisemitism and Zionism The war years in the east left the Jews there more vulnerable than ever. The desperate food shortages and military failures destroyed faith in the Austro-Hungarian empire and unleashed competing nationalist forces. Watson argues persuasively that the antisemitism that flourished everywhere may have had prewar roots, but “its intensification and brutalization was a wartime product”.13 As early as April 1918 relations between Poles and Jews in Kraków – where both groups had willingly joined in support of the Habsburg war effort in 1914 – broke down into five days of vicious antisemitic riots.14

The political pressure from Polish nationalists loomed even more ominously as the German war effort collapsed in the autumn of 1918. In those uncertain days, Jews in the Polish lands were liable to be accused of all varieties of disloyalty to Poland: that they were pro-German, pro-Bolshevik or pro-Zionist. 15 In November Jews were slaughtered as collaborators in pogroms that swept across Poland.16 Under those circumstances the optimistic efforts of Kopfstein and others to link German success with Jewish liberation in 1914 came to seem profoundly misguided and left the liberals of the Centralverein with a bad conscience.17 Reflecting in October 1918, the AZJ admitted: “The Jews of Poland are simply orientated towards Jewry/Jewishness, and nothing could be further from their thoughts than operating as a German advance guard in Poland.”18

Events in Germany had also shifted opinion both towards and among Jews. The notorious 1916 census of the number of Jews who had enlisted in the army (Judenzählung) was the most obvious sign that Jews would be prime candidates for blame in the event that Germany lost the war.19 It was enough to instantly change the

13 Watson, Ring of Steel, 501. 14 Ibid, 502-503. 15 William W. Hagen, “Murder in the East: German-Jewish Liberal Reactions to Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland and Other East European Lands, 1918-1920,” in Central European History 34, no. 1 (2001), 7. 16 Vital, A People Apart, 738. 17 Hagen, “Murder in the East,” 29. 18 AZJ, October 11, 1918, 484. 19 Vital, A People Apart, 649. 55

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perception of some German Jews, such as the philosopher Ernst Simon, then a frontline soldier. The census ripped Simon out of the “dreamlike self-deception” that German Jews and non-Jews were one community. Instead it illustrated “that we were foreign, that we stood to one side and had to be identified and counted, noted down and treated as a special category”.20

Growing public evidence of antisemitism challenged young Jews in Upper Silesia to examine their relationship to the nation, and in some cases to break with the assimilationist views of their parents. Hans Liebermann had suffered malnutrition as a result of food shortages during the war, then endured personal experiences of antisemitism after joining the army in March 1918. “When the war went sour it was blamed on the Jews,” he remembered. Yet he retained his parents’ loyalty to Germany, and went on to become active in the Centralverein in the 1930s: “We were so assimilated, our representation was so that we were Germans and happened to be Jewish ... We were not happy about [losing the war]. It was our defeat.”21

Gertrude Wachsner, a contemporary of Liebermann, reacted differently as she experienced the war as a schoolgirl in Beuthen and Kattowitz:

Gradually the war influenced us not only through the inconveniences and material privation it brought – our views about the German fatherland also changed. Until then we were at one with our parents and grandparents in regarding Germany as the best country in the world, where you could live and work in peace. But the longer the war went on and the worse the scale of the defeats, the more hostile the atmosphere became. ‘The Jews are war profiteers and shirkers,’ the word went, and we began to avoid discussions about the war and its possible outcome. 22

The accusation that the Jews were profiting from the war struck hard, not least because so many were employed in small business, retail and trade, in some cases inevitably dealing with scarce foodstuffs or benefiting from the boom in military production – Arnold Zweig’s Zionist father Adolf, for example, organised the

20 Adi Gordon, “Auf der Suche nach der Zentraleuropäisch-jüdischen Generation des ersten Weltkrieges: ‘Weltbühne’ und ‘Brith Shalom’,” in Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendliche im ‘Zeitalter der Jugend’, ed. Yotam Hotam (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2009), 158. 21 Hans Liebermann, oral history interview, Emmanuel Ringelblum collection. 22 Weissbluth, “Es soll die Spur,” 8. 56

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distribution of army contracts among Upper Silesian saddlers.23 Actual cases of profiteering provoked intense reproach in the Jewish community, in the knowledge that they provided fuel for antisemitism. In 1915 Kopfstein thundered from the pulpit against three Jewish businessmen caught up in a profiteering scandal as traitors to the fatherland.24

Only those who disavowed the fatherland entirely could separate the fate of the Jews from the military situation. The future rabbi Joachim Prinz, a teenager in Oppeln during the war, moved decisively towards a Zionist outlook as the war progressed: “I watched my father collect the daily dispatches about the war, which was beginning to look rather dismal. But it was not my war and Germany was not my country.”25 The same sudden shift between the generations affected Hans Preiss, the son of Eduard Preiss, a respected Kattowitz doctor, local councillor and Centralverein stalwart. Hans (born 1904) lived through his most impressionable years during the war and shortly afterwards came to the conclusion that “everything my father says is wrong”:

I have this in common with the German people: language, environmental influences, cultural influences for the past 150 years, but I belong to another family …. I am a German citizen … but I do not and can never belong to the German nation [Volksgemeinschaft]. I am essentially alien to the German people.26

Events outside Germany also breathed life into the idea that Zionism represented a more realistic path for German Jews than it had seemed before the war. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government endorsed the establishment in Palestine of a “national home for the Jewish people”, signalled a momentous change for the movement, instantly removing it from “the never-never land of earnest fantasy” and into the real political world as a credible international force.27 As the Zionist claim of a distinct Jewish nationality began to gain more traction, the assimilationists feared the acceptance of that view was a gift to the antisemites. Hans Preiss wrote:

23 Wenzel, Arnold Zweig, 5. 24 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 15. 25 Meyer, Joachim Prinz, 38. 26 Preiss, ZA 2/16: 88, 58. 27 Vital, A People Apart, 692. 57

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The old men of the Kattowitz Gemeinde committee were appalled, since they promoted the views of the Centralverein … they were afraid that through a strong Zionist movement (maintaining that we Jews do not belong to the German people), a corresponding counter-movement would grow up which could strip the Jews – all Jews, not just the Zionists – of their civic rights, given that the Jews, that is the Zionists, themselves admitted that they were not part of a unified [German] nation.28

These questions came into sharper focus as the 1921 plebiscite demanded a formal declaration of national loyalty, and as nationalists on both sides defined in increasingly aggressive terms what it meant to be either German or Polish. Most Jews had no hesitation in making that declaration, or in defining their Germanness – they felt they were “in civic, cultural and national respects a constituent part of the German people”.29 But in the heat of the Upper Silesian conflict, the more effusively they demonstrated their attachment to Germany, the more aggressively it was dismissed by some non-Jewish Germans. Furthermore, when partition came, the liberal German Jews in the parts of the province allocated to Poland faced a challenge to their view that the presence or absence of Kultur was among the most salient divisions between peoples and lands. Increasingly others – both antisemites and Zionists – pressed the case that the most important distinction was in fact between Jews and non-Jews.

3.3 Korfanty and the Polish claim to Upper Silesia The key figure on the Polish side of the plebiscite debate was Wojciech Korfanty, a highly effective leader whose vitriolic anti-German propaganda also indulged antisemitism and incitements to violence. The election of the demagogic, anticlerical opportunist to the Reichstag as a representative of the National Democracy party (known from its initials ND as Endejca) in 1903 had marked a transformation in Upper Silesian Polish nationalist politics. Born and brought up in the mining village of Laurahütte, north of Kattowitz, Korfanty’s program before the First World War rested on fierce opposition both to German political and economic domination of Upper Silesia, and to the dominant Catholic Zentrum party, which enjoyed the support of

28 Preiss, ZA 2/16: 88, 50. 29 Birnbaum, Staat und Synagoge, 18. 58

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German-speaking Catholics as well as most Polish-speaking Upper Silesians.30 Within a few years the Polish nationalist vote in Upper Silesia had risen as high as 40%.31

Korfanty’s vision was to persuade both the native dialect-speakers and the more recent arrivals that they were all ethnic Poles whose interests lay with the Polish heartland, regardless of current political borders. In contrast to Zentrum’s accommodation with fellow-Catholic German Upper Silesians and the German state, he proposed a radical populist nationalism, rejecting any suggestion of a separate Upper Silesian identity that might lead to claims for autonomy or even independence. He opposed the socialism of the Social Democratic party almost as vehemently as his Zentrum foes did, but championed the cause of Polish workers on nationalist grounds as victims of their German employers.32

Korfanty frequently expressed hostile opinions towards the Jews, but his antisemitism appears largely as a branch of his fanatical anti-German tirades rather than the deep ideological conviction of the Endejca leader, Roman Dmowski. This is not to suggest that Korfanty saw Jews in any way as potential citizens with equal rights or a legitimate stake in the Polish nation-state he hoped to create. But in the struggle to bring Upper Silesia into the Polish fold, the Jews attracted his attention largely as a form of “super-German”, whose economic, administrative and social influence was an exaggerated version of the privileged position he ascribed to Germans in general. As a result he promised to wage a “relentless struggle” against them.33 Korfanty also attacked the Social Democrats as “infiltrated by Jews”, but for the most part he portrayed the Jewish community as archetypal capitalists, who were beneficiaries and perpetrators of German economic hegemony in Upper Silesia.34 This view mirrored rural Poles’ reactions to the urbanisation of the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Walter Grünfeld, analysing the rapid development of Kattowitz after it attained city status in 1865, noted that newly arriving Germans and Jews were “separately identified” by the Poles, but regarded equally as “opponents of the original [Polish] villagers”.35

30 Karski, Korfanty, 72-73. 31 Rudolf Vogel, Deutsche Presse und Propaganda des Abstimmungskampfs in Oberschlesien (Beuthen: Oberschlesische Zeitung, 1931), 24. 32 Karski, Korfanty, 61. 33 Ibid, 62. 34 Ibid, 85. 35 Grünfeld, Rückblicke, 12. 59

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It had become increasingly clear since the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 and Russia’s subseqent withdrawal from the war that an independent Polish state would come into being when hostilities ended. But where its boundaries would be drawn was far from obvious. As we have seen, in January 1918 Woodrow Wilson included independence for Poland as the thirteenth of his fourteen points laying down the basis for an enduring peace. But Wilson’s formulation that it should include the territories “inhabited by indisputably Polish populations” did little to satisfy competing interests at the end of the war. Germany’s military defeat immediately brought into dispute three of its eastern provinces with large Polish populations – Posen, West Prussia and Upper Silesia.

Korfanty had ambitions to lead the new Polish state, but his immediate goal in the wake of Germany’s defeat was to wrest Upper Silesia from its weakened grasp – or at least as much of it as he could get away with. Here he came up against the opposition of Poland’s new leader, Jósef Piłsudski, who became Korfanty’s most formidable opponent, and ultimately his political nemesis. Piłsudski, from a social democratic background, held a pragmatic vision of an independent Polish state that had long competed with the right-wing, fervently antisemitic nationalism of Dmowski.36 As well as their sharp ideological differences, Piłsudski and Dmowski held diametrically opposed views on Poland’s geopolitical priorities. Piłsudski, obsessed with shoring up Poland’s eastern border against Soviet Russia, was lukewarm even on Poland’s claims to Posen and West Prussia, and certainly had no ambitions to incorporate what he called “the old Prussian colony” of Upper Silesia.37 But it was Dmowski who led the Polish delegation at the Versailles conference, where the future of the region would be decided, while his party colleague Korfanty made political preparations in Upper Silesia.38

As the German forces withdrew, accusations that Polish Jews had sided with Germany during the war helped to strengthen the antisemitic currents in Polish nationalism.39 Leaflets distributed in Warsaw in October 1918 called for Korfanty as national leader instead of the “minion of the Jews”, Piłsudski.40 In November pogroms swept across

36 Andreas Kosssert, “Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalist Antisemite: Roman Dmowski,” in In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 91-92. 37 Karski, Korfanty, 186. 38 Ibid, 196-199. 39 Frank Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen 1881-1922: eine Studie zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981), 173. 40 Ibid, 179. 60

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Galicia, coming within 20 kilometres of the border with Upper Silesia at Chrzanów, where at least seven people were killed and the Jewish population was forced to flee.41

At Versailles in the first months of 1919, Polish demands were backed resolutely by France, largely as a result of its desire to weaken Germany.42 By February Poland had effectively taken military control of Posen, and in June the Versailles Treaty confirmed about 90 per cent of it as Polish territory, along with about 66 per cent of West Prussia.43 Upper Silesia – which had not been part of a Polish state for many centuries – was much more contentious. The Polish and French delegations at first succeeded in persuading the other three members of the “council of four” allied powers – Britain, the United States and Italy – that almost the whole of Upper Silesia should be immediately ceded to Poland, knowing that a vote of the population was likely to produce a much more ambiguous result.44

That decision sparked huge pro-German protest rallies in Upper Silesian cities, and the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, persuaded Wilson and his French counterpart, Georges Clemenceau, that the province’s future should not be settled without a plebiscite.45 Dmowski’s unabashed antisemitism hardly helped the Poles’ case, as prominent British Jews objected strongly to his “chauvinist gang”, not least when he accused Lloyd George of being “an agent of the Jews”.46 The campaign and vote would be supervised by an Inter-Allied Commission, with German troops required to leave the province by the end of January 1920. In early February of that year, 20,000 allied troops, the majority French but also including British and Italian units, entered Upper Silesia.47 Over the next two years the Germans would bitterly accuse the French forces of actively and passively aiding the Poles, as Upper Silesia descended into bouts of bloodshed ranging from isolated political murders to full- scale warfare.

41 JR, November 15, 1918, 357. 42 Karski, Korfanty, 197. 43 Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: the Germans in Western Poland 1918-1939, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 16, 21. 44 Karski, Korfanty, 199. 45 Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, 49-50. 46 Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 222, 227. 47 Ernst Birke, “Schlesien,” in Die Deutschen Ostgebiete zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik, ed. Erwin Hölze (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1966), 159. 61

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When the plebiscite was announced, Korfanty’s propaganda machine had a head-start over any official German efforts.48 He would play a key role in the violence of words and deeds that followed, leaving Upper Silesia sharply divided and the Jews exposed to fresh threats. But a new threat of violence strongly tinged with antisemitism also emerged from the German side. The departure of German troops from Upper Silesia and the weakness of the new German republic left a vacuum that was eventually filled by a variety of irregular forces who were often aggressively hostile to the Jews. They would play a pivotal role in changing the political atmosphere.

3.4 The Freikorps and German antisemitism In the first phase of the Weimar republic (1919-23), the irregular forces known as the Freikorps – mostly composed of war veterans with strong nationalist leanings – added an extra element of violent instability. The new republican government based on the Social Democrats, the Catholic Zentrum and the liberal DDP was besieged by internal threats from the extreme left and right, uncertainty over the country’s borders in both east and west, deep economic crisis and the demands of the victorious allied powers. Nor could it rely on the loyalty of the army hierarchy, which did all it could to transfer blame for the military defeat of 1918 and the punitive measures of the Versailles Treaty to the civilian politicians.49

As a result the Weimar governments developed a febrile relationship with Freikorps units, at times acknowledging their role (even formally incorporating them into the regular army), at others turning a blind eye to their freelance activity either through weakness or calculation. First used to help put down revolution from the left in the form of the workers’ councils (Räterepublike) that briefly took over Munich and other cities in 1919, Freikorps elements subsequently played a central role in the attempts to overthrow democratic rule by Wolfgang Kapp in 1920, and by Adolf Hitler in his 1923 putsch. Outside Germany’s borders they took part in exceptionally brutal campaigns in the Baltics and elsewhere.50

The role of the Freikorps in Upper Silesia began when the government called for volunteers to form a Border Defence force (Grenzschutz) in January 1919, in response

48 Vogel, Deutsche Presse und Propaganda, 38. 49 Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Penguin, 1991), 68. 50 Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 72-76. 62

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to Polish insurrection in the neighbouring province of Posen.51 By the end of May there were an estimated 250,000 armed Germans on the eastern border, and in August a Freikorps brigade led by the naval officer Wilfried von Loewenfeld was sent into Upper Silesia to put down the brief “first Polish uprising”.52 Although all German military and paramilitary forces were required to leave Upper Silesia in January 1920, some Freikorps continued to operate there clandestinely under the banner of the German “special police”, smuggling in arms and carrying out reprisals against Poles and German “traitors”.53 Following the inconclusive outcome of the plebiscite in March 1921, the Freikorps returned in large numbers to combat the “third Polish uprising”, turning the military tide with a hugely symbolic victory in May 1921 at the battle of the Annaberg (about 60km north-west of the industrial district, outside Krappitz/Krapkowice).

