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The Case of Upper Silesia After the Plebiscite in 1921

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The Case of Upper Silesia After the Plebiscite in 1921 Celebrating the nation: the case of Upper Silesia after the plebiscite in 1921 Andrzej Michalczyk (Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt, Germany.) The territory discussed in this article was for centuries the object of conflicts and its borders often altered. Control of some parts of Upper Silesia changed several times during the twentieth century. However, the activity of the states concerned was not only confined to the shifting borders. The Polish and German governments both tried to assert the transformation of the nationality of the population and the standardisation of its identity on the basis of ethno-linguistic nationalism. The handling of controversial aspects of Polish history is still a problem which cannot be ignored. Subjects relating to state policy in the western parts of pre-war Poland have been explored, but most projects have been intended to justify and defend Polish national policy. On the other hand, post-war research by German scholars has neglected the conflict between the nationalities in Upper Silesia. It is only recently that new material has been published in England, Germany and Poland. This examined the problem of the acceptance of national orientations in the already existing state rather than the broader topic of the formation and establishment of nationalistic movements aimed (only) at the creation of a nation-state.1 While the new research has generated relevant results, they have however, concentrated only on the broader field of national policy, above all on the nationalisation of the economy, language, education and the policy of changing names. Against this backdrop, this paper points out the effects of the political nationalisation on the form and content of state celebrations in Upper Silesia in the following remarks. The most important issues are partly connected with the analyses mentioned above. According to Linek, the years 1922-1950 covered ‘a time of dynamic activity by the nation-state’ in Upper Silesia and were characterised by holistic actions by the state aimed at implementing principles of an ethnic nationalism.2 Arguing along the same lines, Hobsbawm named his chapter covering the years 1918-1950 ‘The apogee of nationalism’.3 The question that results from those observations is to what extent state celebrations were performed for nationalising purposes. Moreover, I try to examine how far the social inclusion or exclusion that could be activated before or during the festivities depended on nationalistic principles. Finally, I aim to look at how the population of Upper Silesia reacted to the ideas created by the state authorities. The state celebrations that constitute the core of this case study can be defined, on the one hand, as forms of the representation of the national policy in public; and, on the other, as a collective experience of the participating individuals.4 They are planned 1See: Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918-1939 Lexington 1993; Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism reframed: nationhood and the national question in the New Europe Cambridge 1996; Matthias Kneip, Die deutsche Sprache in Oberschlesien. Untersuchungen zur politischen Rolle der deutschen Sprache als Minderheitensprache 1921-1998 Dortmund 1999; Bernard Linek, ‘Deutsche und polnische nationale Politik in Oberschlesien 1922-1989’, in Die Grenzen der Nationen: Identitätenwandel in Oberschlesien in der Neuzei, ed. Kai Struve and Phillip Ther Marburg 2002:137-68. 2 Linek, 140. 3 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge 1990. 4 See: Winfried Gebhardt, Fest, Feier und Alltag. Über die gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit des Menschen und ihre Deutung. Frankfurt/M 1987: 63ff.; Inszenierungen des Nationalstaats. Politische Feiern in 49 or founded, and throughout related to a concrete, usually historical occurrence. They offer the state an exceptional opportunity beyond everyday life to reflect on the origin, importance and future of the groups and/or institutions, to enact them in public and, thus, to present them on a broad social basis.5 The festivities have a potential strength to become an important medium for the codification, transmission and appropriation of collective models and to stress historical continuity and cultural unity.6 The selected case study deals with the Upper Silesian plebiscite celebrations. These celebrations represented the biggest enactments of the Polish and the German state power in Upper Silesia in the period from 1922 to 1932 and, thus, are also best documented. Most source material used for this research comes from the contemporary press and public as well as secret reports by civil servants. This case study begins in 1922. In this year, the international allied commission abandoned its governance and safety tasks in the controversial borderland, and the Upper Silesian administration was assumed by the Polish and the German states. This development facilitated the organisation of Polish and German celebrations of the anniversary of the plebiscite from 1923 onwards. The last celebration of the plebiscite organised by state authorities took place in 1932. This year marks the final date of this paper. Nationalism and the Upper Silesians before the plebiscite With the increase in national consciousness and a progressing polarisation of national attitudes during the ‘Kulturkampf’ the Upper Silesian ethnic borderland, home to strategically crucial heavy industry, changed into an area defined by nationalism in the early years of the twentieth century. After the defeat of Austria and Germany in the First World War, the new Polish state claimed the entire region on the grounds that ethnic Polish people lived there. As a result of German and Polish military actions (the so-called ‘Silesian uprisings’) and a plebiscite, Upper Silesia was divided between Poland and Germany in 1922, and became the borderland of two nation- states. Even though Germany had lost large parts of its eastern territories, it still contained sections of Polish-speaking or Slavophone people, and because of the readjustment of European borders after the First World War, a German minority now found itself citizens of Poland. Relations between the nationalities in Upper Silesia were already complicated at the time when the country was still part of the German empire. The intensification of political rivalry and agitation was reflected in a specific way in the consciousness of the local population, which took place before the plebiscite. Yet, many Silesians remained unimpressed despite the sharp national mobilisation and even bloody fights. The language problem was related to the ethnic process of identification. Upper Silesians frequently had a command of both German and Polish, leading to a situation in which the language was not a decisive criterion for nationality. For a considerable part of the population the daily use of the Slavophone Upper Silesian dialect was not necessarily synonymous with Polish national consciousness. About 60% of the Upper Italien und Deutschland seit 1860/1871, ed. Sabine Behrenbeck and Alexander Nützenadel Köln 2000; Hans-Juergen Luesebrink, ‘Das Fest’, in Orte des Alltags. Miniaturen aus der europäischen Kulturgeschichte, ed. Heinz-Gerhardt Haupt München 1994: 202-6. 5 See: Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation, American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Geneviève Fabre, Juergen Heidekind and Kai Dreisbach New York 2001. 6 See: Behrenbeck and Nuetzenadel: 13; Festive Culture in Germany and Europe from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Karin Friedrick London 2000. 50 Silesian population, according to the official census of 1910, spoke Polish or regional Slavonic dialects. The plebiscite in 1921 had already shown that only 40 percent voted for Polish control of Upper Silesia. Moreover, in this region over 90% of the population were Roman Catholic. Religion often influenced the life of the inhabitants in much a stronger way than national divisions, and formed a common ground and, thus, a base for deeper understanding between both ethnic groups. The governments of Poland and Germany realised that some people in the Upper Silesian border area were indifferent to their national identity. From the perspective of the state apparatuses, the Upper Silesians could be assigned to three national defined groups.7 Two of them developed clear dividing lines, i.e. the group of the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘strangers’. However, the attitude of the third group was contradictory to the idea of the nation-state propagated in Warsaw or Berlin. These people were described - in terms of the nationalistic discourse - as national ‘unstable’ or ‘undecided’, and appeared in the reports as a group with ‘unconscious national attitude’. Additionally, they often showed resistance to national declarations and preferred other forms of identification, e.g. regional or religious ones, as opposed to national identity. These circumstances formed a focus for conflict. However, propaganda measures introduced by the states covered not only the nationally ‘problematical’ group, but also other parts of the population which were exposed to the nationality policy. The whole population of Upper Silesia therefore became an object of mobilisation, further consolidation, assimilation, or societal exclusion. The official state celebrations of the anniversary of the plebiscite revealed this development. The celebrations of the anniversary of the plebiscite in German Upper Silesia On
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