Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland

1. Priests, Editors and the Struggle for the Catholic Milieu

Chapter One Priests, Editors, and the Struggle for the Catholic Milieu In 1895, Felix Porsch, one of the leaders of the provincial Silesian branch of Germany’s Catholic Center party, offered these sobering words to a gathering of party activists in Breslau: Until now, we in the Center have not recognized any difference between German and Pole, any difference of language, of status, of occupation . The moment that such a difference is introduced will be the moment when the ground on which the Center stands, the only ground on which it can be great, will collapse.1 A glance at Reichstag election returns suggests that Porsch had little reason to worry. In 1893, the Center party had won its largest ever number of votes in the region, over 80 percent of all ballots cast, consolidating a regional dominance ‹rst won during the polarizing years of the Kulturkampf . Although that percentage dipped slightly in the elections of 1898, as the Social Democrats started to make inroads in Upper Silesia’s industrial triangle, the Center once again garnered an overwhelming share of the popular vote and won every constituency that it contested.2 Upper Silesian Catholics, it seemed, were continuing to vote as Catholics, ensuring that election returns highlighted the region’s relative confessional homogeneity rather than its national, linguistic, and socioeconomic differences. But if one looks more closely at those electoral statistics, scrutinizing the 19 1. Quoted in Ilse Schwidetzky, Die Polnische Wahlbewegung in Oberschlesien (Breslau: Osteuropa Institut, 1934), 42. 2. Jerzy Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów do Parlamentu Zwiazku Pólnocnoniemieckiego i Parlamentu Rzeszy Niemieckiej na terenie Slaska w latach 1867–1918,” Studia i Materialy z Dziejów Slaska 7 (1966): 385–433. footnotes and the ‹ne print, it is easier to see why the leader of Silesia’s Center was so anxious. Many of the party’s apparent landslide victories in 1893 and in subsequent by-elections actually featured bruising intraparty face-offs between rival Center candidates. In almost all of these contests, populist candidates endorsed by the Polish-language newspaper Katolik (The Catholic) soundly defeated those backed by the provincial party leadership . The Upper Silesian Center, these results suggested, had unraveled into a “Polish Center” and a “German Center,” with the constituencies of each de‹ned in part by geography (Poles mostly on the right bank of the Oder, Germans on the left), in part by social standing (Poles at the bottom, Germans at the top). Far from being an indicator of tight sociopolitical cohesion , Upper Silesians’ shared nominal adherence to the Center party was, in this view, no more than a loose alliance—or an uneasy truce—between two distinct ethnonational blocks. In this chapter, I will try to make sense of these divergent portraits of Upper Silesian Catholicism at the end of the nineteenth century, to examine what was holding this community together as well as what was threatening to tear it apart. In order to understand the centripetal power of confession , it will be useful to begin by looking at the impact of what became a crucial formative experience for a generation of Catholic activists and a foundational myth for later generations: the Kulturkampf. The struggle between church and state coincided with and decisively shaped the meaning of a number of other watershed events in Upper Silesia’s history: the introduction of universal male suffrage, the region’s ‹rst major industrial strike, the push to germanize local primary schools. Once these experiences came to be de‹ned in confessional terms, as manifestations of the assault on and the defense of “the Catholic people,” religion emerged as the default language of communal solidarity. But getting there ‹rst was an advantage , not a guarantee of future loyalty. Maintaining belief in the plausibility of “the Catholic people” required sustaining the social spaces where such a community could be regularly reenacted: the “double parishes” where preaching, singing, confession, associational meetings, and catechism classes were offered in both German and Polish variants. It also required a local clergy who could plausibly preside over such communities , balancing populist opposition with state loyalism, sympathy for working-class grievances with defense of social order, the fostering of Polishness with the promotion of Germandom—priests, in other words, who could ful‹ll St. Paul’s injunction to be “all things to all men.” It was hardly surprising that this precarious balancing act began to 20 Neither German nor Pole break down by the...