In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter Four The Vicissitudes of War In the fall of 1913, during a meeting of the town council in the small Upper Silesian community of Schalkowitz, one of the members of the council began to address his colleagues in Polish. This breach of a statute designating German as the exclusive language of public business triggered a heated exchange . One councilman defended the mandatory use of German with the claim “We are all Germans here,”prompting the ‹rst councilman to object, “I am a Pole and will not deny my nationality.” Seeking to mediate, the mayor staked out what seemed like a compromise position. “Although we are not Germans,” he said, “our children will be Germans.” Hardly reassured by this prediction, the councilman who had just avowed his Polish nationality reiterated, “We are Poles and will always remain Poles.”1 This episode offers a glimpse into the state of the nationalist rivalry in Upper Silesia on the eve of the First World War. Leaders of the Polish movement could take satisfaction in the fact that more Polish-speaking Upper Silesians than ever were now prepared, like the outspoken polonophile councilman in Schalkowitz, to claim the label of “national Poles” and to demand the free use of the Polish language in recognition of their God-given, irreducible national difference. Yet there remained a widespread sense of pessimism about the future of the Polish language in Upper Silesia, a suspicion that time was working against the Polish cause. While readily acknowledging their own descent from a Slavic “ethnic stock”—note how the disputants in Schalkowitz routinely used an inclusive ‹rst-person plural in debating their collective identity—many Upper Silesians anticipated the ultimate demise of the Polish language in the re174 1. Schwidetzky, 104 n. 6, based on an account in Gazeta Opolska, 9 September 1913. gion as a lamentable but entirely unavoidable result of the march of history . No one had to spell out the logic behind the Schalkowitz Gemeindevorsteher ’s matter-of-fact prediction “our children will be Germans.” The German nationalizing program had a state behind it; the Polish nationalizing program did not. However diligent Polish activists were in countering every Turnverein with a Sokol, every Volksbibliothek with a biblioteka ludowa , it seemed increasingly clear that such association building could never match up against Wilhelmine Germany’s machinery of coercion and cultural homogenization. The only institution that arguably had the manpower , the infrastructure, and the social clout to right this imbalance was the Catholic church, but, as we have seen, the bulk of the local clergy was only prepared to soften the blows of germanization, not lead any systematic opposition to it. In the absence of such backing, it seemed the best that Polish national activists could hope for in the foreseeable future was a dif‹cult holding action against the germanizing onslaught. The events of the summer of 1914, however, would turn this set of assumptions on its head. In a matter of days following the assassination of Habsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, all three of the great powers that ruled the lands of partitioned Poland had lurched into a general war, shattering the century-long interimperial collusion that had made the territorial settlement of the Congress of Vienna seem like a permanent structural constraint on Polish national aspirations. Even the excruciatingly cautious editor of Katolik, Adam Napieralski, sensed that the realm of the possible had now signi‹cantly expanded. “We are now talking about something that seemed a utopia ‹ve months ago,” he wrote to one colleague. “I am convinced that the moment that our forefathers awaited for a hundred years is drawing near.”2 The “moment” anticipated by Napieralski was, in fact, relatively modest. He expected nothing more radical than the restoration of a degree of autonomy to the Congress Kingdom (Russian Poland) under the auspices of the Central Powers, along with some linguistic and cultural concessions to Polish speakers in Prussia. While Napieralski’s hopes of exploiting an expected German victory were thwarted—‹rst by the intransigence of the German government, then by Allied arms—the ultimate German defeat, coming on the heels of the collapse of the Russian monarchy, opened up far more radical possibilities for Upper Silesia, as for East Central Europe as a whole. Popular sentiment in favor of a radical break with the old Reich was now overwhelming, but it would remain far The Vicissitudes of War 175 2. Cited by Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 185. [3.143.23.176] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share