Bernhard Sauer notes that for the German government “there was a danger that, as in the Baltic, once the Freikorps were mobilised [in Upper Silesia], they could no longer be controlled and would pursue their own political objectives”.54 Those fears proved to be well grounded. Not all Freikorps units were driven by antisemitism – indeed many Jews enthusiastically took part in early Freikorps interventions, particularly against the Bavarian Räterepublik, even sometimes with the endorsement of rabbis.55 But increasingly the Freikorps became associated with far-right völkisch nationalism, violently hostile to the democratic Weimar parties who comprised in their view a “Jew government”.56

The Freikorps were closely associated with Bavaria, but many key leaders and participants in the Upper Silesian campaigns were locals. Hans Reichmann, the Centralverein lawyer in Beuthen, identified both reactionary Bavarian groups and young German Upper Silesians among the main components of the Freikorps troops.57 The Upper Silesia campaigns became a key breeding ground for proto-Nazi elements, and the Hitler regime in turn glorified the exploits of the Freikorps there

51 Bernhard Sauer, “‘Auf nach Oberschlesien’: Die Kämpfe der deutschen Freikorps 1921 in Oberschlesien und den anderen ehemaligen deutschen Ostprovinzen,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 4, no. 58 (2010), 298. 52 Ibid, 301-302. 53 Ibid, 308-309. 54 Ibid, 311. 55 Roland Flade, Juden in Würzburg 1918-1933 (Würzburg: Freunde Mainfränkischer Kunst und Geschichte, 1985), 92. 56 Sauer, “‘Auf nach Oberschlesien’,” 319. 57 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 34. 63

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after coming to power – the memorial and ceremonial amphitheatre (Thingplatz) on the site of the Annaberg was supposedly the largest built anywhere under the Nazis.58 Tooley warns that many accounts of the Upper Silesian activities of the Freikorps published in the 1930s exaggerated elements that would find favour with the Nazis.59 But there is plenty of contemporary evidence of open antisemitism, and many Freikorps leaders later found their way to the Nazi hierarchy, often through the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA – commonly known as the Brownshirts). Research by Michael Mann has found that Upper Silesians – even more so than Germans from other territories lost or partially lost after the First World War – were disproportionally represented among Nazi war criminals.60

Among the Freikorps leaders active in Upper Silesia was Hubertus von Aulock, a local from Kochelsdorf (Kochlowice) on the fringe of the industrial triangle. During the 1920 Kapp putsch his troops had occupied Breslau, where he was held responsible for unspeakable acts of torture, threats to shoot Jews and the deaths of numerous captives, including the Jewish socialist activist and newspaper editor Bernhard Schottländer, whose mutilated body was fished out of the Oder months later.61 Upper Silesian Jewish leaders would later complain of Aulock’s “malign influence” in relation to outbreaks of antisemitism following the plebiscite.62

Another was Manfred von Killinger, who led the Ehrhardt Brigade and plotted the murder of the Weimar politician Mathias Erzberger in August 1921.63 Closely associated with Killinger’s group were “countless agitators” of the antisemitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund (German People’s Defence and Resistance Association – DSTB), whose leader, Richard Kunze, had won infamy for openly espousing violence against Jews.64 The DSTB’s activities helped to ensure the rapid spread of antisemitism in Upper Silesia among the adherents of the Freikorps, and Kunze would become the most prominent antisemitic agitator in the region in the

58 Robert Gerwarth, “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe”, in War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, ed. Gerwarth and John Horne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70. 59 T. Hunt Tooley, “German Political Violence and the Border Plebiscite in Upper Silesia, 1919-1921,” Central European History 21, no. 1 (March 1988), 80. 60 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 227. 61 Sauer, “‘Auf nach Oberschlesien’,” 303-305. 62 AZJ, July 22, 1921, 169. 63 Bernhard Sauer, “Freikorps und Antisemitismus in der Frühzeit der Weimarer Republik,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 56, no. 1 (2008), 17. 64 Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik, (Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 2003), 172. 64

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years that followed.65 Walter Grünfeld, whose father Hugo was the German representative on the three-member body overseeing the plebiscite in Kattowitz (one Polish and one German member, with a French overseer), recalled how he and his mother stumbled upon a group of young Freikorps members outside the city singing a provocative song of the Ehrhardt Brigade, “with a violently antisemitic refrain”.66

The acknowledged leader of the Freikorps, known collectively from May 1921 as the “self-defence forces” (Selbstschutz), Karl Höfer, was also an Upper Silesian, from Pless (Pszczyna), south of Kattowitz. Höfer became a hero to the Upper Silesian Germans after leading his forces at the Annaberg. But he also attracted animosity from some on his own side for condemning the antisemitic activities of groups loosely under his control, including death threats to Jews and the display of swastikas on the vehicles of some formations.67 The CV-Zeitung noted in 1924 that Höfer, who had left “an everlasting memorial in the hearts of all true Upper Silesians”, had written to the Centralverein praising the bravery of Jewish soldiers in the First World War and denying the “false accusations” of those who questioned the Jews’ commitment to the German cause.68 (Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1939 Höfer was a senior SS officer on Himmler’s staff.)

Höfer was not the only Freikorps leader to publicly reject antisemitism. A statement by Dr Römer of the Bavarian Freikorps Oberland in July 1921 insisted that its Upper Silesian group included numerous Jews and had no antisemitic tendencies. However, the fact that it needed to order the removal of swastikas from its members’ helmets and issue a denial that after fighting the Poles the group wanted to “hammer in the heads of the Jews” suggested ordinary members did not necessarily share the leadership’s view. 69

The Jews of the Upper Silesian cities were only too aware of the double-edged sword represented by the use of the Freikorps to defend German interests. As the CVZ’s praise for Höfer indicates, the darker political threat of antisemitism could be temporarily overlooked by Jews invested in the German national cause, as almost all

65 Sauer, “‘Auf nach Oberschlesien’,” 312. 66 Grünfeld, Rückblicke, 30. 67 Karl Höfer, Oberschlesien in der Aufstandszeit, 1918-1921: Erinnerungen und Dokumente (Berlin: E.S. Mittler und Sohn, 1938), 204. 68 CVZ, September 13, 1924, 551. 69 IDR, July 1921, 226. Dr Römer was probably Josef “Beppo” Römer, who later joined the Communist Party, plotted to assassinate Hitler and was executed by the Nazis in 1944. 65

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were. Jewish businessmen quietly funded the Selbstschutz and there were even Jews who joined or tried to join the Freikorps in Upper Silesia.70 Hans Reichmann notes that “curiously enough”, Jews fought and died in their ranks.71 The 1935 Philo-Lexikon (“the Jewish Encyclopedia”) maintained that “countless Jews” joined the Selbstschutz, naming six who fought, of whom three were killed. Among those mentioned is Herbert Cohn, who died at the Annaberg. 72 Another, Alfred Badrian, was flag-bearer of the company led by Albert Leo Schlageter – Schlageter joined the NSDAP in 1922 and became a Nazi martyr after his execution by the French a year later.73

Such individuals may seem like isolated figures, and in some cases peculiarly tragic ones, but it should not be assumed that joining the armed groups was an extreme consideration among Jews. Rabbi David Braunschweiger of Oppeln lamented the fact that many more Jews would have joined the Freikorps, but were prevented from doing so by widespread antisemitism.74 The willingness to fight even alongside known antisemites and extreme nationalists attests to the strength of the pro-German outlook among Jews, and to the acute dilemma they faced in acting on it.

There is also some evidence of antisemitism among the Polish forces which confronted the Freikorps in the three “uprisings” – first in August 1919, then in August 1920 and finally in May-June 1921 – and which took part in the lower-level violence that persisted throughout the period, resulting in almost 3,000 deaths between November 1918 and June 1922.75 Timothy Wilson notes numerous instances of explicitly antisemitic violence by pro-Polish forces, although it seems likely that in this period Jews were sometimes incidental rather than primary targets.76 Max Bloch, the Beuthen DDP leader and representative on the German plebiscite commission (a cross-party body set up to represent German interests in the campaign), believed Jews in rural areas were threatened by armed Polish groups “because of their pro-German inclination” rather than because they were Jews per se.77

70 For funding, see Guttmann, ZA 2/16: 34, 3. 71 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 35. 72 Emanuel bin Gorion, Alfred Loewenberg, Otto Neuburger, Hans Oppenheimer (eds), Philo- Lexikon: Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1936. Unaltered reproduction. Königstein: Jüdischer Verlag, 1982), 515. 73 Robert Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918-1923 (New York: Harvard University Press, 1952), 236-237. 74 Der Schild, October 24, 1927, 327. 75 Wilson, Frontiers of Violence, 5. 76 Ibid, 139. 77 Der Schild, October 24, 1927, 334. 66

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But most important for the future of the Jews were the dangers inherent in the breakdown of state authority, whether German or Polish, and the mass of resentments unleashed on all sides – over wartime defeat, perceived German or Polish iniquity, the fear of violence during the plebiscite period, and increasing economic desperation. It produced a profoundly unstable climate where scapegoats were easily sought. This hostile atmosphere – and to some extent the emergence of the Jews as targets – was fuelled during the months preceding the vote by shrill propaganda from both sides.

3.5 The Jews in the plebiscite campaign Little has been written about the Jews in relation to the plebiscite campaign, beyond the fact that they were passionately and vocally pro-German. Hans Reichmann wrote that even his Jewish neighbours in Beuthen who were free of any chauvinistic tint had become infected with nationalistic fever by the events following the war:

Like every Upper Silesian Jew, they embodied a healthy attitude in favour of the German fatherland. For them the choice between Germany, where inflation had destroyed their savings, and Poland, which as a young, future-oriented state promised new development potential, did not require a moment’s debate. They naturally followed the imperative of their historical, cultural, linguistic and emotional bond, by giving everything for the cause of Upper Silesia remaining with the Reich.78

Before the campaign began, the JLZ reflected on divisions between Upper Silesia’s Jews, claiming that uncertainty about the province’s future was helping to increase the influence of the Zionists, who were “on the alert everywhere to draw into their orbit those who yearned for positive Jewish values, but who would never become Orthodox”.79 Liberals should be ready to resume hostilities, the paper argued, but only after the plebiscite campaign. For now, “it goes without saying that every conflict between Jewish interests in Upper Silesia must be extinguished; every free thought must be directed towards only one goal; the plebiscite and its successful execution”.80

Given their relatively tiny numbers, and their obvious German allegiance, the Jews were not regarded as a demographic group that would swing the vote one way or the

78 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 34. 79 JLZ, December 3, 1920, n.p. 80 Ibid. 67

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other. One Polish analysis in the early days of the campaign characterised the Jews as a “realistically minded element” that might be “not unsympathetic to the idea of Polish sovereignty”.81 This was wildly optimistic, but the Poles did make some attempts to tailor their message, at least so as not to risk undermining support for the Polish cause in other countries through displays of open antisemitism.82 There is some evidence of crude efforts to reassure Jews they would have a secure future under Polish rule, including parades in which a man dressed as a Jew marched symbolically arm-in-arm with Polish aristocrats.83

For more than a year before the vote, pro-Polish and pro-German propaganda competed, often in lurid and vicious terms, to influence a contest that appeared evenly balanced – in November 1919 Polish parties had shocked the pro-German population by taking 53 per cent of the vote in local elections.84 The pro-Polish campaign based its case primarily on land reform, the dire economic outlook for Germany, the burden of Germany’s war reparations and the perception that Prussia – to which Upper Silesia belonged – remained at heart a discriminatory Protestant state, which sent its officials to rule over the majority Catholic province.85 The Germans relied on asserting Upper Silesia’s long-standing ties to German culture, the historic role of the Germans in building its industrial strength, the perfidy of the French and the uncertainties inherent in joining a new Polish state that was economically weak, politically unstable and still at war on its eastern borders.86

Contrary to conceptions of rigid Polish-speaking and German-speaking blocs with very few undecided voters, the campaign illustrated that a significant proportion of those entitled to vote were open to persuasion by arguments based on other factors: religion, culture, social pressure from peer groups and, above all, the economic situation. Voting intentions certainly could not simply be read off language preferences or guessed from Polish- or German-sounding names. Wilhelm Lustig, a Jewish lawyer from Gleiwitz who worked on a polling booth at the plebiscite for the

81 Bjork, Neither German Nor Pole, 243. 82 Ibid. 83 CVZ, September 21, 1922, 249. 84 Birke, “Schlesien,” 158. 85 Waldemar Grosch, “Deutsche und polnische Propaganda in der Zeit der Aufstände und des Plebizits,” in Oberschlesien nach dem ersten Weltkrieg: Studien zu einem nationalen Konflikt und seiner Erinnerung, ed. Kai Struve (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2003), 83-89. 86 Peter Wozniak, “Blut, Erz, Kohle: A Thematic Examination of German Propaganda on the Silesian Question During the Interwar Years,” East European Quarterly XXVIII, no. 3 (September 1994), 326. 68

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German side, maintained that his pro-Polish counterparts were unable to complete administrative forms in Polish, but could do so in German.87 Fully aware that language did not necessarily determine allegiance, both sides put out propaganda in both Polish and German, in a blizzard of new or repurposed publications.

The pro-Polish Weisse Adler (White Eagle) and pro-German Schwarze Adler (Black Eagle) faced off against each other, both produced in German. Pro-German papers published in Polish or in both languages were aimed at Polish speakers who identified less with their supposed ethnicity and more with the socio-economic benefits they perceived from remaining with Germany.88 In 1919 the previously liberal Oberschlesische Grenz-Zeitung (Upper Silesian Border News) was bought by Korfanty and turned into a fanatically pro-Polish propaganda sheet – published in German.89

Openly attacking Jews was not a central propaganda strategy for either side, but subtle and not-so-subtle inferences were commonplace, particularly on the Polish side. Rabbi Braunschweiger maintained that the Polish press and official Polish propaganda went out of their way to bait the Jews.90 Waldemar Grosch, who has carried out the most comprehensive overview of plebiscite propaganda, found numerous examples of explicitly antisemitic pro-Polish leaflets and many more characterising “magnates” and “capitalists” in terms that could be understood as referring to Jews.91 Pejorative descriptions such as “profiteers” (Schieber) and “middlemen” (Makler) were deployed, as well as sweeping conflations of both “German-Jewish” and “Jewish-Communist” influences. Propaganda boasted that since Poland had already thoroughly expunged Jews from positions of power, they would leave Upper Silesia in droves in the event of a Polish victory in the plebiscite.92

Allison Rodriguez’s study of propaganda material similarly found some negative depictions of Jews in pro-Polish publications.93 And Sigmund Karski reproduces more

87 Wilhelm Lustig, “Erinnerungen aus der Zeit der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien” (New York: Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection, 1958), 7. http://access.cjh.org/553636. Accessed January 27, 2017. 88 Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany, 241-243. 89 Bjork, Monoglot Norms, 114. 90 Der Schild, October 24, 1927, 326. 91 Waldemar Grosch, Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien, 1919-21 (Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 2003), 300. 92 Grosch, Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung, 304-305. 93 Allison Rodriguez, “‘Scoundrels’ and Desperate Mothers: Gendering German and Polish Propaganda in the Upper Silesian Plebiscite, 1919-1921,” in Creating Nationality in Central 69

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Figure 4

(removed from publicly accessible Pro-Polish antisemitic propaganda version for copyright reasons) highlighting “the Jewish profiteer” (left) as one of four types who would vote for Germany, along with “the capitalist”, “the big landowner” and “the idiot”. Source: Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/public ation/14292/edition/12734. Accessed January 13, 2019.

