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

2. Down with the Center: The Growth of Alternative Nationalisms

Chapter Two Down with the Center: The Growth of Alternative Nationalisms During the 1890s, dissension over the role that the promotion of Polish nationality should play in the defense of the “Catholic cause” had driven an unmistakable rift through Upper Silesia’s Catholic community. The region ’s parish clergy, on the one hand, and a growing cadre of Polish Catholic activists, on the other, were engaged in repeated clashes over issues ranging from the selection of Reichstag candidates to which language should be used in preaching and singing during religious services. Yet, through all of these bitter polemical disputes, both Upper Silesia’s priests and such lay Polish activists as Katolik editor Adam Napieralski remained committed to preserving the ideal of Catholic unity and respecting the rhetorical heritage of the Kulturkampf. The Katolik camp could be con‹dent that even the more unsympathetic and germanophile parish pastors would defend the right of the church to speak to its parishioners in their mother tongue, while the clergy could in turn rest assured that at election time, Napieralski would ultimately reach some kind of understanding with German Catholic leaders and rally his readers to the banner of the Center party. Shortly after the turn of the century, however, this habit of confessional solidarity dissolved with astonishing speed. A new generation of Polish national activists, led by the talented populist ‹rebrand Wojciech Korfanty, rejected Napieralski’s subtle strategy of co-opting and transforming the regional Center party from within and instead demanded a straightforward secession along national lines. Campaigning under the slogan “Down with the Center” and playing on a mixture of cultural and socioeconomic grievances, Korfanty’s National Democratic movement made an explosive debut in the Reichstag elections of 1903, forcing runoffs in several districts and narrowly capturing the industrial district of Kat77 towitz-Zabrze. By the next election, in 1907, the bulk of Upper Silesia’s Catholic electorate was voting for the Polish party, while a signi‹cant minority of German-speaking Catholics also abandoned the Center and threw their support to more hardline German national parties. These emerging Polish and German nationalist movements were not necessarily antireligious, anti-Catholic, or even anticlerical. But for the majority of Upper Silesia’s clerics, the idea of aligning themselves ‹rmly with either the German or the Polish national cause remained an unimaginable option, one guaranteed to divide their beloved Catholic cause and alienate a large portion of their own parishioners. In 1906, at a meeting of the region’s clergy, Father Jan Kapica expressed his colleagues’ sense of disorientation as they faced the seemingly inexorable disintegration of Upper Silesia’s Catholic milieu. The unity of the Catholic people is lost, the unity between German and Pole, between clergy and people; trust has been lost. The people has lost trust in the clergy, and the clergy—let us just say it openly— has no more trust in the people. . . . Today we are conducting an ignominious fratricidal war, Catholic against Catholic, the pastor has to ‹ght with his parishioners, the Catholic people are ashamed of their own priests. We have an enemy to the right, an enemy to the left, a war on the outside and pure turmoil in our own camp. The battle cry goes out: Germans here, Poles there! Workers here, owners there! New weapons have been forged. We do not know how to handle them. New ideas, new concepts, words and formulas have surfaced, everyone has them on their lips, no one can properly interpret them. The leaders have lost their direction—why should we deny it?—indeed, they have lost their heads. It is no wonder that the “young guard” hedges, becomes discouraged, or tries to throw down its weapons altogether.1 In this chapter, I will examine the development of these “new ideas, new concepts, words, and formulas” that, in the space of only a few years, seemed to rede‹ne the foundational political and social realities of Upper Silesia, transforming the region from a predictable Centrist/Catholic bastion into a battleground between competing nationalisms. 78 Neither German nor Pole 1. Kapica, Mowy—Odezwy—Kazania, 189. The New Poles The sudden attraction that the Polish party exerted on the workers and farmers of Upper Silesia can only be understood if one considers the reevaluation of the meaning and boundaries of “Polishness” that was taking place within the larger community of Polish national activists around the turn of the...