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A Polish Mitteleuropa?: Upper Silesia's Conciliationists and the Prospect of German Victory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

James Bjork
James Bjork*
Affiliation:
Rice University, U.S.A.
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Extract

In the first days of August 1914, as enthusiastic crowds hailing the German declaration of war on Russia and France swarmed in front of the imperial residence in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II famously declared that he no longer knew political parties, only Germans. The remark was intended to be rhetorically inclusive, of course, to signal the surmounting not only of party-political divisions but also of the empire's chronic class, confessional, and regional tensions. But for one of the empire's most marginalized groups of subjects—those millions who did not consider themselves of German descent and who spoke Polish rather than German as a native language—the Kaiser's invocation of a common German identity was more effective in underlining the limits rather than the promise of civic solidarity. Unlike the Habsburg Monarchy or (to a lesser extent) the Czarist Empire, where Polish nationalists could hope to reconcile commitment to their national cause with faithfulness to an imperial dynasty or even a diffuse sense of patriotism to a multinational state, the Hohenzollern monarchy had, over the previous half-century, become virtually synonymous with hostility to all things Polish. Upholding the Prussian monarchy, it seemed, was functionally inseparable from promoting a culturally homogenized German nation-state.

Type
Forum: Grenzmarken: Negotiating National Identity on the Borders of Germanness
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 2001 , pp. 477 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. In one of the standard texts on Polish involvement in the First World War, for example, 30 pages are devoted to an initial discussion of the Austrophile orientation, 14 pages to the Russophile orientation, and only four pages to the Germanophile orientation. Jerzy Holzer and Jan Molenda, Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1973).Google Scholar

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32. Jan Kapica, Die Deutsche Kulturmission, der Katholizismus, und die nationale Versöhnung (Beuthen: Druck und Verlag Katolik, 1917), p. 64.Google Scholar

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34. Ibid., p. 48.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., p. 44.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., pp. 120–21.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., p. 130.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., p. 169.Google Scholar

39. Thomas G. Masaryk, The New Europe (The Slav Standpoint) (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972) (originally published 1918), pp. 103–104.Google Scholar

40. Kapica, op. cit., p. 162.Google Scholar

41. Ibid., p. 173.Google Scholar

42. Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, pp. 205–206.Google Scholar

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44. This is how the well-informed Father Szramek describes the genesis of the meeting. “Ks. Aleksandr Skowroński, p. 147.Google Scholar

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49. From Schlesische Volkszeitung, No. 118, quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan Kapica,” p. 57.Google Scholar

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51. As early as 1915, Upper Silesian women had led militant hunger marches to protest high prices and shortages. By 1917, wildcat strikes were commonplace, and labor union membership was growing rapidly. See Mendel, op. cit., pp. 196–215; and Wolfgang Schumann, Oberschlesien 1918/19: Worn gemeinsamer Kampf deutscher und polnischer Arbeiter (Berlin: Rütten&Loening, 1961), pp. 39–56.Google Scholar

52. A detailed account of the by-election can be found in Mendel, op. cit., pp. 156–74.Google Scholar

53. Schlesische Volkszeitung, No. 273, quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan Kapica,” pp. 52–53.Google Scholar

54. Ibid., p. 46.Google Scholar

55. Adam Napieralski, Deutschland, Österreich, Polen (Ein Beitrag zur Lösung der polnischen Frage) (Bytom: Katolik, 1918), pp. 22–23, cited in Paweł Dubiel's sharply critical article: “Memoriał Adama Napieralskiego w sprawie odbudowy państwa polskiego,” Zaranie Śla̦skie, Vol. 2, 1970, pp. 302–12.Google Scholar

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57. Paul Nieborowski, Oberschlesien, Polen, und der Katholizismus (Berlin: Hans Robert Engelmann Verlag, 1919), pp. 45–46.Google Scholar

58. Jan Kapica, “Delegatura Biskupia,” in Emil Szramek, ed., Mowy–Odezwy–Kazania, p. 245.Google Scholar