Figure 5

Pro-German antisemitic propaganda in the satirical magazine Pieron, no 20 (1920) depicting “Kattowitz profiteers”. The caption reads: “It’s a miracle they haven’t started selling houses on the black market yet.” Source: Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/public ation/295082/edition/278829. Accessed January 13, 2019. Copyright status: public domain

Europe, 1880-1950: Modernity, Violence and (Be)Longing in Upper Silesia, ed. Tomasz Kamusella, James Bjork, Tim Wilson and Anna Novikov (London: Routledge, 2016), 102. 70

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examples from both sides, including a cartoon in the satirical pro-German propaganda magazine Pieron that used stereotypically antisemitic portrayals of Schieber in Kattowitz.94

But the much more common references to Jews in the newspapers – which did much of the heavy lifting of the propaganda effort on both sides – have been largely overlooked. One revealing call for Polish votes appeared in Korfanty’s Grenz-Zeitung less than two weeks before the vote:

Q: Who made Upper Silesia rich? A: 200,000 Polish miners and steelworkers! Q: Who pocketed the profits? A: Thirteen German coal barons and Junkers, and a few Jewish businesses.95

The pro-Polish Weisse Adler was not above using the appointment of a Jew as head of a Berlin school board to suggest that German rule in Upper Silesia meant Catholic education might be overseen by Jews (which in turn implied Germany was “well on the way to being bound by the slavery chains with which Trotsky is now torturing Russia”).96 The JLZ cited numerous examples of unashamedly antisemitic opinion in the Polish press, including articles that called for boycotts of Upper Silesian Jewish businesses and professionals, and denounced the Jews as the “irreconcilable enemies of Poland”, hated by the majority of Poles “from the depths of their soul”.97 Parts of the Polish press echoed Dmowski by claiming that Jewish influence over Lloyd George was responsible for the allegedly pro-German position of the British occupation forces in Upper Silesia.98

Nor was the pro-German press entirely immune. Wilhelm Lustig reported that the conservative Ostdeutsche Morgenpost, produced in Beuthen, had published an antisemitic article in the middle of the campaign that broke the sense of unity in the German camp (Lustig calls it the Burgfrieden – “fortress peace”– the same word used

94 Karski, Korfanty, 293. 95 GZ, March 10, 1921, n.p. 96 Der Weisse Adler, October 2, 1920, n.p. 97 JLZ, March 24, 1921, n.p. 98 Illustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Krakow Illustrated Daily News), cited in JLZ, March 18, 1921, n.p. 71

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by the Kaiser in August 1914 to promote national unity in wartime). 99 Lustig said he won an undertaking from the Morgenpost’s editor-in-chief, Fritz Kleiner, to refrain from further antisemitic outbursts before the plebiscite.100 German publications were more likely to focus on the Ostjuden where they referred to Jews. The pro-German Polish-language magazine Dzwon (The Bell) published a series of articles drawing on the Polish press to highlight the allegedly worthless nature of the Poles on the other side of the border, including their intolerance of non-Catholics and flagrant antisemitism. But the reference to antisemitism was disingenuous. In warning Upper Silesians of their fate if it was annexed by Poland, it did not shrink from mentioning that countless thousands of “Kaftan Jews” would swarm into the province in the event of a Polish victory.101 One pro-German leaflet put the number at 2.5 million.102 This sample suggests at the very least that open antisemitism was far from taboo, although it should be seen in the context of the vast amount of hostile and often flagrantly racist material aimed at non-Jewish Germans and Poles published by each side during the campaign.

The Jews were not simply passive observers – they had a direct and urgent interest in the debates unleashed by the plebiscite, and threw themselves into the campaign with “feverish, fanatical” enthusiasm.103 Prominent individuals, above all Max Bloch from Beuthen, were heavily involved in the German campaign. All political parties other than the communists co-operated in trying to co-ordinate Germany’s official effort, in evolving and often cumbersome arrangements with the national and Prussian governments. The Jewish community, like other religious bodies, was not formally part of the machinery, but Bloch represented the DDP in the first multi-party bodies in 1919.104 During the campaign he was a trusted lieutenant of the Upper Silesian Zentrum leader, Carl Ulitzka, both in galvanising the German propaganda effort and in negotiations with the Interallied Commission, with Korfanty himself and later with the League of Nations.105 When Korfanty bought the Grenz-Zeitung it was Bloch who

99 Lustig, “Erinnerungen aus der Zeit der Volksabstimmung,” 8. 100 The Morgenpost expressed the views of the Deutsche Volkspartei (German People’s Party), which promoted pro-business and socially conservative views. It attracted some Jewish support, but also at times indulged antisemitism. See Donald Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 73-74. 101 Karski, Korfanty, 228. 102 Grosch, Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung, 305. 103 Preiss, ZA 2/16: 88, 17. 104 Grosch, Deutsche und Polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung, 44. 105 Hitze, Carl Ulitzka, 302-307 and 454. 72

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first tried to prevent him,106 then founded a short-lived new paper for German liberals, the Oberschlesische Landeszeitung, on behalf of the DDP.107 Bloch was certain that the Jews voted “completely and unequivocally” for Germany, and even combed through the register of voters after the poll to satisfy himself that the three Jews in Beuthen who failed to vote did so only because of absence through illness or death.108

Of the arguments made for the German cause, the one that resonated most with the Upper Silesian Jews was the conception of Germany as a Kulturnation. The novelist Max Tau, who returned from Berlin to Beuthen to vote, wrote that “we wished away the hours until we could show the world through the plebiscite that Upper Silesia was an ancient German cultural land”.109 The counterpoint of that strong bond was the rejection of all things Polish as having any intrinsic cultural value. The idea that “the further east you go, the more primitive the culture becomes” was an important theme of the German propaganda effort.110 Liberal German Jews asserted without a second thought that Poland’s supposedly backward, inferior culture naturally entailed antisemitism.111 Both Polish cultural inferiority and Polish antisemitism were taken as a given in the German Jewish press. The AZJ could not have been more explicit: “Needless to say, antisemitism is endemic in Poland,” it remarked. “The less culturally developed a nation is, the more widespread antisemitism is.”112

The JLZ agreed:

It hardly needs to be pointed out what the transfer of Upper Silesia to Poland would mean for our co-religionists. But that is not what makes it such an obvious, happily fulfilled duty for the Upper Silesian Jews to vote for our German fatherland. Rather, it is the consciousness of their firm bond with the German cultural community.113

But it was obvious even to liberal Jews in Upper Silesia that their beloved German Kultur was also entirely capable of accommodating antisemitism. The historian Markus Brann, writing in a book published as German propaganda (unapologetically

106 Vogel, Deutsche Presse und Propaganda, 40. 107 Grosch, Deutsche und Polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung, 133. 108 Der Schild, October 24, 1927, 334. 109 Max Tau, Das Land, 99. 110 Grosch, “Deutsche und polnische Propaganda in der Zeit der Aufstände,” 81. 111 JLZ, March 18, 1921, n.p. 112 AZJ, January 21, 1921, 15. 113 JLZ, March 18, 1921, n.p. 73

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titled Oberschlesien: ein Land deutscher Kultur - Upper Silesia: A Land of German Culture), maintained that Jews would vote unhesitatingly for Germany, but with no illusions about their non-Jewish compatriots:

When two hard stones rub against each other, whatever lies between them gets ground up. The Jew in Upper Silesia stands between Germany and Poland. To the Poles, because of his different beliefs, he is a doubly hated German. To the Germans he is often seen as an intruder, the descendant of a foreign race ... [But] he will prove that his heart remains there on the day of the plebiscite, when he will return home, despite all the abuse suffered, and help to keep beautiful and rich Upper Silesia, to which the Pole has stretched out his covetous hand, in the Reich.114

The Jews who needed to return home were those who had been born in Upper Silesia but who, like thousands of their non-Jewish compatriots, had subsequently left for other parts of Germany or the Austrian lands. The enfranchisement of these “outvoters” for the plebiscite was proposed by Poland, but that turned out to be a blunder that cost the Poles significant support.115 As many as 90 per cent of the 190,000 outvoters who cast a ballot sided with Germany, without which the result would have been much closer.116 For days before the vote special trains left Berlin and other cities in a festive atmosphere, packed with returning Upper Silesians. President Friedrich Ebert saw off one contingent at Berlin’s Görlitzer station, telling them Upper Silesia owed its “culture and its flourishing industry” to “the larger homeland, Germany”. Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung even invested the event with religious overtones, headlining its report on Ebert’s speech “The pilgrimage to Upper Silesia”.117

Outside Upper Silesia the organisation of the travellers was in the hands of the Deutscher Schutzbund für die Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschen (Defence League for Borderland and Overseas Germans).118 Witnesses compared the exuberant scenes as

114 Markus Brann, “Die Bedeutung der Juden für die Geschichte und Kultur Oberschlesiens,” in Oberschlesien: Ein Land deutscher Kultur, ed. Paul Knötel (Gleiwitz: Heimatverlag Oberschlesien, 1921), 95. 115 Karski, Korfanty, 252-253. 116 William Rose, The Drama of Upper Silesia: a Regional Study (London: Williams and Norgate, 1935), 181. 117 VZ (first supplement), March 11, 1921. 118 Grosch, Deutsche und Polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung, 49. Not to be confused with the antisemitic Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund. 74

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the trains passed through Germany to the heady days of August 1914, as well-wishers pressed refreshments, cigarettes, flowers and even children’s clothes on the travelling outvoters.119 Numerous accounts record a large number of Jews among those who returned. Elaborate preparations were put in place at train stations in Berlin and other cities to provide food and drink, and to cater for the religious ritual needs of the Orthodox. In Breslau alone – the key transit point for arrivals from Berlin, where more than half the Jewish outvoters lived – more than 300 Jewish volunteers were recruited to assist. In Upper Silesia itself, Jewish organisations under the leadership of Bruno Altmann, the head of the Kattowitz community, worked closely with the German plebiscite commission to provide similar services.120

The impulse to return was strong. Margot Reichmann recorded her inability to return for the vote from Frankfurt (due to the recent birth of her first child) as “my failure as a German”, which did not go down well at home. “My father, a great patriot and well known in the town, was angry because even 10 minutes before the polls closed people were asking him if I was still coming.”121 The return of so many Upper Silesian Jews turned the plebiscite into a chaotic reunion, with close and distant relatives packing into every available room. Walter Grünfeld recalled that everyone in his family who had moved to Berlin returned, as well as “an unknown relative” from Munich and a large number of old friends of the family. In Grünfeld’s account, the tense atmosphere of the plebiscite meant it was no time to enjoy catching up with friends and relatives.122

By contrast, an anonymous correspondent Ilse, writing from Kattowitz to her friend Anna Goldschmidt in Nordhausen on March 18, described the days excitedly as “a huge festival”, with distant relatives and long-lost friends coming and going in an endless stream and everyone in the best of moods, “as if they were all children on their birthday”. Among the disparate guests in her house were the grandson of her grandmother’s childhood friend, two aunts accompanied by their seamstress, a business acquaintance and her father’s former nurse, now 75. As many as 20 people were staying by night, and 40, 50 or even 60 by day, “depending on how many cousins, former neighbours and old friends visit”.123 All convention went out of the window, with men and women, old and young, congregating to discuss the only

119 AZJ, April 15, 1921, 89. 120 AZJ, March 18, 1921, 64. 121 Frohmann, “Autobiography,” 21. 122 Grünfeld, Rückblicke, 33. 123 JLZ, April 8, 1921, n.p. 75

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subject anyone wanted to talk about: the vote. Max Tau wrote in typically effusive style:

For most people, these days before the plebiscite were days of joy at reunion, holidays of friendship, happy days of devotion. Guests were not allowed to stay in hotels, everyone wanted them in their houses; we scarcely knew them, but we belonged together nevertheless, people embraced and kissed as if it was a wedding celebration.124

The Jewish former national justice minister Otto Landsberg, returning to vote in his home town of Rybnik, recorded a “strong Jewish presence” among the travellers, holding it up as a rebuke to German nationalists who maintained that Jews could not feel German as non-Jews did.

They are not thinking about whether victory for Poland in Upper Silesia would move the “pogrom border” to the west. No thought rules them except to protect their immediate home and Germany from downfall ... These are the Jews supposedly with no fatherland!125

Yet Landsberg’s account of the Jews’ German patriotism also contained a strong suggestion that some of their compatriots were actively hostile to their presence. Among the hordes of Jews, he wrote, none saw the point of their vote as a rejection of antisemitic nationalism. “They smile indulgently at the swastikas that some of the particularly tactless defenders of the homeland have displayed on their chest.” The presence of the swastika among volunteers was recorded elsewhere as a “discordant note” in the otherwise harmonious community spirit among the German travellers.126 Displaying the swastika in 1921 did not imply support specifically for Hitler’s fledging NSDAP, although the party had formally adopted the symbol the previous year. But it had been associated with other far-right groups in the postwar years, and, as the newspaper reports make clear, was understood by everyone as an expression of antisemitism.

Korfanty’s Grenz-Zeitung gleefully seized on Landsberg’s observation and further played on the theme by noting that Max Bloch had felt the need to place a statement in

124 Max Tau, Das Land, 99. 125 JLZ, April 8, 1921, n.p. 126 JLZ, March 18, 1921, n.p. 76

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the press defending the Upper Silesian Jews from accusations in German nationalist papers that the Jews had not supported the German cause with sufficient vigour. The Grenz-Zeitung also cited a correspondent writing from the Upper Silesian town of Sohrau to the Israelitisches Familienblatt, who described how 80- and 90-year-old men with their extended families had made the journey to vote for Germany, “despite the wave of antisemitic filth that has splattered across the German districts in recent years”127. The Grenz-Zeitung noted sarcastically: “Whether the Upper Silesian Jews thought they were rendering a service [by voting for Germany] escapes our understanding.”128

The day of the vote itself passed relatively peacefully, but the outcome left neither side satisfied. A clear majority voted for Germany – 59.7 per cent to 40.3 per cent – on an astonishing turnout of 97.7 per cent. But despite all the nationalist energy invested in the plebiscite, its outcome resolved very little. The subsequent partition of the province, discussed in the following chapter, left Jews on both sides of the border to face frightening new threats, as catastrophic economic conditions brought violent antisemitism to unprecedented heights in both Katowice and Beuthen. The crisis exposed divisions within the community, and no group was more exposed than the liberals who had pinned their faith on the protective embrace of German Kultur.

127 GZ, April 27, 1921, n.p. 128 Ibid.

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Figure 6

Distribution of votes throughout the plebiscite area, where dark blue indicates the strongest pro-German vote and dark red shows the strongest pro-Polish areas.

Source: Map by Wilhelm Volz, 1921. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/31848/edition/28699. Accessed February 7, 2019. Copyright status: public domain.

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Figure 7

Distribution of plebiscite votes in the industrial areas, showing German dominance in the larger urban areas. The five large touching circles are (left to right): Gleiwitz, Hindenburg, Beuthen, Königshütte and Kattowitz.

Source: Detail from map by Wilhelm Volz, 1921. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/31848/edition/28699. Accessed February 7, 2019. Copyright status: public domain.

Figure 8

Key to plebiscite map.

Source: Detail from map by Wilhelm Volz, 1921. Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/31848/edition/28699. Accessed February 7, 2019. Copyright status: public domain.

4. Partition and division: 1921-23

4.1 Descent into disorder In November 1921, the Jüdische-Liberale Zeitung published an article by Felix Heimann, a lawyer associated with the Centralverein, arguing that Jews and other Germans who found themselves on the Polish side of the border after the partition of Upper Silesia should do their best to support the Polish state as loyal citizens, while still keeping their German identity “next to their heart”.1 It sparked an angry reaction from those who wanted nothing to do with the Polish state, but at least one element of Heimann’s argument was uncontroversial among his audience: “Jews – often denounced by their enemies as agents of disintegration – have in truth always wanted to keep the state strong.”2

Any cause of political instability was a potential threat to the physical safety and communal security of the Jews. In Upper Silesia between 1921 and 1923, three developments would make them acutely vulnerable to external attacks and internal division: the rise of far-right and antisemitic movements; the legitimisation of violence as a political tool following the plebiscite; and the catastrophic economic situation. The events broke open Jewish unity along the existing fault lines: between east and west, and between Zionists and assimilationists. The lines intersected in the crisis of November 1923, when the Zionists took the part of the Ostjuden against insinuations from the mainstream Jewish institutions that the behaviour or mere presence of the Ostjuden had helped fan antisemitic attacks. But the Ostjuden themselves were a peripheral presence, taking little or no part in these arguments. The sudden threat of antisemitic violence from the German side did nothing to minimise the gulf that separated the German Jews from the east.

If anyone had expected the plebiscite to resolve the national question decisively, they were quickly disappointed. The outcome was clearly in Germany’s favour, but not by so much as to dash all Polish claims, especially in the south-eastern areas outside the cities, where the Polish vote was strongest. And the spread of hostile propaganda from both sides during the long campaign had forced the population to take sides, serving only to make the national issue a more poisonous point of division.

1 JLZ, November 4, 1921, n.p. 2 Ibid.

80 Borderline Germans Partition and division: 1921-1923

Poland’s defeat at the polls dealt a sudden blow to Korfanty’s reputation.3 But the Versailles Treaty by no means guaranteed that the outcome of the plebiscite would decide everything, and diplomatic talk soon turned to how or whether the province could be partitioned. In early May 1921 Korfanty tried to force the issue with a military incursion from across the border (the “third uprising”). The Polish forces quickly occupied Upper Silesia as far as his self-declared partition line and surrounded the cities of the industrial belt, before Höfer’s victory at the Annaberg stopped his progress.

