Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960 by Brendan Karch (review)

Through the past twenty years of scholarship, Upper Silesia has become one of the most studied borderlands in Europe. A Prussian province abutting the Habsburg and Russian empires before World War I, the multilingual region was contested primarily by the German and Polish nation-states from 1918 through the early Cold War. In particular, Upper Silesia's industrial region—continental Europe's second-largest after the Ruhr—weathered nationalist competition and violent population policies. After decades of polemicist tracts and reminiscences, scholarly output on Upper Silesia commenced in earnest with surveys by Günther Doose, Richard Blanke, and T. Hunt Tooley, followed by the collection Die Grenzen der Nationen (2002), edited by Kai Struve and Philipp Ther, and Struve's Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (2003). Investigation then expanded through innovative studies by Polish, German, and Anglophone scholars including James Bjork, Waldemar Grosch, Tomasz Kamusella, Juliane Haubold-Stolle, Bernard Linek, Anna Novikov, Peter Polak-Springer, Allison Rodriguez, Hugo Service, Grzegorz Strauchold, and Tim Wilson. As Habsburg experts such as Peter Judson and Tara Zahra questioned the constructedness of national identity by positing the "national ambivalence" or ambiguity of "chameleon" borderland populations, Upper Silesia came to be seen as an ideal case for analysis due to the tendency of its multilingual inhabitants to regularly switch national sides as suited their perceived individual interests. After a 1921 plebiscite overseen by the League of Nations compelled residents to declare their nationality, the territory was partitioned between Weimar Germany and the "resurrected" Polish nation-state. Interwar nationalization campaigns to stamp out national indifference then peaked with German Nazi and Polish Communist efforts to classify and homogenize Upper Silesia's population. Finally, a wave of emigration to West Germany saw the indigenous population dwindle to a minority whose descendants still harbored alternative German or Upper Silesian identities in nationally "homogenous" Poland.

Moving out of Upper Silesia's eastern industrial areas along the Polish border, Brendan Karch's new book highlights the "relatively quiet and understudied corner of Upper Silesia" around Opole (Oppeln in German) as an "excellent test case for creating national loyalties" (5). About an hour's train ride west of the disputed industrial conglomeration, Opole and its rural hinterland were only ceded to Polish administration in 1945 as a result of Allied conferences. Applying archival and periodical sources, Karch looks to Opole to interrogate how and why Upper Silesians resisted German and Polish nationalist pressures to join their respective camps. The trend was a "feedback loop," Karch argues: "the more radical the national demands, the more likely nationally uncommitted local populations retreated to a purely instrumental stance toward belonging" (266).

After opening chapters primarily devoted to pre-1914 Polish nationalist movements (and their lack of sustained appeal), the third chapter repeats the scholarly consensus that voting patterns in the 1921 plebiscite exhibited "the very contingency and instability of nations" (99). Of course, when in chapter 4 Karch makes his shocking claim that "local Polish speakers turned out in substantial numbers for the Nazi Party" (181), one must remember that such "Poles" were typically the multilingual dialect-speakers with shifting "loyalties" whom Karch foregrounds in his introduction. Chapter 5 examines the toleration of Jews in Upper Silesia before the 1937 expiration of the 1922 Geneva Accord. Chapter 6 then details how the Nazis sought to enlist most Upper Silesians as "contaminated" Germans (248), a trend mirrored in chapter 7 as "hundreds of thousands of Upper Silesians who had passed as loyal Nazi citizens then became verified Poles, remaining in their homes across the zero hour" (259). Of particular interest here are the immediate postwar archival reports by postwar Polish sociologist Stanisław Ossowski on national feeling in local villages. Ossowski's findings on national ambiguity were fleeting, since already by 1950 a combination of German expulsion and Polish settlement had reduced the indigenous population to a mere 56 percent, and through the late...