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

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Acknowledgments Although much of the work that goes into a book is conducted in relative isolation, no project that has been this long in the making is possible without the generosity and support of many people. A first note of appreciation is due to the committee who supervised my doctoral dissertation, which served as the point of departure for this book. I could not have asked for better advisors than Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer. While always ready to provide feedback and counsel, they also make a point of respecting their students' autonomy, allowing them to cultivate unique arguments and scholarly voices. Ron Suny and John J. Kulczycki, the other members of my committee, provided invaluable input in this project's formative stages. Alf Lüdtke, although not a formal member of the dissertation committee, was also among the intellectual godparents of this project. His seminar during my first year of graduate study has left a lasting mark on how I approach history. Further crucial contributions to the intellectual foundations of this book came from other members of the faculty and from my fellow graduate students at the University of Chicago, especially the participants in the Modern European History Workshop. Since completing my doctoral dissertation, I have had the good fortune to be affiliated with a number of outstanding history departments—at the University of Notre Dame, Rice University, and Colgate University—as well as with interdisciplinary programs at Georgetown University's Center for German and European Studies and Cornell University's Institute for European Studies. I benefited enormously from interactions with my colleagues at these institutions, both through formal seminars and workshops and in informal conversations. Particular thanks go to Roger Chickering, probably the first scholar not attached to my dissertation committee who gave this project an encouraging vote of confidence, and to Margaret L. Anderson, who offered insightful and conscientious feedback on various parts of the manuscript. Last but certainly not least, a debt of gratitude is due to Page x →Geoff Eley and the anonymous reviewers for the University of Michigan Press, whose enthusiasm for my initial manuscript made it possible for this book to be published and whose perceptive feedback led to an improved and leaner final product. During my time conducting research in Poland, I benefited from the advice and hospitality of a number of colleagues and friends. Wanda Maria Wanatowicz and Piotr Greiner at the University of Silesia helped to smooth my entry into local archives and provided useful historiographical orientation. A number of librarians and archivists, especially Halina Dudala at the archdiocesan archive in Katowice, offered assistance and unfailing hospitality. During my long stay in Poland, I also had the privilege of having a wonderful home in downtown Katowice provided by Anna and Roman Bielatowicz, who became and remain dear friends. A number of organizations provided crucial financial support for this project, at both the research and write-up stages: the Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays grant), the State Department (Fulbright grant), the International Research and Exchanges Board, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. All those who help to keep these programs running—and help to keep them funded—have my appreciation. A different kind of contribution, though equally vital, was made by the many colleagues and friends who provided support, advice, and much needed distraction on the long road from dissertation proposals to permanent academic employment. This could be a lengthier list, but I should at the very least mention a few friends who have really been there every step of the way: Andre Wakefield and Rebecca Kornbluh, Tom Miles, Melissa Feinberg and Paul Hanebrink, Paul and Julie Steege, Genita Robinson, and Kathy and Mike Pettit. Although I came to know them very late in the process of completing this book, my colleagues in the History Department at King's College London also deserve special mention. The day I received a job offer at King's was one of the happiest of my life, but only over time have I come to appreciate what a splendid group of colleagues I have found. Without doubt, my greatest debt of gratitude is owed to my family: my father, Walter, who passed away shortly after the manuscript was accepted for publication; my mother, Eloise; and my brother, Charles. Without their

constant encouragement, neither this book nor anything else that I have achieved in my life would have been possible. Page xi → I am grateful to the publishers of the following publications for granting permission for some material from them to be reproduced in this book: “A Polish Mitteleuropa? Upper Silesia's Conciliationists and the Prospect of German Victory,” Nationalities Papers 29 (2001): 477–92 (Taylor & Francis website: http://www.informaworld.com) “Everything Depends on the Priest? Religious Education and Linguistic Change in Upper Silesia, 1870–1914,” in Die Grenzen der Nationen. Identitätenwandel in Oberschlesien in der Neuzeit, Kai Struve and Philipp Ther, eds., Band 15, Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 2002 “Gretrennt durch einen gemeinsamen Glauben: Die Organisierung katholischer Arbeiter in Oberschlesien 1870–1914,” in Christliche Arbeiterbewegung in Europa 1850–1950, Claudia Hiepel and Mark Ruff, eds., Band 30, Konfession und Gesellschaft, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003 “Nations in the Parish: Catholicism and Nationalist Conflict in the Silesian Borderland 1890–1922,” Religion und Nation, Nation und Religion: Beiträge zu einer unbewältigen Geschichte, Michael Geyer and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005 “Industrial Piety: The Puzzling Resilience of Religious Practice in Upper Silesia,” in Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Transcendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland, ” Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher, eds., Stuttgart: Wallstein, 2006 Page xii →