The fighting lasted barely two months, but it was enough to stall a decision from the allied powers on how to respond to the plebiscite, and to spread more uncertainty among the civilian population. In early July the Beuthen Jewish leader Max Bloch was among 10 Germans arrested (“taken hostage” according to the semi-official chronicle of Beuthen) after a French officer was killed in a fracas.4 That 1925 Beuthen account, endorsed by the town’s civic leaders, gives an idea of the extent of German grievance at the events of May-July 1921:

The ‘era of freedom and justice’ that [General Henri] Le Rond [French head of the interallied plebiscite commission] referred to when the plebiscite zone was militarily occupied and its administration taken over, was for us a time of the hardest national humiliation, unlimited subjugation, sky-rocketing injustice and gruesome bloodshed.5

The mounting toll of antisemitic incidents caused even more anxiety among Jewish Germans. At the end of May the son of a Jewish factory owner, Felix Haase, was taken hostage and shot by Polish forces in Rybnik, after the family had suffered antisemitic jibes in response to their pro-German activities.6 On the German side, the return of the Freikorps, now badged as the self-defence forces (Selbstschutz), to confront Korfanty’s troops, also led to a sharp rise in reports of antisemitism. Pamphlets with wild conspiracy theories about “Jewish Bolshevism, running riot under a Polish cloak” were circulated by German nationalist elements.7 Im Deutschen Reich complained

3 Karski, Korfanty, 319. 4 Arthur Riedel, “Kriegs- und Nachkreigserlebnisse der Stadt Beuthen O/S,” in Die deutsche Stadt Beuthen O./S. und ihre nächste Umgebung, ed. Erwin Stein (Berlin: Deutscher Kommunal-Verlag, 1925), 31. 5 Ibid, 28. 6 AZJ, May 27, 1921, 124. Haase was a prominent local figure who had been among those who signed the anti-Zionist statement in February 1914. 7 IDR, July 1921, 211. 81

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that pro-German circles failed to acknowledge attacks on the staunch Jewish supporters of Germany’s cause: “On the contrary: only vilification upon vilification of the Jews.”8

By July the situation had become so acute that representatives of the Centralverein and other Jewish bodies sought a meeting in Breslau with the Reich chancellor, Joseph Wirth (of Zentrum). The CV lawyer Ludwig Foerder complained to Wirth about the attitude of a large part of the Selbstschutz towards Jews, particularly Ostjuden, which had manifested in frequent disturbances. Foerder handed over a dossier detailing dozens of incidents of verbal abuse and personal violence. Wirth – himself a hate figure among the Freikorps in Upper Silesia as a representative of the “Jew Republic” – assured the delegation he would do everything in his power to restrain the influence of Freikorps leaders named by the Jewish bodies.9 Höfer was reported to have intervened in individual cases, but had yet to issue a more general order to his troops to restrain their antisemitic behaviour.10

The situation was exquisitely painful for the Jews, who felt simultaneously betrayed by their fellow Germans and anxious about a possible future under Polish rule. But among Zionists and other Jewish nationalists there were also an element of vindication for their longstanding analysis of the German-Jewish relationship. Though equally disinclined to choose Poland over Germany, they had a coherent political response to hand – that the Jews must develop their own national consciousness and rely only on themselves. It is important to note here that opponents of the liberal view were by no means monolithic in their positions. In 1919 the Jüdische Volkspartei (Jewish People’s Party – JVP) had been founded to take the fight to the liberals in Gemeinde elections and pursue policies that identified Jews as a national rather than religious group. Although its membership overlapped substantially with the umbrella Zionist body, the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (German Zionist Union – ZVfD), they differed radically on whether to focus on conquering the communities in Germany, or on fostering emigration to Palestine. In contemporary reports the JVP were generally referred to as Zionists by the liberals, but simply as the Volkspartei by the Zionist papers.11

8 Ibid, 212. 9 For hatred of Wirth among the Freikorps, see Sauer, “Freikorps und Antisemitismus,” 11. 10 AZJ, July 22, 1921, 169. 11 Michael Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei: National-Jewish Communal Politics during the Weimar Republic,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), 219-243. 82

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But this division was trivial compared with the struggle of the liberals to reconcile their resolute identification as Germans with the sudden explosion of antisemitism among their compatriots. Im Deutschen Reich wrote:

The memory of what the Poles did to the Jews in the other ‘liberated’ areas [West Prussia and Posen] is all too vivid; but this expectation of countless oppressions in the event of Polish rule is not the decisive factor for the Upper Silesian Jews. Rather, it is much more their strong and deeply rooted consciousness that their land belongs to Germany. And when this view of the Upper Silesian Jews is understood, it’s all the more grotesque to see the antisemitic writers and agitators ... make the claim that the Jews are working to sell Upper Silesia to the Poles.12

This accusation added another plank in the construction of the German antisemitic case against the Upper Silesian Jews. They were blamed for Germany losing the war, while they profited from it; they were identified with the Weimar government; they were supposedly in league with the Poles; and finally they would be blamed for economic collapse. But before that violent denouement, the partition of Upper Silesia would further undermine the formerly stable position of the Jews.

4.2 Partition, emigration Since the allies were unable to decide on Upper Silesia’s future, they passed the problem to the League of Nations, which set up a committee made up of representatives from Spain, Brazil, China, Belgium and Japan. Despite all German attempts at lobbying in Geneva, London, Paris and Rome (including sending Jewish representatives such as Bloch, Hugo Grünfeld and Kopfstein), the League unconditionally accepted the committee’s recommendation for partition, which was announced on October 20, 1921.13 It drew the border between the two largest cities of the industrial belt, Beuthen and Kattowitz, giving by far the larger part of the most valuable economic areas to Poland and sparking fury among the Germans. Beuthen was cut off from its hinterland on three sides, and Kattowitz (now to be known as

12 IDR, September 1921, 248. 13 Karski, Korfanty, 396. 83

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Katowice) became the capital of the new Polish voivodeship, or province, of Silesia, even though 85% of the town’s population had voted for Germany.14

Fresh challenges immediately sprang up on both sides of the new border. Logistically, dividing two industrial cities barely 15 kilometres apart created serious problems – some mundane but frustrating, such as transport and utility links, others more long- term, such as tariff and migration barriers. For the Jews, the pain was felt above all in Katowice. In November 1921 E. Finkel, writing in the journal of the Jewish Bne Briss fraternity (now B’nai B’rith), explicitly tied the fate of the Upper Silesian Jews to the German Kultur that had purportedly created the province’s industrial wealth:

Figure 9 (removed from publicly accessible version for copyright reasons)

The partition of Upper Silesia, with the darker shade indicating the area given to Poland.

Source: Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin. http://brandenburg.rz.htw- berlin.de/polen_deutsch.html. Accessed January 13, 2019.

14 “Ergebnisse der Plebiszite (1920-21),” in Dokumente und Materialien zur ostmitteleuropäischen Geschichte, ed. Heidi Hein-Kircher, Herder Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschungs. https://www.herder-institut.de/no_cache/digitale- angebote/dokumente-und-materialien/themenmodule/quelle/40/details/40.html. Accessed August 5, 2018. 84

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Upper Silesia, which was made into a land of high productivity and an incomparable source of prosperity through German endeavour, German work and German intelligence, is to be dismembered, and cities that are German to their core, the economic centre of the highly developed industrial area, delivered to the less cultivated, newly created Polish empire ... The dismembering of Upper Silesia hits us very hard as Jews. This land of the ‘black diamonds’ [coal], which was of far- reaching importance for Germany’s prosperity, includes a highly developed Jewish population, which through its deeds and achievements brought fame and renown to the whole of German Jewry ... The Jewish communities of Upper Silesia pulsed with genuine Jewish life ... Through their proximity to the eastern Jewish centres, they have known the suffering of our brothers in Poland and Russia intimately.15

Those who stayed in Katowice were about to “know the suffering of their brothers” even more intimately, as the city was no longer separated from Galicia and the rest of Poland. But even if they were sympathetic to that suffering, they were not ready to sink their differences simply because the border had moved. The Katowice B’nai B’rith lodge itself, one of the oldest German outposts of the international order, fought a long campaign against its US head office to remain under the organisational control of the German branch after partition, rather than acknowledging its new Polish status. Anna Novikov, in her study of the post-partition Polish territory, suggests one reason for that resistance was a reluctance to be associated with the Ostjuden.16

Hans Preiss’s father Eduard, himself a luminary of the lodge, immediately sold his house and left for the German zone, declaring he would under no circumstances become “a Polish Jew” – meaning he did not want to live as a Jew under the Polish regime, although there is enough ambiguity to suggest he also did not want to be considered on the same terms as those who were already Polish Jews.17 Ten years later, Eduard Preiss would write that the German-speaking Jews who remained in what was now Polish territory (specifically those who belonged to the lodge) had been left with twin roles in relation to the eastern Jews: “pioneers of practical altruism”,

15 E. Finkel, “Oberschlesien,” Der Orden Bne Briss: Mitteilungen der Großloge für Deutschland VIII UOBB (November 1921), 102. 16 Anna Novikov, Shades of a Nation: the Dynamics of Belonging among the Silesian and Jewish Populations in Eastern Upper Silesia (1922-1934) (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2015), 139. 17 Preiss, ZA 2/16: 88, 18. 85

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because of the poor economic situation of the proletarian Ostjuden; and “interpreters of western culture” thanks to the “low cultural status of a large proportion of their coreligionists from the former Polish-Russian and Galician regions”.18

Preiss was among many on both sides of the border who did not stay, taking advantage of the right enshrined in the convention signed in Geneva allowing freedom of movement across the frontier for all residents of the plebiscite area.19 As many as 30,000 Germans moved west in the first year after partition.20 Some sources estimate 150,000 eventually moved from Poland to Germany permanently and 60-70,000 went in the other direction.21 The Jews were among the most eager to leave the Polish zone – perhaps as many as 70 per cent of the Jewish population had migrated west by 1924.22 In Beuthen, special arrangements had to be made so that the “natives, the newcomers from the Polish territories and the resident Ostjuden” could all follow their chosen rites separately on the high holidays.23 The main synagogue, the smaller shul next door, the Mamreh lodge and the matzo-baking rooms in the Gemeinde centre – these for the Ostjuden – were all pressed into service, and even then some smaller groups from Galicia prayed separately in private rooms.24

There were practical reasons for Jews to leave the eastern zone apart from a fear of Polish antisemitism. Polish now became the only language of official business. As a result, those employed by the state, such as teachers and civil servants, were among the first Germans to leave, and they had provided much of the business for self- employed professionals, among whom Jews were disproportionately represented. Lawyers were all but forced to move because they had no training in Polish law, which now came into force.25 Other reactions were less pragmatic and more visceral. Ivan Lilienfeld (born 1910) grew up in Rybnik with his grandmother, a “fanatical German who hated the Poles”. Rybnik’s Jews were “German to their bones” and the vast majority fled to the German zone almost overnight once it became clear the town

18 Eduard Preiss, “Zur Erinnerung an die Abstimmung in Oberschlesien,” Der Orden Bne Briss: Mitteilungen der Großloge für Deutschland VIII UOBB (April 1931), 62. 19 Polak-Springer, Recovered Territory, 36. 20 Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 33. 21 Brendan Karch, “Polish Nationalism and National Ambiguity in Weimar Upper Silesia,” in Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950: Modernity, Violence and (Be) Longing in Upper Silesia, ed. Tomasz Kamusella, James Bjork, Tim Wilson and Anna Novikov (London: Routledge, 2016), 150. 22 Wodziński, “Languages of the Jewish Communities,” 138. 23 Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1986), 591. 24 Ibid. 25 Blanke, Orphans of Versailles, 34. 86

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would fall under Polish control, Lilienfeld remembered.26 And no sooner was the border redrawn, than events in Katowice gave the Jews an added reason to leave.

4.3 ‘Out with the Polish Jews’: antisemitic riots in Katowice On June 20, 1922, Polish troops marched ceremonially into Katowice to formally take possession of the state’s new territory. But Poland’s triumph was clouded by huge practical challenges, above all the parlous state of its economy, and doubts that the new lands would be filled any time soon by the ethnically homogenous, enthusiastically Polish population envisaged by hardline nationalists. For one thing, many Germans remained, despite mass emigration. A strong regional identification also proved persistent, even intensifying through the 1920s as the Poles’ promises of economic prosperity proved illusory.27 Brendan Karch has argued that after partition Polish nationalists were disappointed to discover that Upper Silesians, and particularly the Szlonzok speakers, were if anything more reluctant than before to identify as Poles. Rather than separating the region into two stable national groups, “the plebiscite only heightened widespread practices of national ambiguity, as many Upper Silesians resisted defining themselves according to strict national categories”.28

And then there were the Jews. In Galicia alone there were almost 900,000 just before the First World War – 11% of the population – and the lives of those even closer to the border were very different from the mostly prosperous German Jews of Kattowitz.29 In 1920 a journalist described the Jewish quarter in Oświęcim (Auschwitz), only 30 kilometres from Kattowitz, in terms that could stand for shtetl life hundreds of kilometres to the east:

Every gate of the Jewish quarter is a scene to be preserved forever. Dark vestibules, alleys, niches, ladders, nooks and crannies, blind windows, buttresses ... Every civilised person wishes to have such a Jewish corner painted, but none wants to live in such a corner. And so these

26 Ramona Bräu, “Zwischen Schlesien und Palästina: Lebensläufe schlesischer Juden auf der Grundlage von Zeitzeugeninterviews,” in Von Schlesien nach Israel: Juden aus einer deutschen Provinz zwischen Verfolgung und Neuanfang, ed. Maximilian Eiden (Görlitz: Schlesisches Museum zu Görlitz, 2010), 68. 27 Polak-Springer, Recovered Territory, 38. 28 Karch, “Polish Nationalism,” 149. 29 Piotr Wróbel, “Foreshadowing the Holocaust: The Wars of 1914-1921 and Anti-Jewish Violence in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War, ed. Jochen Böhler, Wlodzimierz Borodziej and Joachim von Puttkamer (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 171. 87

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courtyards, so very picturesque, will be swept away by modern utilitarianism and hygiene.30

Even before partition, the number of Ostjuden in Kattowitz had increased, to the consternation of the established German Jews as well as the wider population. The unease in Jewish circles can be gauged from a rancorous dispute that broke out in 1920 in the pages of the Jüdische Turn- und Sportzeitung. This was the national newsletter of the Jewish organisation for Turnen – the distinctively German form of gymnastics, which often carried nationalistic overtones, and which in its Jewish manifestation was closely aligned with the Zionists. The argument arose from the fact that Ostjuden were admitted to the general ranks of the Bar Kochba club in Kattowitz, rather than having their own separate section, as in some other clubs (itself an indication of the social distance the westerners preferred to keep). In June 1920 a certain Hans Kuhn wrote to the JTS in response to a correspondent from Cologne who had welcomed the mixing of western and eastern Jews in the Kattowitz club. Kuhn wrote that such “unconditional brotherhood” towards people whose “customs, habits and behaviour … are not on the same level” was one of the greatest mistakes of the Turner movement and of Jewish nationalism:

Have you seen the overwhelming majority of the Ostjuden in our region, who are idle but have a big mouth, and believe that is their prerogative through the simple fact of their eastern Jewishness? People who believe they count as the most valuable among us because their Jewishness is more obviously on show. Apparently you don’t know them! We alone know that many of our Ostjuden really do belong to the most valuable among us and should be treated as brothers. But we also know that a hundred times as many must first be brought up and made into humans through hard work, that they must be forced to earn this brotherhood by first having it withheld, so that they at least do something to improve themselves. We know that and you do not; because you live in Cologne and we live in Kattowitz.31

If such prejudice existed among those who leaned towards Zionism, it was certainly no better with the liberals. Here the testimony of Heinemann Stern is telling. From his

30 Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 59-61. 31 JTS, June 1920, 17-18. 88

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viewpoint, the border area had long been familiar with the “serious traders and dubious salesmen, in kaftans or long coats” and they had caused few concerns in peacetime. But now the “Jewish question” had become the “Eastern Jewish question”:

Public opinion changed towards the end of the war, when complaining about the ‘profiteers’ became the preferred way to cope with the conditions of general misery.32

Stern, a liberal to his core, considered himself above such scapegoating, pointing out that Kattowitz had relied on Galicia for much of its food during the war. Yet he also denounced the “embarrassing” situation that resulted from “swarms” of foreigners who “flooded over the Czech and Polish border to take advantage of the inflation, above all in currency exchange”. Stern’s language to describe the Kattowitz Ostjuden in the period around the plebiscite betrays the anxiety of liberal middle-class German Jews:

Their headquarters was the leading hotel and cafe Monopol, which they filled from the ground floor to the rafters. Naturally, no respectable local visited the establishment any longer ... The effect on the population, obviously including sensible and well-meaning people, is easy to imagine.33

Stern’s own discomfort is clear from the hostile reception he and a Zionist friend received when they visited the Monopol on a whim to try to engage the mass of young “idlers” in discussion (“their faces revealed that pedagogical experiments and sermonising Jeremiads would not be welcome”).34

