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Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960. by Brendan Karch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018

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Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960. by Brendan Karch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018 BOOK REVIEWS 465 Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960. By Brendan Karch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 331. Cloth $105.00. ISBN 978-1108487108. Primed for Violence: Murder, Antisemitism, and Democratic Politics in Interwar Poland. By Paul Brykczynski. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 215. Paper $19.95. ISBN 978-0299307042. Brendan Karch’s imaginative book conjures up German speakers resistant to being “German.” Paul Brykczynski’s admirable work highlights Poles who so strenuously rejected Jewish fellow citizens’ efforts to share in the country’s fate that they abetted and applauded the 1922 murder of independent Poland’s first elected president, killed by an upper-class, ultranationalist artist-antisemite. Karch’s study of Upper Silesia, an area inhabited by one of Europe’s largest bilingual popu- lations, advances the cutting-edge debate over the concept of national indifference ignited in recent years by Habsburg historians—notably, Jeremy King, Tara Zahra, Pieter Judson, and Jakub Beneš (for useful orientation, see Maarten van Ginderachter et al., National Indifferentism and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe [2019]). Of pre-modern Upper Silesians, who lived under Austrian and Prussian rulers from the late Middle Ages, Karch says they “were not pre-divided into pre-nations,” as essentialist modern nationalism holds. “They existed in local communities defined by bilingualism, shared religious practice, and a social mixing so natural that it was barely considered mixing at all. Rather than being awakened, Polish and German loyalties had to be constructed” (11). Following the influential historical sociologist Rogers Brubaker, Karch aims to “examine nationalism as an always unfinished mode of catego- rization rather than as the formation of [fully realized – WH] group identities” (14). Karch’s social-constructivist approach challenges the concept of national indifference because, Karch argues, it “explains a condition rather than a process”—a negative state of “not doing and not believing.” Instead, he seeks out Upper Silesians’ loyalties, whether “earned or lost,” and whether—following Max Weber’s distinctions—“value driven” (wert- rational)or“instrumental” (zweckrational) (16–18, 302ff). The ideologically committed nationalists who sought from the late nineteenth century to imbue Upper Silesian Catholics with the metropolitan (Varsovian, Cracovian, Poznanian) intelligentsia’s vision of recovered statehood for an imagined Polish nation were value driven. Their followers in Upper Silesia, always a small minority, lived in a self-enclosed nationalist subculture, from which they ventured forth to convince speakers of the local, demotic Polish, often bilingual in German, to enter their metaphysical-ideological fold. One pioneer nationalist complained of “the many irrational people who regard a Pole and a German as hardly different from each other” (66). The vast majority of people were hard to budge from their primary commitment to Catholicism, served by non-nationalist clergy and revivified by pilgrimage, temperance movements, and resistance to the anti- Catholic Kulturkampf in Bismarck’s Germany. The laity were embedded in German institu- tions, especially German-language schools and the army. Social mobility through mastery of High German and employment in German settings lent their offspring prestige and modest well-being, which did not rule out a home life conducted in their accustomed Slavic tongue (today recognized by the European Union as a separate regional language, schlonsak). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 17:32:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938920000266 466 BOOK REVIEWS These ordinary Upper Silesians guided their political loyalties by instrumental rationality—by calculation of benefits and advantages gained under imperial German rule or, following Upper Silesia’s 1921 partition, as citizens of resurrected Poland or Weimar Germany. (Karch concen- trates his analysis on those Slavic speakers who lived under German rule.) Upper Silesians main- tained loyalty to Berlin until 1918, despite the rise in their midst of Polish nationalist politicians and press. In the 1921 plebiscite, they voted—by a controversially small margin—for continued German citizenship. Karch shows that in putting clashing nationalisms to a democratic vote by both men and women, propagandists on both sides emphasized not the moral imperatives of