Stern left Kattowitz for Berlin in May 1922, but when the Poles took over the administration of their new province the following month, the presence of the Ostjuden in the city quickly came to the fore. Only days after the formal occupation, Korfanty’s Grenz-Zeitung reported with satisfaction that the police had confiscated large quantities of goods at Katowice railway station, adding the hope that this would help persuade the “filthy Jews from Sosnowiec and elsewhere” that there was no

32 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 106. 33 Ibid, 107. 34 Ibid. 89

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future in doing business in Katowice.35 The Grenz-Zeitung’s contempt for the Ostjuden put it in a curious political position. Rather than celebrating the polonisation of Katowice at the expense of its German heritage, the paper found itself expressing the fear that the city might be dragged down to the level of other parts of Poland by the presence of these “disgusting parasites”. In a nakedly antisemitic outpouring, the paper fretted:

If every German businessman who leaves Katowice is replaced by a Polish Jew, we will soon be blessed with these Mojichkes just like towns in Galicia and Congress Poland. If we don’t expend all our energy to keep the Jews out of Upper Silesia, the jargon of the Polish Jews [Yiddish] will soon fill our marketplaces, and once the Jew has settled himself in, 100 horses won’t be able to pull him out.36

The following day, in an article conspicuously headed “Out with the Polish Jews” (not “Out with the Jews”), the paper reported approvingly on a “sidelocks [pajkes] and kaftans hunt” in the area around the station, praising the harassment of Jews as “a welcome step forward in the cleansing of Katowice”:

If this kind of action goes on for a few more days, most Jews will find they prefer to do their business in Sosnowiec and Oświęcim, rather than dragging their carcass to Katowice. We particularly want to draw the population’s attention to those establishments that have provided themselves with a shiny new sign in Polish, but give shelter to swarms of Jews every day.37

This hostility took on increasingly serious overtones in the late summer of 1922 as two outbreaks of mass violence in Katowice and other towns targeted Jews. The trigger was the extreme economic stress affecting both Poland and Germany, but exacerbated in Polish Silesia by partition. The perpetrators of the outrages against the Jews emerged from the fringes of angry demonstrations against rapid increases in the cost of living.38 The violence, beginning on Monday August 22, had an explicitly antisemitic character from the start, described bluntly as “persecution of the Jews”

35 GZ, June 26, 1922, n.p. 36 Ibid. 37 GZ, June 27, 1922, n.p. 38 CVZ, August 31, 1922, 214. 90

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and even a “pogrom” in pro-German Upper Silesian newspapers.39 The Zionist Jüdische Rundschau reported that the violence was triggered by “the claim that the Jews, above all the traders who had come to Kattowitz from Poland and Galicia since partition, were responsible for price increases”.40

Gangs of youths beat Jews in the streets, invaded their apartments and trashed Jewish shops. In the evening they stormed the Monopol, where many Jews had fled for safety. At midnight three Jews were attacked and savagely beaten at the train station.41 The following day a crowd gathered outside the main railway station and proceeded to attack Jewish businesses in surrounding streets and assault their owners. One Jewish tradesman died of a heart attack after being threatened by a mob who broke into his cellar.42 Jews sought protection from the police, but they were unable to control the violence, which continued through the night into Wednesday. Some non-Jewish businesses were also looted, but it is clear from Jewish and non-Jewish sources that the Ostjuden were the principal victims.43 Some had their beards cut off, suggesting the traditional dress and appearance of the Ostjuden made them obvious targets, though not the only ones.

The baiting, which was initially aimed primarily at migrant Jews from Poland and Galicia, now degenerated into persecution of Jews generally, causing great suffering to the local Upper Silesian Jewish population too.44

The Morgenpost noted that the Jews were “obviously not responsible in any way” for the recent price increases and criticised the Grenz-Zeitung for excusing the perpetrators of the violence.45 The Grenz-Zeitung for its part rejected allegations in the pro-German press that the police had failed to come to the aid of the Jews. It laid the blame squarely on the Ostjuden themselves:

To avoid such intolerable incidents in future, the authorities must firmly bar entry to all Jews from Congress Poland and Galicia, whose

39 OW, August 23, 1922, n.p; OM, August 23, 1922, n.p. 40 JR, August 25, 1922, 445. 41 Ibid. 42 OW, August 31, 1922, n.p. 43 OW, August 24, 1922, n.p. 44 CVZ, August 31, 1922, 214. 45 OM, August 23, 1922, n.p. 91

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business here is confined to usury, profiteeering and smuggling. It would be appropriate in future to implement on-the-spot checks on all Jews coming from there to Katowice, to see whether they are trying to bring gold, silver and the like over the border to Germany. Then our authorities should keep their eye firmly on the Jews, who have made it their job to sell out Upper Silesia entirely. In the early days of the occupation energetic efforts were made to confiscate all the goods that the Jews wanted to export. But these measures were soon relaxed, and we have seen the consequences in the past few days.46

Two weeks later, on Friday September 8, unruly crowds were again on the streets in front of the voivodeship offices after cash promised to pay their wages failed to materialise. Some demonstrators turned to violence, smashing market stalls and causing “indescribable terror” in the streets.47 Outside hotels frequented by Jews, the crowds threatened to seize alleged profiteers and lynch them.48 The next day, they dragged mounted police from their horses and smashed dozens of plate-glass windows in the city centre.49 Again the Jews were assaulted on the streets and in cafes, and their shops and businesses were ransacked.50 Reports in the mainstream press again made clear that this was “persecution of the Jews”, not general mayhem in which Jews were random victims.51

It is clear from the attacks on established businesses that the targets in this second round of outrages were German as well as Polish Jews. Kattowitz residents perceived that “all the shops” in the central Grundmannstraße area were Jewish-owned.52 Among the targets singled out were a Jewish cigar business in that street (now Ulica 3 Maja) and the confectionery shop of a Jewish woman in the adjoining Teichstraße (Ulica Stawowa), which was demolished and stripped of its goods.53 In a long discussion of the causes of the violence, the CV-Zeitung accused the Grenz-Zeitung of shamelessly stirring up antisemitism to divert attention from the economic troubles of the new Polish state, and reminded readers of the plebiscite propaganda promising

46 GZ, August 24, 1922, n.p. 47 OM, September 9, 1922, n.p. 48 KattZ, September 9, 1922, n.p. 49 OW, September 12, 1922, n.p. 50 OM, September 9, 1922, n.p. 51 Ibid. 52 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 84. 53 OW, September 12, 1922, n.p. 92

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the Upper Silesian Jews equality and fraternity in Poland.54 But it wasn’t long before the CV would have to find different reasons for similar outbreaks of violence on the German side of the border.

4.4 ‘Pogroms’ in Beuthen Worrying signs of antisemitic agitation also emerged on the other side of the border during 1922. On June 24, the foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, was murdered in Berlin by former Freikorps members, an act understood by all as an attack on the republic itself, with specific antisemitic meaning – Rathenau was the most prominent Jewish member of the government.55 Shortly afterwards, the fanatical Richard Kunze, whose activities during the Polish uprisings had won him notoriety in Upper Silesia, held a mass rally in Beuthen, the first specifically antisemitic meeting ever held in the town, according to the Centralverein’s Beuthen lawyer Hans Reichmann.56

The Catholic editor of Zentrum’s Oberschlesische Zeitung, Karl Herz, wrote that “unrestricted terror” reigned in Beuthen in 1922, and that he and others who opposed Kunze’s acolytes had been abused as “baptised Jews” (which Herz was not).57 In early July, the local Centralverein group wrote to the mayor of Beuthen, Alfred Stephan, detailing a list of recent incidents attributed to the growing antisemitic movement in the town. The severity of the events mentioned ranged from antisemitic speeches in front of the town hall (possibly a reference to the Kunze event) to casual violence against Ostjuden on the streets and full-scale mob attacks on Jewish shops. One business owner was warned by a former war comrade to take precautions against planned attacks on July 12 “aimed at your religion in general, not just against the Polish Jews”. 58

In November, two months after the sobering events in Katowice, elections were held in German Upper Silesia for the first time since 1919, for both the national parliament (Reichstag) and the Prussian assembly (Landtag). As the only part of the country voting – the polls in Upper Silesia had been postponed because of the plebiscite – it

54 CVZ, September 21, 1922, 249. 55 For the intimate connections between Freikorps involvement in the Upper Silesian conflict and the attacks on prominent Weimar figures at this time, see Sauer, “Freikorps und Antisemitismus,” 14. 56 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 42. 57 CVZ, September 13, 1924, 551. 58 Hecht, Deutsche Juden, 166-167. 93

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now attracted national attention. The results showed a dramatic surge in support for extreme right-wing parties hostile to the Weimar republic, and a corresponding slump for the parties that had joined the governing coalition: Zentrum, the Social Democrats and the liberal Democratic party. Two explicitly antisemitic parties, the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National People’s Party – DNVP) and the fledgling Deutschsoziale Partei (German Social Party – DSP) between them won almost 20 per cent of the vote, while the liberal DDP polled a miserable 12,000 votes, barely 2 per cent.59 The DSP was headed by Kunze, who had left the DNVP to found his own party on the grounds that the rightwing nationalist party was not anti-Jewish enough.60 The CV-Zeitung warned that the DSP’s vote (4.5 per cent) might have been even higher but for the violence that accompanied Kunze wherever he went. Even starting with that relatively low level of support at the ballot box, Kunze dominated the political battlefield in Upper Silesia for the next two years, according to Hans Reichmann.61 The DNVP, which campaigned against “Jewish influence” rather than wanting to remove their rights altogether, was scarcely less threatening.

The lessons of the election, the CV-Zeitung believed, included the need for Jews to give no unnecessary opportunity for prejudice:

No Jew must make economic distress worse through his way of doing business. Everyone must know that each person represents the whole to outsiders. A rascal who calls himself a Jew will be pinned on all of us, even though we may have nothing in common. These are the lessons [of the election]. 62

Earlier in the month Beuthen’s Rabbi Kopfstein had made a similar call for Jews to moderate their own behaviour for fear of stimulating antisemitism, but with a specific Upper Silesian focus on the Ostjuden. In the wake of the Katowice attacks, he took it upon himself to call a meeting at which he condemned the behaviour of young Ostjuden who “often earned their money easily and squandered it in pleasure houses with dubious female company”, giving the far-right groups an excuse to spread poison against the Jews.63

59 OM, November 21, 1922, n.p. 60 Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, 50. 61 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 44. 62 CVZ, November 23, 1922, 333. 63 Israelitisches Familienblatt, November 2, 1922, cited in Maurer, Ostjuden, 591. 94

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Hostility towards the Ostjuden became increasingly explicit as the climate worsened. At an interdenominational meeting in Hindenburg in December 1922, a Jewish magistrate, Aufricht, launched an attack on the easterners as property profiteers and “completely inferior” people, who “knew how to get around the customs regulations to bring millions of objects across the border, while the poor Christian woman was arrested for a small packet of chocolate”.64 In February 1923 a committee member of the Gleiwitz Centralverein branch, Louis Kohn, proposed “intensive measures” on the part of the CV against the continued presence of the Ostjuden on the German side of the border, recommending that CV officials should attack them publicly.65 The eagerness of liberals such as Stern, Kopfstein and their Centralverein colleagues to police the behaviour of other Jews would come under increasing criticism from the Zionists as the antisemitic wave intensified in late 1923.

In May, a hand-grenade was thrown at a memorial to Jewish soldiers killed in the war, which had only recently been unveiled in Beuthen’s Jewish cemetery.66 A letter of regret to Kopfstein from a local Catholic peace organisation also referred to “outrageous attacks” on the synagogue.67 In June, the DSP won the second largest number of votes in Beuthen city elections (11.5 per cent), giving them five representatives on the council.68 Two Jewish stalwarts of the DDP, Max Bloch and Ernst Behrendt, were among the four councillors elected for the liberal party, which held on to more support in Beuthen than elsewhere in Upper Silesia. However, Jewish representation had fallen drastically since the introduction of the equal franchise in 1918.69 The CV also fretted that the success of far-right parties following in Kunze’s wake had made antisemitism politically acceptable across the spectrum, accusing Zentrum and the Mittelstandspartei (Middle-class Party) – both parties that had at times attracted Jewish support – of shamelessly tolerating antisemitic slogans in their election leaflets.70

The community was vulnerable. A report compiled for the Centralverein in November 1921 had found the local CV organisation in Gleiwitz, Hindenburg, Oppeln and

64 CVWL MF DOC 55/17/610, December 7, 1922. 65 CVWL MF DOC 55/17/619, February 19, 1923. 66 JR, October 23, 1923, 537. 67 CVZ, July 5, 1923, 219. 68 OM, June 29, 1923, n.p. 69 Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus, 165. 70 CVWL MF DOC 55/17/619, June 28, 1923. 95

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Beuthen was relatively weak and passive.71 And divisions among the Beuthen Jews were close to the surface by 1923. A few days after the council election the leader of the Beuthen Zionists, Isidor Dobrzynski, died suddenly. The Zionist Jüdische Rundschau noted that this “upstanding, proud Jew” who “recognised no compromise” could also have been on the Beuthen council, but he would have put himself forward “only on an exclusively Jewish list, not one that was ashamed to call itself that”.72 This can only be a reference to the heavily Jewish-influenced DDP.

Bloch and Behrendt were soon under more direct attack from the DSP in the council chamber. The party put forward a motion to expel all Jews who had settled in the city since January 1, 1922 (meaning primarily Ostjuden) and to withdraw property and residence rights from Jews – to “reintroduce conditions from the middle ages” as the CV-Zeitung put it.73 No other parties supported the proposal and it was ruled unconstitutional in a council meeting of September 10. But the DSP brought 200 of its supporters to the meeting, who shouted down a Zentrum representative, abused Bloch and Behrendt “in the most foul-mouthed way”, and threatened other Jews in the public gallery.74

An exchange between Bloch and the DSP representatives Max Fleischer and Eberhard Mochmann revealed how tensions had festered since the war and the plebiscite:

Fleischer: If you reject this proposal there will be 500 men on the street within an hour and 5,000 within two hours to make sure it goes through. Bloch: It would have been better if your 5,000 men had been around during the French occupation. At that time there was no talk of a German Social Party. Mochmann: It was the Jews who brought the French into the country and betrayed the Ruhr industries [under the reparations provisions of the Versailles treaty].

Bloch’s reply was inaudible amid the uproar in the chamber. 75

71 Ibid. 72 JR, July 3, 1923, 336. The JVP, the closest thing to a Zionist political party, contested elections only within the Jewish community, not national, regional or local polls. 73 CVZ, October 18, 1923, 322. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 96

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Throughout the summer individual Jews had been targeted on the streets in what the Rundschau called “planned attacks”. Jews were subject to humiliation as well as violence, including one youth who was beaten half-unconscious then forced to hang a sign around his neck reading “I’m off to Palestine”.76 Behrendt himself was hunted down and narrowly escaped an attack in his own apartment.77

As with the Katowice riots the previous year, the alarming rise in antisemitic violence was inextricably entwined with economic distress, culminating in the disastrous hyperinflation that reached its peak throughout Germany in November 1923. The League of Nations decision to partition Upper Silesia had played a role in this galloping disaster, not only depriving Germany of vital industrial resources but causing a psychological shock that contributed to the flight of capital out of the country.78 By November 29 a copy of the Ostdeutsche Morgenpost cost 200,000,000,000 (200 thousand million) marks, or 20 pfennigs in the new currency issued by the Reichsbank that finally succeeded in stemming the bleeding. As millions lost their savings or were made destitute, the crisis threatened to destroy all confidence in the young republic. The inflation particularly fuelled accusations that Jews – whether big businessmen or Ostjuden stereotyped as unscrupulous traders – were profiting from the economic misery of honest Germans. Amid the splintering of established politics, dozens of far-right nationalist groups competed to take advantage of the antisemitic mood, and Adolf Hitler’s name first gained recognition outside its Bavarian heartland.79

Until now, Richard Kunze had led the way in stirring up violent antisemitism in Upper Silesia. But Kunze, in the opinion of the Centralverein’s Hans Reichmann, did not understand how to organise his followers militarily and struggled to win over embittered veterans because he had avoided service in the war. Hitler, by contrast, had an impeccable war record, and now his National Socialist party sent the former Freikorps leader Gerhard Roßbach to Upper Silesia to set up paramilitary units made up of former Selbstschutz members. In the Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, Roßbach promised to make Upper Silesia “a second Bavaria”. 80

76 JR, October 23, 1923, 537. 77 CVZ, October 18, 1923, 322. 78 William Guttmann and Patricia Meehan, The Great Inflation: Germany 1919-23 (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1975), 22. Guttmann was himself an Upper Silesian Jew. 79 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 74. 80 Reichmann, “Mein Leben in Deutschland,” 45. 97

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The economic crisis fuelled widespread unrest that culminated in Hitler’s attempted coup in November 1923. That ended in shambles in Munich, but events in Upper Silesia in the preceding months demonstrated the opportunities for aggressively antisemitic politics. In September and October resentment exploded into serious violence against Jews in Beuthen. On Saturday September 22, a mob of as many as 400 young men, including many students, armed themselves with sticks and army revolvers and surged through the streets to the railway station singing and chanting against the “Jew republic”81. They robbed and assaulted Jews, and threatened to storm two cafes, before part of the mob invaded the State Theatre, looking for Jews.82 The Silbiger hotel in Klukowitzer Straße was the target for an attack with a hand-grenade, which failed to go off.83

Several days later another hand-grenade exploded near the concert hall, an attack aimed at Jews according to the perpetrator.84 The situation was serious enough for the mayor, Stephan, to travel to Berlin the following week to report to the Prussian interior ministry and to plead for support to strengthen the police.85 But council meetings on September 27 and 28 were again disrupted and Behrendt physically threatened, as most of the elected members fled the chamber in chaotic scenes.86 A week later, on October 5, a mob marched down Bahnhofstraße, the main shopping street in Beuthen, shouting “Kill the Jews!” and “Tomorrow Hitler will be here, then we’ll loot everything”.87 They blocked off the street, and sought out Jews to assault and rob over a six-hour period with the police unable or unwilling to intervene. The police chief issued an order aimed at breaking up crowds that gathered outside banks and businesses, which he stressed was aimed not at legitimate customers, but at “the banding together of disorderly elements”, with specific reference to recent antisemitic attacks.88 Further incidents took place on October 10, 12 and 13 before the violence finally subsided.89

81 CVZ, October 18, 1923, 322. 82 OZ, September 24, 1923, n.p. 83 JR, October 23, 1923, 537. 84 Ibid. 85 OM, September 26, 1923, n.p. 86 CVZ, October 18, 1923, 322. 87 CVZ, October 11, 1923, 315. 88 OM, October 12, 1923, n.p. 89 JR, October 23, 1923, 537. 98

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4.5 The liberals and Zionists at war The shocking scale of the violence in Beuthen – which then spread to other cities, including Berlin – raised troubling questions for the Jewish community. Some were practical and immediate: how should Jews organise to defend themselves? Others were existential: what does this mean for the future of Jews in Germany? Jewish and non-Jewish commentators alike interpreted the violence as something entirely new for Germany, but which they recognised from other countries, specifically Russia and Poland, as a pogrom. The CV-Zeitung described the events as “consistent with an arranged pogrom of the kind that has been spoken about among the antisemitic associations for some time”. 90 On October 23 the Berlin Gemeinde discussed Beuthen at a representative assembly. The nationalist JVP asked what the leaders of Berlin’s Jews intended to do about the events, which it said were “systematically prepared and had the characteristics of a pogrom”.

The prominent lawyer and Zionist Alfred Klee told the assembly: “This is the first time we have had to deal with a pogrom on German soil. When we heard previously about pogroms in Russia, we were convinced that nothing like this could happen in Germany.”91 The harmony of views across assimilationist, Zionist and non-Jewish publications on this point is striking: all agreed there was something about German Kultur that was meant to be incompatible with antisemitic mob violence. Such things were the “hallmark of less cultivated states”, the Zionist Rundschau wrote in a front- page editorial the following week.92 The Zentrum-aligned Oberschlesische Zeitung said that until the events in Beuthen such things had taken place “only in states lacking culture”.93

Liberal Jews suffered a further blow to their worldview when it became clear who had been targeted in the attacks. The Oberschlesische Wanderer had reported bluntly that the September 22 attackers “preyed upon Ostjuden”.94 But further reports made clear that these were only the most obvious and vulnerable victims – German Jews and even Christians suspected of being Jews were assaulted with equal viciousness in the following days. The Rundschau reported that of 20 people injured on October 5, among them students and businessmen, all but one were “German through and

90 CVZ, October 11, 1923, 315. 91 JR, November 2, 1923, 549. 92 JR, November 9, 1923, 557. 93 OZ, September 24, 1923, n.p. 94 OW, September 24, 1923, n.p. 99

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through, with their roots in Beuthen”.95 The non-Jewish population of Beuthen, and in some cases the police, had stood by and watched.96 Not only had German Kultur proved entirely capable of accommodating atrocities previously believed alien to it, but its most fervent adherents – solid bourgeois Jews – were among the victims.

Even before the worst of the Beuthen outrages, feelings had been running high between the liberals and the Zionists. At a meeting of the Beuthen Centralverein executive committee on September 5, Kopfstein proposed a public meeting of the Jewish community for the following week to discuss the crisis, with himself as the only speaker. The local council member and businessman David Goldstein suggested a Zionist representative should also be invited to speak, but this was rejected “after fierce debate” on the grounds that it might weaken the impression of Jewish unity.97 The antisemitic violence of the following weeks only inflamed the uproar in internal Jewish politics. Zionists seized on this shocking blow to liberalism as the validation of all their arguments about the nature of the German-Jewish relationship. In a thundering editorial, the Rundschau declared assimilation dead:

Equality before the law, which has constantly been held up as the basis for Jewish existence, has been rocked ... the fruits of Jewish emancipation are beginning to totter. The policy of assimilation, the policy of the systematic sacrifice and degradation of Jewishness, has been shipwrecked. German Jewry today faces the fact that its policy of the past century has been utterly bankrupted.98

Heinrich Stern, later the leader of the Berlin community in the Nazi era, responded with a blistering article in Breslau’s Jüdische-Liberale Zeitung, angrily accusing the Zionists of having shown no interest until now in the fight against antisemitism and restating the classic liberal assimilationist position:

We remain part of the German national and cultural community, not just for pragmatic reasons, but also emotionally – because we have no other [emphasis in original].99

95 JR, October 23, 1923, 537. 96 Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus, 170. 97 CVWL MF DOC 55/11/327. 98 JR, November 9, 1923, 557. 99 JLZ, November 17, 1923, n.p. 100

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The Upper Silesian Zionists called for Jewish self-reliance and unity, but increasingly on their own terms. The Rundschau correspondent in Beuthen maintained that the acute danger had strengthened Jewish solidarity, bringing Jews together to defend themselves politically and physically.100 There was indeed one practical show of unity – the Beuthen Jews agreed to withdraw all contributions to the city’s emergency relief fund until the authorities could more effectively guarantee their security. In an address to the relief association, Kopfstein expressed his disgust that the town’s leaders had allowed the situation to deteriorate to such an extent.101 The withdrawal was endorsed by the Zionist Rundschau as a sign of “the unified position of the Jews”.102

But the show of unity disguised a rancorous internal conflict, which burst into the open over the Ostjuden. The idea that immigration of undesirable Jewish elements from the east helped to fan antisemitism had a long history, as we have seen, both among German Jews and non-Jews. Herz, the Catholic editor of the Oberschlesische Zeitung, had no qualms about writing in a Jewish paper (the CV-Zeitung) that the immigration of Ostjuden brought with it “a certain danger, because those who arrive from the eastern milieu are on a lower cultural level than the German population, including the native Jews, who have had an established presence in Upper Silesia for a thousand years”. That danger was to give new strength to antisemitic feeling. 103 Even the criminal court in Beuthen, ruling on a people-smuggling case, based its judgment not only on the grounds that the Reich must be protected from unauthorised immigration, but also that the migration of Ostjuden was the root cause of the antisemitic movement’s growth, which in turn threatened the established German Jews.104

It was one thing for non-Jews to express that view, but quite another for the leaders of the Jewish community itself to proclaim it to the non-Jewish public in the immediate aftermath of the Beuthen violence. On October 26, the conservative Ostdeutsche Morgenpost and other regional papers published an explosive statement from Kopfstein on behalf of the Beuthen branch of the Centralverein. Representatives of CV groups throughout Upper Silesia had met to discuss the antisemitic attacks, the rabbi wrote. It was stressed at that meeting “that a solution to the question of the Ostjuden

100 JR, October 12, 1923, 517. 101 CVZ, October 18, 1923, 322. 102 JR, October 23, 1923, 537. 103 CVZ, September 13, 1924, 551. 104 Maurer, Ostjuden, 482. 101

Borderline Germans Partition and division: 1921-1923

could only be approached in the context of the overall foreigner question, and not from a confessional standpoint”. And that given the economic crisis in Germany, particularly the housing shortage, “an influx of foreigners is undesirable”. The meeting was unanimous in agreeing that German Jews “distanced themselves from all dishonest elements, of any religion, nationality or origin, and sharply condemned their behaviour”.105

This enraged the Zionists, who saw it as a naked attempt to blame the Ostjuden for provoking antisemitic violence. After the attacks spread to Berlin in early November, the Rundschau felt compelled to reinforce the point, already clear from Beuthen, that it was “not a pogrom against the Ostjuden, but a pogrom against the Jews”. While not referring explicitly to Kopfstein, it castigated those German Jews who sought protection by distancing themselves (abrücken – the same word used by Kopfstein) from the easterners. They would “reap contempt as well as hatred”:

We hope that no such tendencies will reveal themselves among German Jews. Because worse than any disaster that our disaster-prone people might meet today would be the curse of a disgrace that would live long in history. The Jewish nation has borne all persecution with dignity and pride for millennia in the firm belief in its destiny, in its higher and eternal right to existence, which it has maintained for centuries, a living example to other nations of how a people can maintain belief in itself even amid degradation. Worse than any disaster would be a betrayal that we imposed upon ourselves.106

Two days later the regional branch of Upper Silesian Zionists met in Beuthen and condemned Kopfstein’s statement both for its form and content. It was undignified to publish it in the mainstream press, participants said (even in antisemitic papers, it was claimed), but it was the dividing line (Trennungstrich) drawn between German Jews and Ostjuden that aroused the strongest criticism.107 The Zionists complained to the Gemeinde, which Reichmann characterised in unmistakably confrontational language as “a powerful advance” against the CV, while admitting that Kopfstein’s statement had aroused opposition from a large part of the community.108

105 OM, October 26, 1923, n.p. 106 JR, November 9, 1923, 557. 107 JR, November 23, 1923, 573. 108 CVWL MF DOC 55/11/327. 102

Borderline Germans Partition and division: 1921-1923

On November 14 representatives of the Gemeinde, the Centralverein and the Zionists failed to agree on a common platform to defend the community, because the CV refused to give up its leadership of the campaign. Dr Neumann from the Gemeinde executive said it was outrageous that “in this hour of danger” the CV would reject collaboration on equal terms. Georg Weissmann and Siegfried Fränkel from the Zionists again sharply criticised the CV for the Ostjuden comments. But Kopfstein and his colleagues insisted that while physical defence could be carried out on a joint and equal basis, the CV would “prosecute arguments in defence of the Jews from a specific standpoint, namely of German Jews, and therefore could not co-operate with the Zionists on this”.109

Within days of Jews being beaten by mobs in the streets, both sides appeared more intent on attacking each other than on formulating coherent defence plans. The Beuthen branch of the Centralverein published a curt notice in the CV-Zeitung on December 6, taking issue with the “dividing line” characterisation of Kopfstein’s view and rejecting the claim that his first statement had been sent to antisemitic papers, on the grounds that it had gone to all Upper Silesian daily papers, “each of which has explicitly denied any antisemitic leanings”.110 The Zionists refused to let the matter lie. On December 18 the front page of the Rundschau was partly given over to a further dissection of Kopfstein’s statement, “one of the saddest documents of internal Jewish conflict and the undignified attempt to sheet home the blame for antisemitism to the Ostjuden”. The reference to the housing shortage was one that had been endlessly repeated in antisemitic speeches and articles, the Rundschau maintained. The “dishonest elements” could only refer to the Ostjuden. And picking up on the Centralverein response of December 6, it sarcastically retorted: “What a happy province of the German empire Upper Silesia must be, to have no antisemitic papers!”111

As 1923 came to a close, the outlook for the Weimar republic gradually brightened. The failure of Hitler’s Munich putsch and the renewal of the currency eventually ushered in a period of relative calm and stability. But nothing could restore the foundations on which the assimilated Jews of Upper Silesia had built their expectations of progress to full acceptance as Germans. “We have no other” was no

109 CVWL MF DOC 55/11/327. 110 CVZ, December 6, 1923, 368. 111 JR, December 18, 1923, 607. 103

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longer enough. Partition, antisemitism, street violence, economic collapse, political uncertainty, loss of local influence and rising Jewish nationalism all conspired to eat away at the assumptions that had sustained Jewish liberalism for a century or more.

If the abrupt exposure of the assimilationists’ unblinking trust in German Kultur left them philosophically trapped, they then found themselves similarly cornered politically. As the 1920s wore on, the liberals increasingly lost ground to more extreme parties in national politics as well as to the Zionists in internal Jewish politics. Niewyk notes that Jews from the nineteenth century on were “acutely aware that Jewish emancipation stood or fell with the fortunes of liberalism”.112 By 1924, the party that best represented those values and the aspirations of most Upper Silesian Jews, the DDP, had slumped to 5.7 per cent of the national vote, down from more than 18 per cent in 1919. Despite the improvement in economic conditions and easing of political violence in the middle Weimar years between 1924 and 1929, it never recovered. Peter Pulzer uses the figure of Arthur Kochmann, previously prominent on Gleiwitz council, in the Prussian DDP, in the Centralverein and on the synagogue federation of Upper Silesia, to illustrate the liberals’ increasingly uncertain grip. By the late 1920s he had become “an example of a dying breed”.113

Yet the Zionist position also demands scrutiny. Their furious attacks on the CV in 1923 implied a strong bond between Zionism and the Ostjuden. But was this a genuine confluence of interests, or simply an ideological stance that masked the deeper east- west gulf?

4.6 Zionism and the Ostjuden The connections between Zionist politics and the Ostjuden are far from straightforward. As we have seen, the number of eastern Jews in Germany rose significantly in the years after the First World War, and so did support for Jewish nationalism.114 The Ostjuden were disproportionately likely to be sympathetic to Zionism.115 But this was not a simple matter of cause and effect, since Zionism also won converts among German-born Jews, as we have seen from individual examples above. Two possible factors need to be considered to gain a more rounded picture of

112 Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, 1. 113 Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 286. 114 Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei,” 224. 115 Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, 119. 104

Borderline Germans Partition and division: 1921-1923

who the Upper Silesian Zionists were, and how they thought: first, whether rising Zionist sentiment was simply the result of a large number of Ostjuden who already subscribed to those views arriving in the German areas; and second, whether greater interest among German Jews in the traditional values of eastern Judaism, coupled with the particular hostility of the non-Jewish population towards the Ostjuden, helped push more Upper Silesian Jews towards a Jewish nationalist or Zionist position. The evidence is insufficient to make sweeping conclusions, especially on the second point. However, some threads point towards a surprisingly weak connection between the strength of Zionism and the presence or influence of Ostjuden in Upper Silesia.

To get an idea of how the composition of the population changed after 1914, we need to look at levels of emigration among the established Jewish community, and immigration of eastern Jews. The total Jewish population of Upper Silesia had been falling since its peak of more than 24,000 in 1880, mostly thanks to migration to other German cities, above all Breslau and Berlin.116 By 1910 it was down to 18,000, and in 1925 there were only 10,000 Jews in the area that had remained German after partition – obviously the numbers fell in large part due to the loss of Katowice and the other areas ceded to Poland in 1922. Thereafter the figure declined only marginally until 1933.117 There was significant migration of German Jews west following partition, but only a few of those settled in German Upper Silesia – again most headed for Berlin or cities in western Germany.118 Only in Beuthen did the Upper Silesian Jewish population rise noticeably.119

How many of these migrants were Ostjuden? It would be easy to assume that Upper Silesia was one of their primary destinations for settlement, given its proximity to the border, but this was certainly not the case before the First World War. As noted in chapter two, in 1910 only 2,554 Jews in the whole of Silesia were foreign-born (5.68

116 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 41. 117 For 1910 figures, see Osborne, The Upper Silesian Question, 153. For 1925 and later, see Karol Jonca, “Die Vernichtung der schlesischen Juden 1933-1941,” in Wach auf, mein Herz, und denke: zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Schlesien und Berlin-Brandenburg von 1740 bis heute, ed. Klaus Bździach (Berlin/Opole: Gesellschaft für interregionalen Kulturaustausch/Stowarzyszenie Instytut Śląski, 1995), 318. 118 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 48. 119 Wodziński cites a figure of 7,700 Jews leaving the new Polish voivodeship of Silesia between 1922 and 1924, from a pre-partition population of 10,500. Weiser states that the Jewish population of Polish Silesia had halved by 1927, implying some inward migration from other parts of Poland. Beuthen’s Jewish population of 2,579 in 1914 had risen to 3,600 by 1925. See Wodziński, “Languages of the Jewish Communities,” 138; Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 48, 76. 105

Borderline Germans Partition and division: 1921-1923

per cent), and of those nearly 1,500 were in Lower Silesian Breslau (7.2 per cent of its population). Given the Upper Silesian Jewish population in the same year of 18,000, the proportion of Ostjuden there could not have been above 5 per cent.