ethnic identity but the practical advantages of German or Polish citizenship, such as social ben- efits, economic prospects, and civil and military security (99, 137ff). Nationalism’sendpoint,the unified organic nation-state, proved under democracy to be an ever-retreating mirage, before which the population disaggregated into a congeries of subcultures. Because Weimar eventually devised, in its part of Upper Silesia, locally administered structures of bilingual, bicultural life that Slavic-speakers found acceptable, Polish nationalism languished there. Nazi racialization of the imagined German Volk sparked analogous impulses among hardline Polish nationalists. Disappointed in Upper Silesians’ bowing to life under Weimar liberalism and Hitlerian authoritarianism alike—which Polish nationalists imputed to a widespread inferiority complex vis-á-vis Germans—they now insisted that Polish ethnicity as they defined it was every Slavic-speaking individual’s ineluctable destiny (6, 178, 233, 264–66). The result was a downward spiraling “feedback loop, in which value-driven national radicalism and instrumentally driven national skepticism [among ordinary Upper Silesians] reinforced each other” (21). An interesting chapter traces the paradoxical freedom of Upper Silesian Jews from perse- cution from 1933 until the expiry in 1937 of the League of Nations provisions protecting them. As for Hitler’s Silesian Catholic Slavic-speaking subjects, most escaped classification as internal enemies and played the pragmatic role of “good Germans” and trusted soldiers to war’s end. Likewise, after Germany annexed Polish Upper Silesia, Nazi authorities placed most Slavic speakers into safe categories of the infamous Volksliste (248ff). After com- munist Poland absorbed the whole of Silesia, these instrumentally loyal Nazi subjects, labeled “autochthons,” found themselves forced into loyalty to the new Poland, or they fled—by the hundreds of thousands—to the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, there to be rapidly assimilated as Germans “from the East.” In 1945, the communist strongman Aleksandr Zawadzki publicly denounced “the notion, which fatally and harmfully reflected itself in the psyche of Silesia, that when Poland arrives, Silesians are Poles, and when the Germans arrive, they are Germans” (283). Communists from the Polish heartland flooded into Upper Silesia to extirpate all traces of the German presence. Anti-communist Slavic speakers found themselves governed as a suspect, formerly colonized people. Arrogant communist Polonization policies drove Upper Silesians into wounded silence or exile. “Polish nationalism devoured its native- born”—if wayward—“children” (286). Beyond massive postwar expulsions of those labeled German, heavy out-migration of dis- illusioned Upper Silesians to West Germany occurred after 1956 and again after 1989. Yet, still today, several hundred thousand Upper Silesians proclaim themselves officially to be Poland’s largest minority group, the S´la˛zacy. Still more embrace this as a secondary identity alongside Polishness, while the current integral-nationalist government scorns both groups as self-denying Poles and would-be Berlin-Republic Germans. In the end, Upper Silesian Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 17:32:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938920000266 BOOK REVIEWS 467 separatism from metropolitan Poland and embrace of a history enfolded within Germany survive with surprising vigor. Karch’s book should inspire historians of Germany to look again to the German-French, German-Danish, and German-Slavic borderlands for analogous instances of resistance to centralizing, monolingual nationalism. If German historiography has not yet found questions of national indifference a challenge, it may be because the salience of regional identities and religiously permeated subcultures is so well recognized. Yet Karch leaves Upper Silesia’s stories only half-told. How did the bilingual common people, for centuries mostly ill-used subject villagers under magnate lords, lead their daily lives and understand themselves, both subjectively and emotionally? In historiography, if not in prose fiction and art, this question calls for answers. Karch highlights those targeted for “awakening” by Polish nationalists, while those who were drawn toward Deutschtum remain largely offstage. The everyday dynamics of this multicultural island call for social-psy- chological and cultural—not only political—illumination. ∗∗∗ Paul Brykczynski demonstrates the axial significance of the 1922 murder of newly elected Polish president Gabriel Narutowicz by a follower of the National Democrats (Endeks), the country’s powerful right-wing, nationalist, obsessively antisemitic movement. Historians of Germany will be struck by parallels to
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