During and after the war more than 70,000 Jews came to Germany from the east, some as prisoners and forced labourers, others as refugees.120 Reliable figures for their distribution are unavailable, but there is no evidence that the composition of the population in Upper Silesia changed dramatically. In 1924 the national government, under pressure from right-wing nationalist MPs, admitted there had been a “reasonably strong” migration of Ostjuden into the province in the previous few years, thanks to the general uncertainty over the status of the border, but insisted it was a huge exaggeration to say that it constituted a “shocking extent” – it involved no more than 1,000 people.121 Writing in 1936, the Zionist Fritz Tau maintained that the flow of migration from the east had ebbed “only in the last few years”, but gave no more specific statistics or time-frame.122

It is unclear from these sources to what extent migration from the east involved temporary movements back and forth across the border, transition to destinations further west, or settlement in Upper Silesia. But there is little evidence of a significant shift in the composition of the permanent population. Gunter Kamm, who as a prominent member of the community was in a position to know, proposed that by 1933 “about 10 per cent” of Beuthen’s Jewish population of 3,200 were Ostjuden.123 Wilhelm Lustig, also a contemporary witness with detailed knowledge, could name only two Ostjuden families from Gleiwitz, “although there must have been more”.124 Perhaps the most telling anecdotal evidence is the very absence of references to any significant resident population of eastern Jews, or to their sudden arrival at any point, in the many memoirs that record Jewish life in the industrial towns in the Weimar years.

If we accept there was no transforming influx of Ostjuden, it seems reasonable to suggest that any changes in the political outlook or national identification of the Upper Silesian Jews had more to do with members of the established population coming to new conclusions, rather than to different people arriving. The most obvious

120 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 216. 121 JZO, March 14, 1924. 122 JGO, July 27, 1936, 4. 123 Kamm, “Erinnerungen,” 3. 124 Wilhelm Lustig to Ernst Ehrlich, ZA B2/16: 79. 106

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shift to examine is the extent to which sympathy for Zionism or other forms of Jewish nationalism grew in the period after 1918. We have seen some telling accounts of individuals who responded positively to the Zionist message in light of the growing tendency to blame the Jews for Germany’s hardships in the later years of the war. Statistical evidence is harder to come by. Adelheid Weiser states that support for Zionism in Upper Silesia remained weaker than in other parts of the country, but there is little doubt that its influence nevertheless grew significantly in the early 1920s.125

Some frustratingly incomplete figures are available for official membership of the Zionist Union, paid for with a symbolic shekel, assessed as being worth one German mark. In Beuthen these rose from 82 in 1922 to 354 in 1925, 181 in 1926 and 321 in 1927.126 Such advances should be treated with caution since the numbers fluctuated so wildly, tending to be much higher in years when a Zionist congress was held, but they suggest an upward trajectory, which also reflected national trends. In other parts of the country the Jewish nationalist JVP made large gains in Gemeinde elections during the 1920s, at the expense of the assimilationists, sensationally winning a hotly contested election for the Berlin Gemeinde in 1926, and another in Duisburg in 1927.127 Figures for the Gemeinde elections in Upper Silesia are elusive, but certainly the Zionists there did not achieve gains big enough to win control of any communities.

A more exact sense of the extent of nationalist/Zionist feeling can be gleaned from the historic election in February 1925 to the newly formed Preußischer Landesverband jüdischer Gemeinden (Prussian Assembly of Jewish communities – PLV). This was the first and only time direct elections to a Jewish representative body were held across such a large part of the country. In the five largest Upper Silesian towns (Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg/Zabrze, Ratibor and Oppeln), the Zionists won between 20 and 30 per cent of the vote – marginally less than the Prussian average – on a very high turnout.128 This was regarded as a notable advance. The Centralverein national president, Ludwig Holländer, wrote anxiously after touring the region that Zionism had made “huge strides” in Beuthen as a result of the election and the status of the CV had fallen considerably there, though he judged the situation to be less dire

125 Maser and Weiser, 48. 126 For Beuthen figures see JR, October 6, 1922, 528; August 20, 1926, 474; and June 28, 1927, 366. 127 Brenner, “The Jüdische Volkspartei,” 224-226. 128 JLZ, February 6, 1925, n.p. The percentage of the Zionist vote was: Beuthen 29.92%; Gleiwitz 28.03%, Hindenburg 22.4%, Ratibor 30.64%, Oppeln 21.25%. Figures printed in the Jüdische Rundschau differ very slightly. See JR, February 10, 1925, 108. 107

Borderline Germans Partition and division: 1921-1923

in Gleiwitz and Hindenburg. In a telling phrase that reveals how each town had come to be seen as a battleground between the two sides, he hoped that Beuthen could “still be won back for us”.129 By 1927, to the despair of the Centralverein, both the liberal and orthodox Beuthen rabbis were “friendly to the Zionists”.130

Anecdotal evidence supports the view that conflict intensified as Liberal domination of the Gemeinden was increasingly threatened in the 1920s. Wilhelm Lustig reported that in Gleiwitz the Zionists became much more active after 1922, while in Beuthen they were strengthened by the arrival from now-Polish Katowice of Arnold Wiener to join the capable leader Georg Weissmann, the head of the regional body of the Zionist movement.131 The Beuthen Zionist Siegfried Fraenkel, who took over leadership of the local group after Dobrzynski’s death in 1923, recalled torrid battles with representatives of the Centralverein, particularly over his efforts to introduce Hebrew as the language of the Jewish primary school in the town.132 In January 1925 Dr Jacobowitz, a lawyer for the Upper Silesian regional branch of the Centralverein, told colleagues in Berlin the area had been “very aggressively attacked by the Zionists” in recent times.133 Looking back from 1936, Fritz Tau wrote that in Beuthen in particular Zionist gains had been won through gradual attrition – almost every Jew’s politics there were firmly established, so that “the soul of every individual” had to be fought over.134

What role did the Ostjuden play in this rise in support for Jewish nationalism? The estimates of their share of the Jewish population in Upper Silesia suggest their sheer numbers were insufficient to have much impact on elections. Nor do eastern Jews appear to have formed a large membership bloc in the local Zionist organisations, or to have taken leadership positions. When the president of the national Zionist Union, Alfred Landsberg, addressed the Upper Silesian Zionist regional association on November 11, 1923, he stressed the importance of attracting Ostjuden to the local organisation – strongly suggesting his audience was composed very largely, if not entirely, of German Jews.135 It is striking how few voices of eastern Jews have made it

129 CVWL MF DOC 55/17/619, 1925, otherwise undated. 130 CVWL MF DOC 55/11/327, November 15, 1927. Marcus Melchior, the Orthodox rabbi, became a convinced Zionist in Beuthen partly due to the influence of Arnold Wiener. See Melchior, A Rabbi Remembers, 122-124. The liberal rabbi was Ludwig Golinski. 131 Lustig to Ehrlich, ZA 2/16: 79; Fritz Tau, ZA 3/46: 11. 132 Siegfried Fraenkel, “Zur Lebensgeschichte,” 2-3. 133 CVWL MF DOC 55/11/327, January 10, 1925. 134 JGO, July 27, 1936, 5. 135 JR, November 23, 1923, 573. 108

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into the surviving records of the Upper Silesian Jewish communities even from later years. The furious debates sparked by Kopfstein’s pronouncement at the end of 1923 may have been about the Ostjuden, but they were not with them.

Could it be that Upper Silesian Jews were drawn to Zionism at least partly through an appreciation of the more traditional life of their eastern neighbours? The war had brought thousands of German Jews into direct contact with their eastern coreligionists for the first time, and many – particularly those inclined towards Zionism – found what they perceived to be an authenticity in their religious practice and way of life that had long been lost in the west.136 In the Weimar years this developed into what Steven Aschheim calls the “cult of the Ostjuden”. But there is little evidence in the memoirs of Upper Silesian Zionists (admittedly a very small sample) that this was a factor in their political awakening. Rather, those referred to above, such as Gertrude Wachsner, Joachim Prinz and Hans Preiss, couched their change of heart largely as a reaction to hostility and prejudice from non-Jewish Germans as the atmosphere became poisoned by military defeat. Nor did their Zionism imply rejection of their German cultural roots. Preiss, observing in despair from Beirut at the height of the Nazi terror in 1941, was still arguing passionately against other Jews that the Germans as such were not a criminal race: “As much as he hated Hitler, he loved the Germany he remembered.”137

Heinemann Stern recorded that in pre-First World War Kattowitz Ostjuden played little public role in the Zionist movement, despite their numerical and intellectual contribution.138 Writing of the same period, Yehuda Eloni describes how the leading Zionist body, the ZVfD, resisted the enthusiastic participation of Ostjuden in the movement because it saw itself above all as “a German-Jewish organisation”, which accepted foreign Jews on ideological grounds, but was essentially not intended for them. 139

[The German Zionists] behaved towards them as if to migrants. Because of the economic and social gulf they did not see them as an

136 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 187-188. 137 Joan Clarke, The Doctor who Dared: the story of Henry Price (Sydney: Tully Press, 1982), 164. 138 Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich?, 86. 139 Yehuda Eloni, Zionismus in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis 1914 (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1987), 139. 109

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integral part of ‘German Jewry’. They saw them more as in need of protection than as equals.140

There is not enough evidence to conclude unequivocally that the Upper Silesian Zionists maintained similar attitudes in the period after the First World War. However, the strands outlined above suggest at the very least that in Upper Silesia the Ostjuden were a key factor in the antagonism between liberals and Zionists not because of their overwhelming presence, but because of what they represented politically. They served as a symbol to liberals of how Jews should not appear to non- Jewish Germans, and to Zionists of the importance of displaying Jewish unity. But as far as day-to-day engagement with the Ostjuden went, the liberals and Zionists alike are silent. Despite their political differences, the two groups of Upper Silesian Jews had more in common than they might have cared to admit in their reluctance to step across the physical and pyschological border to the east.

140 Ibid, 140. 110

5. Conclusions

The Beuthen Centralverein leader Ernst Behrendt, writing in 1927, optimistically looked back on the early 1920s as an aberration, when a conjunction of events had conspired to throw the hard-won gains of the Upper Silesian Jewish middle-class into jeopardy. Violence had not ceased abruptly at the end of 1923. As late as September 1924, Behrendt himself suffered a life-threatening physical attack by antisemitic thugs, but he continued to believe that “Germans of all confessions essentially fight their battles on cultural grounds – their heart’s desire is to persuade their opponent through enlightenment and education”.1

Behrendt died in Dachau in December 1944, sharing the fate of thousands of Upper Silesian Jews. Their road to the camps came with only slight variations to the familiar pattern of Nazi slaughter. One was that the minority rights written into the 1922 Geneva convention on the partition of Upper Silesia – designed primarily to protect Germans in Polish areas and vice-versa – were also claimed by the Jews in German Upper Silesia after the Nazis came to power in 1933.2 Local Jewish leaders, particularly the Zionist Georg Weissmann, applied pressure on the League of Nations through the “Bernheim Petition” to keep Upper Silesia relatively untouched by the antisemitic laws passed in the rest of Germany, above all those that related to employment and to marriages between Jews and non-Jews.3 But that protection ended when the convention expired after its intended 15-year term in July 1937.

The following year the synagogues of German Upper Silesia were destroyed in the nationwide pogrom on November 9.4 After the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Polish Upper Silesia was re-annexed to Germany, and the Nazis drove most of the remaining 14,000 Silesian Jews into small forced labour camps set up around the province.5 Less than a month after the Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942, which cemented plans for the so-called “final solution”, a transport of Jews from

1 Der Schild, October 24, 1927, 324. In 1924 Behrendt and a colleague were besieged overnight in a Beuthen hotel by dozens of extreme nationalists who daubed the walls with swastikas. See CVZ, September 25, 1924, 588. 2 Brendan Karch, “A Jewish ‘Nature Preserve’: League of Nations Minority Protections in Nazi Upper Silesia,1933-1937,” Central European History 46, no.1 (2013), 131. 3 Ibid, 139. 4 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 60. 5 Ibid, 61.

111 Borderline Germans Conclusions

Beuthen arrived at Auschwitz and its occupants were gassed.6 The rest of Silesia’s Jews followed, most to the slave labour camp of Gross-Rosen (now Rogoźnica) in Lower Silesia, or to Auschwitz.7

No work on Jewish Germans in the first part of the twentieth century can be read without knowledge of the catastrophic end to the story. But hindsight is not the same as history. Many have interpreted the behaviour of the various Jewish factions in the Kaiserreich and Weimar years in the light of the Holocaust, and come to the conclusion that, as Donald Niewyk puts it (without himself subscribing to this view), “realism on the part of the Jews would have led them to Zionism” and conversely that liberal assimilationism turned out to be “a monumental case of self-delusion”.8 Such judgments are unhelpful, for several reasons. First, they assume that the Nazi rise to power was an inevitable or logical outcome of German history that could and should have been foreseen. Second, they discount the self-identification of Jews as Germans on the grounds that some non-Jews did not recognise them as such. This argument – essentially that assimilationist Jews were living in a state of false consciousness – robs them retrospectively of their right to define themselves as they saw fit. And third, they do not attempt to explain what led so many people to such supposedly delusional beliefs, based on the evidence at their disposal. This is the key task if we want to try to read history forwards, rather than impose a framework dictated by later events.

In the case of Upper Silesia, the evidence outlined above suggests that the dichotomy between Germany and “the east” played a powerful role in the way Jews saw themselves. Like their non-Jewish compatriots, they generally subscribed to positive views of supposedly inherent German virtues – order, cleanliness, economic progress, Kultur – and contrasted them with the alleged backwardness of the Polish lands in all respects. These tropes were deeply ingrained and endured across the dramatically changing political landscape of the region in the twentieth century – Andrew Demshuk has shown that they also persisted for decades after 1945 among Germans expelled from Silesia at the end of the Second World War.9 For the German Jews, those tendencies were strongly reinforced by the alienation they felt from the appearance and practices of the Ostjuden – or at least the stereotypes they embodied.

6 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: the Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 - March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 421. 7 Maser and Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien, 63. 8 Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany, 195. 9 Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 23, 68. 112

Borderline Germans Conclusions

As a result, they typically expressed their loyalty to Germany as a positive identification which, if anything, even surpassed that of non-Jewish Germans. They spoke in terms of “duty to the fatherland” and their devotion to Kultur. “German Jews allow no one to exceed them in their love for their homeland,” Behrendt insisted.10 When the direct plebiscite question arose in 1921, they specifically denied that their decision to vote for Germany was primarily motivated by Polish antisemitism. In other words, for all that they recognised the value of a liberal, constitutional state to Jewish security and progress, that was not what drove their vote, or their loyalty to Germany more broadly. They did not pragmatically seek the protection of the German state as Jews, but enthusiastically identified with the nation as Germans.

When antisemitism exploded in Upper Silesia through the Freikorps interventions, the electoral success of völkisch nationalist parties and the mounting violence of 1922 and 1923, the responses of the Jewish community revealed flaws in the ideology of both assimilationists and Zionists. For some of the Centralverein persuasion, exemplified by Rabbi Kopfstein, unqualified devotion to Germany implied less than unqualified acceptance of Jews who were regarded as essentially unGerman and, perhaps, incapable of becoming German. For the Zionists, defending the political rights of eastern Jews was not necessarily matched by an embrace of their culture (or a rejection of Germany’s), as the logic of Jewish nationalism suggested. Even as their movement gained strength in Upper Silesia, the available evidence suggests, it remained culturally German and was led and supported by local German Jews, despite its claims on behalf of the Ostjuden.

Where do these two strands fit within the framework of the indifference thesis, if at all? Perhaps the most straightforward answer is that, unlike non-Jewish Upper Silesians, the Jews could not afford to be indifferent, ambivalent or flexible about which nation they belonged to. As this study has shown, there were powerful historical factors that embedded the Jews so firmly in German culture, and tied their progress so tightly to German constitutional politics, that national indifference was not an option, particularly when German hegemony was threatened. And even when the community was divided, in the aftermath of the antisemitic violence, the ferocity of the exchanges between liberals and Zionists illustrates an understanding on both sides that the

10 CVZ, September 13, 1924, 550. 113

Borderline Germans Conclusions

question of belonging or not belonging to a nation-state – in this case Germany – was critical to the future of the Upper Silesian Jews.

Questions of Germanness and Jewishness were tested to an extreme extent in Upper Silesia, thanks to the combination of its historic demarcation from the eastern hinterland and the successive local crises between 1918 and 1923. Reacting to events that moved at a bewildering pace, the Jews struggled to escape deep-seated and long- established conceptions of their relationship with Germany and with their eastern neighbours, both Jewish and non-Jewish. One outcome was that the liberals failed to engage effectively with the objective fact that Jewish protestations of their eternal Germanness made little impression on the views of non-Jewish Germans. But that misapprehension was only one version of the broader delusion that afflicted a much wider group of people, Jews and non-Jews alike – that Germany, or any nation, embodied a set of essential underlying characteristics, good or bad, that would always survive political turbulence.

114

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Illustrierter Führer durch das oberschlesische Industriegebiet. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Orte Kattowitz, Königshütte, Beuthen, Tarnowitz, Zabrze und Gleiwitz. Leipzig: Woerl's Reisebücherverlag, 1904. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/1061/edition/943. Accessed January 31, 2016.

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Gramer, Franz. Chronik Der Stadt Beuthen. Beuthen: Im Selbstverlage des Magistrats, 1863. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/974/edition/896. Accessed December 10, 2015.

Klaussmann, A Oskar. Oberschlesien vor 55 Jahren und wie ich es wiederfand. Berlin: Phönix-Verlag, 1911. https://www.sbc.org.pl/dlibra/publication/910/edition/836. Accessed May 23, 2017.

Other primary sources “Die Eheschließungen im Jahre 1906.” In Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, vol. 4, 12 (December 1908), 189-190.

“Eheschließungen im Jahre 1904.” In Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden, vol. 2, 10 (October 1906), 158-159.

Brann, Markus. “Die Bedeutung der Juden für die Geschichte und Kultur Oberschlesiens.” In Oberschlesien: Ein Land deutscher Kultur, edited by Paul Knötel. Gleiwitz: Heimatverlag Oberschlesien, 1921: 93-95.

Finkel, E. “Oberschlesien.” In Der Orden Bne Briss: Mitteilungen der Großloge für Deutschland VIII UOBB. Berlin, November 1921: 101-105.

Hein-Kircher, Heidi (ed.). “Ergebnisse Der Plebiszite (1920-21).” Dokumente und Materialien zur ostmitteleuropäischen Geschichte, 2011. Herder Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung. https://www.herder- institut.de/no_cache/digitale-angebote/dokumente-und- materialien/themenmodule/quelle/40/details/40.html. Accessed August 5, 2018.

Reinharz, Jehuda (ed). Dokumente zur Geschichte des deutschen Zionismus 1882- 1933. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981.

Riedel, Arthur. “Kriegs- und Nachkreigserlebnisse der Stadt Beuthen O/S.” In Die deutsche Stadt Beuthen O/S und ihre nächste Umgebung, edited by Erwin Stein. Berlin: Deutscher Kommunal-Verlag, 1925: 23-32.

Stephan, Bernard. “Beuthen als Bollwerk des Deutschtums.” In Die deutsche Stadt Beuthen O/S und ihre nächste Umgebung, edited by Erwin Stein. Berlin: Deutscher Kommunal-Verlag, 1925: 37-39.

Thon, Jakob. “Die Juden in den preußischen Städten.” Zeitschrift für Demographie und Statistik der Juden 2, no. 12 (December 1906): 187-189.

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Published memoirs Daisy, Princess of Pless, by herself. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928.

Grünfeld, Walter. Rückblicke: Dem Andenken von Herrn Dr Walter Grünfeld 1908- 1988. Zug, Switzerland: Privately published, undated.

Höfer, Karl. Oberschlesien in der Aufstandszeit, 1918-1921: Erinnerungen und Dokumente. Berlin: E.S. Mittler und Sohn, 1938.

Klemenz, Hans. “Erinnerungen an Kattowitz 1900-1945.” Mitteilungen des Beuthener Geschichts- und Museumsvereins 25/26 (1963-64), 83-96.

Melchior, Marcus. A Rabbi Remembers. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1965.

Meyer, Michael (ed). Joachim Prinz, Rebellious Rabbi: An Autobiography - the German and Early American Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

Rainer, Withold. “Jüdischer Mitbürger in Myslowitz vor 60 Jahren.” Laurahütter Heimatblatt 12, no. 1, January 23, 1969.

Stern, Heinemann. Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich? Jüdisches Leben zwischen den Kriegen. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1970.

Tau, Max. Das Land das ich verlassen mußte. Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe Verlag, 1961.

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Dienemann, Mally. “Aufzeichnungen,” 1939. http://access.cjh.org/939510. Accessed 25 April, 2017.

Fraenkel, Siegfried. “Zur Lebensgeschichte meines geliebten Sohnes Michael Fraenkel,” 1949. http://access.cjh.org/497855. Accessed March 13, 2016.

Frohmann, Margot. “Autobiography,” 1982. http://access.cjh.org/439046. Accessed March 13, 2016.

Gruenewald, Max. “Childhood Memoirs,” undated. http://access.cjh.org/567114. Accessed April 17, 2016.

Gruenewald, Max. Oral history interview, June 14, 1971. http://access.cjh.org/1328065. Accessed February 6, 2019.

Kamm, Gunter. “Erinnerungen an die jüdische Gemeinde Beuthen O/S,” 1977. http://access.cjh.org/391798. Accessed March 20, 2016. 117

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Kirschner, Emanuel. “Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben, Streben und Wirken,” 1937. http://access.cjh.org/498689. Accessed March 13, 2016.

Lustig, Wilhelm. “Erinnerungen aus der Zeit der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien,” 1958. http://access.cjh.org/553636. Accessed January 27, 2017.

Perls, Hugo. “Eine kleine Stadt in Oberschlesien,” undated. http://access.cjh.org/594326. Accessed April 17, 2016.

Reichmann, Hans. “Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach dem 30. Januar 1933,” undated. http://access.cjh.org/589194. Accessed November 1, 2017.

Weissbluth, Gertrude. “Es soll die Spur von ihren Erdentagen nicht in Aeonen untergehn: Entwurf einer Familiengeschichte,” 1961. http://access.cjh.org/418364. Accessed April 17, 2016.

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Adler, Benjamin. “Von der Orthodoxie zum Zionismus.” B3/46: 11.

Guttmann, W. “Gleiwitz.” B2/16: 34.

Kuschnitzky, Friedrich. Letter to Ernst Ehrlich, November 9, 1959. B2/16: 79.

———. Letter to Ernst Ehrlich, November 5, 1959. B2/16: 79.

Preiss, Hans. Untitled. B2/16: 88.

Schlegel, Rudolf. Letter to Ernst Lustig, March 8, 1979. B2/16: 33.

Tau, Fritz. “In Oberschlesien bis 1938.” B3/46: 11.

Unpublished memoirs — Emmanuel Ringelblum Oral History Collection, Washington, DC, United States

Liebermann, Hans. Oral history interview, August 15, 1978. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accession Number: 1995.A.1257.22. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510476 Accessed February 21, 2017.

Liebermann, Lotte. Oral history interview, October 10, 1978. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Accession Number: 1995.A.1257.23. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510477. Accessed February 21, 2017.

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Other unpublished sources Fraenkel, Peter. “Susanne and the Nazis: a Tale of Intrigue and Heroism,” 2011. http://peterfraenkel.co.uk/susanne_and_the_nazis_2011.pdf. Accessed May 8, 2017.

Schwerin, Kurt. “The Jews in Silesia: An Attempt to Assess their History, and their Economic and Cultural Activities”, 1972. Box 1, Folder 7, Kurt Schwerin Collection. Leo Baeck Institute Archives, New York. http://access.cjh.org/475276. Accessed July 9, 2017.

Newspapers Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums CV-Zeitung Frankfurter Zeitung Im Deutschen Reich Jüdische-Liberale Zeitung Jüdische Rundschau Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Oberschlesien / Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für Beuthen, Gleiwitz, Hindenburg Jüdische Turn- und Sportzeitung Kattowitzer Zeitung Der Oberschlesier Oberschlesische Grenz-Zeitung Oberschlesische Wanderer Oberschlesische Zeitung Ostdeutsche Morgenpost Der Schild Vossische Zeitung Der Weisse Adler Die Welt

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Birnbaum, Max. Staat Und Synagoge 1918-1938: Eine Geschichte des preußischen Landesverbandes jüdischer Gemeinden. Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr, 1981.

Bjork, James. “Monoglot Norms, Bilingual Lives: Readership and Linguistic Loyalty in Upper Silesia.” In Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950: Modernity, Violence and (Be)Longing in Upper Silesia, edited by Tomasz Kamusella James Bjork, Tim Wilson and Anna Novikov, 106-127. London: Routledge, 2016.

———. Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Blackbourn, David. “‘The Garden of Our Hearts’: Landscape, Nature, and Local Identity in the German East.” In Localism, Landscape and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930, edited by David Blackbourn and James Retallack. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007: 149-164

Blanke, Richard. Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 1918-1939. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Bräu, Ramona. “Zwischen Schlesien und Palästina: Lebensläufe schlesischer Juden auf der Grundlage von Zeitzeugeninterviews.” In Von Schlesien nach Israel: Juden aus einer deutschen Provinz zwischen Verfolgung und Neuanfang, edited by Maximilian Eiden. Görlitz: Schlesisches Museum zu Görlitz, 2010: 65-84.

Brenner, Michael. A Short History of the Jews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

———. “The Jüdische Volkspartei: National-Jewish Communal Politics During the Weimar Republic.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), 219-243.

Browning, Christopher. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 - March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Chrust, Yosef. “The Jubilee of the Katowice Conference.” In Katowice: The Rise and Decline of the Jewish Community; Memorial Book edited by Yosef Chrust and Yosef Frankel. Tel Aviv: The Society to Commemorate the Jews of Katowice, 1996: 20-22

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Clarke, Joan. The Doctor Who Dared: The Story of Henry Price. Sydney: Tully Press, 1982.

Davies, Norman, and Roger Moorhouse. Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.

Demshuk, Andrew. The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Dudek, Beata. “Das Wirtschaftsleben der Juden in Schlesien – die Städte Beuthen O/S und Glogau.” In Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West: Neue Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte in Schlesien, edited by Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014: 138-155.

———. Juden als Stadtbürger in Schlesien: Glogau und Beuthen im Vergleich 1808- 1871. Hamburg: Kovač, 2009.

Dwork, Debórah, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

Eloni, Yehuda. Zionismus in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis 1914. Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1987.

Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871- 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Flade, Roland. Juden in Würzburg 1918-1933. Würzburg: Freunde Mainfränkischer Kunst und Geschichte, 1985.

Fuchs, Konrad. “Zur Bedeutung des Oberschlesischen Judentums: Ursachen und Wirkungen.” In Gestalten und Ereignisse aus Schlesiens Wirtschaft, Kultur und Politik, edited by Konrad Fuchs. Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 1992: 74-90.

Fulbrook, Mary. A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Gerwarth, Robert. “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated States of Central Europe.” In War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, edited by Robert Gerwarth and John Horne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012: 52-71.

———. The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Frank Golczewski, Polnisch-Jüdische Beziehungen 1881-1922: eine Studie zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981.

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Gordon, Adi. “Auf der Suche nach der zentraleuropäisch-jüdischen Generation des ersten Weltkrieges: ‘Weltbühne’ und ‘Brith Shalom’.” In Deutsch-Jüdische Jugendliche im “Zeitalter der Jugend”, edited by Yotam Hotam. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2009: 145-166.

Gorion, Emanuel bin, Alfred Loewenberg, Otto Neuburger and Hans Oppenheimer (eds). Philo-Lexikon: Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens. Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1936. Unaltered reproduction. Königstein: Jüdischer Verlag, 1982.

Grosch, Waldemar. “Deutsche und polnische Propaganda in der Zeit der Aufstände und des Plebizits.” In Oberschlesien nach dem ersten Weltkrieg: Studien zu einem nationalen Konflikt und seiner Erinnerung, edited by Kai Struve. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2003: 63-96.

———. Deutsche und polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien, 1919-21. Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 2002.

Guttmann, William, and Patricia Meehan. The Great Inflation: Germany 1919-23. Farnborough: Saxon House, 1975.

Hagen, William W. “Murder in the East: German-Jewish Liberal Reactions to Anti- Jewish Violence in Poland and Other East European Lands, 1918-1920.” Central European History 34, no. 1 (2001), 1-30.

———. Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Hamburger, Ernest. Juden im öffentlichem Leben Deutschlands, 1848-1918. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1968.

Hecht, Cornelia. Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik. Bonn: Dietz Verlag, 2003.

Heinsohn, Kirsten. “Deutsche Juden in Oppeln 1871-1944.” In Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West: Neue Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte in Schlesien, edited by Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014: 259-281.

Hewitson, Mark. “The Kaiserreich and the Kulturländer: Conceptions of the West in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1914.” In Germany and ‘the West’: A History of a Modern Concept, edited by Riccardo Bavaj and Martina Steber. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015: 55-68.

Hitze, Guido. Carl Ulitzka (1873-1953) oder Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2002.

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Immerwahr, Paul. “Justizrat Wilhelm Immerwahr (1865-1935).” Mitteilungen des Beuthener Geschichts- und Museumsvereins 25-26 (1963-64), 221-222.

Jonca, Karol. “Die Vernichtung der schlesischen Juden 1933-1941.” In Wach auf, mein Herz, und denke: zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Schlesien und Berlin- Brandenburg von 1740 bis Heute, edited by Klaus Bździach. Berlin/Opole: Gesellschaft für interregionalen Kulturaustausch/Stowarzyszenie Instytut Śląski, 1995: 317-327.

Judson, Pieter. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2016.

Kamusella, Tomasz. “Language and the Construction of Identity in Upper Silesia During the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Die Grenzen der Nationen: Identitätenwandel in Oberschlesien in der Neuzeit, edited by Kai Struve. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2002: 45-70.

———. “The Szlonzoks and their Language: Between Germany, Poland and Szlonzokian Nationalism.” European University Institute Working Papers No. 1 (2003): 1-50.

Karch, Brendan. “A Jewish ‘Nature Preserve’: League of Nations Minority Protections in Nazi Upper Silesia, 1933-1937.” Central European History 46, no.1 (2013), 124-160.

———. “Polish Nationalism and National Ambiguity in Weimar Upper Silesia.” In Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950: Modernity, Violence and (Be) Longing in Upper Silesia, edited by Tomasz Kamusella James Bjork, Tim Wilson and Anna Novikov. London: Routledge, 2016: 149-169.

Karski, Sigmund. Albert (Wojchiech) Korfanty. Dülmen: Laumen-Verlag, 1996.

Klein-Pejšová, Rebekah. Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Kopfstein, Markus. Geschichte der Synagogen-Gemeinde in Beuthen O/S. Beuthen: W. Nothmann, 1891.

Kossert, Andreas. “Founding Father of Modern Poland and Nationalist Antisemite: Roman Dmowski.” In In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe edited by Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011: 89-104.

Lamberti, Marjorie. Jewish Activism in Imperial Germany: The Struggle for Civil Equality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

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Löwenthal, Ernst Gottfried. Bewährung im Untergang: ein Gedenkbuch. London: DVA, 1965.

MacMillan, Margaret. Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and its Attempt to End War. London: John Murray, 2002.

Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Maser, Peter, and Adelheid Weiser. Juden in Oberschlesien: Teil 1, Historischer Überblick - jüdische Gemeinden. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992.

Maurer, Trude. Ostjuden in Deutschland 1918-1933. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1986.

Mendelsohn, Ezra. Zionism in Poland: The Formative Years, 1915-1926. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.

Mosse, Werner. Jews in the German Economy: The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820-1935. New York: Clarendon Press, 1987.

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Müller, Hans-Harold. “Arnold Zweig (1887-1968).” In Jüdisches Leben zwischen Ost und West: Neue Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte in Schlesien, edited by Andreas Brämer, Arno Herzig and Krzysztof Ruchniewicz. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014.

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Preiss, Eduard. “Erinnerung an die Abstimmung in Oberschlesien.” Der Orden Bne Briss: Mitteilungen der Großloge für Deutschland VIII UOBB. Berlin, April 1931: 62.

Priebatsch, Felix. “Geschichte der Juden in Schlesien.” Menorah 4, no. 5 (May 1926): 257-261.

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Rodriguez, Allison. “‘Scoundrels’ and Desperate Mothers: Gendering German and Polish Propaganda in the Upper Silesian Plebiscite, 1919-1921.” In Creating Nationality in Central Europe, 1880-1950: Modernity, Violence and (Be)Longing in Upper Silesia, edited by Tomasz Kamusella James Bjork, Tim Wilson and Anna Novikov. London: Routledge, 2016: 87-105.

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Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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