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Place-Name Equivalents German

Polish

Beuthen Bytom Birkenthal Brzezinka Bismarckshütte Hajduki Bogutschütz Bogucice Breslau Wrocław Cosel Koźłe Domb Dąb Dzietzkowitz Dziećkowice Eichenau Dąbrowka Mała Gleiwitz Gliwice Hindenburg (after 1915) Zabrze Kandrzyn Kędzierzyn Kattowitz Katowice Königshütte Królewska Huta Kreuzberg Kluczbork Laurahütte Laurahuta Loslau Wodzisław Lublinitz Lubliniec Michalkowitz Michałkowice Myslowitz Mysłowice Nikolai Mikołów Oppeln Opole Pless Pszczyna Ratibor Racibórz Rosdzin Roździeń Rosenberg Oleśno Schwientochlowitz Świętochłowice Siemianowitz Siemianowice Sohrau Żory Tarnowitz Tarnowskie Góry Tichau Tychy Zalenze Załęże

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Notes on Language and Names In writing about a linguistic borderland, the use of a nonlocal, third-party language, such as English, might seem to be a way to transcend partisan-ship. On closer scrutiny, it does no such thing. Almost every Upper Silesian personal name or place-name comes in a German variant and a Polish variant but no English variant (the name Upper Silesia being a blessed exception), so claims to linguistic “neutrality” are quickly punctured. One solution to this dilemma is to use both versions of a name (e.g., Schwientochlowitz/ Świętochłowice). I have considerable sympathy for this approach, but it ultimately seemed too cumbersome for this book. Instead, I have used the version of a particular place-name that was official at the time—that is, German up until 1922, Polish (for certain areas) after the change of sovereignty. This method is not entirely satisfactory, since it is based on deference to power, but it is reasonably clear, economical, and consistent. Personal names are an even thornier issue, since many people routinely adjusted their first names (and sometimes even the spelling of their last names) to fit the language in which they were writing. But again, I felt a choice must be made, if only to spare readers repeated references to, say, Johann/Jan Kapitza/Kapica. Here, I again went with the “official” version in notes and bibliography. In the text, however, I went with the version that seemed most consistent with the individual’s overall linguistic and national orientation; someone with polonophile sentiments, for example, is called by the Polish version of his/her name. This is also not an entirely satisfactory method, since I am, after all, arguing throughout this book that many of my central characters had no clear national orientation. Readers will have to endure such contradictions as another example of the distortions imposed by the nationalization of scholarship.

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Introduction What is an Upper Silesian? Is he a German, a Pole, a Prussian, simply an Upper Silesian, or simply a Catholic or, perhaps, even just an abstract human being? —Father Jan Kapica, 1906 At the end of the First World War, with the old dynastic states of East Central Europe defeated and at various stages of disintegration, the Allied powers set out to redraw the map of the eastern half of the continent in accordance with the principle of national self-determination. Armed with census data and expert opinions, the peacemakers tackled the project with impressive zeal, comparing and weighing the linguistic practices, genealogical origins, and historical experiences of relevant populations in an effort to place them in the “right” state, the one they would recognize as genuinely their own. Often, however, this arsenal of positivist statistical tools gave conflicting evidence, offering no conclusive guidance for the boundary makers of the new Europe. In these cases—or, rather, in those in which interested states sufficiently lobbied to force the issue—the Allies resorted to the most direct and voluntarist means of gauging national identification: a plebiscite. What better way to determine who people were, after all, than to ask them? In all, some half-dozen plebiscites were held around the edges of Germany and Austria in the immediate postwar years. The largest and most hotly contested, and the one most closely watched by the outside world, was held in 1921 in Upper Silesia, a region situated at the southeastern corner of the prewar German Empire. Based on 1910 census data, it was estimated that about one-third of the two million residents of the Upper Silesian plebiscite zone spoke German as a mother tongue, while almost two-thirds spoke Polish (with a few percent claiming Czech or both GermanPage 2 → and Polish as a mother tongue).1 Home to some of the most productive mines and smelting operations in Europe, Upper Silesia was perhaps the most coveted territorial prize of the entire postwar settlement, and both Germany and Poland spared no expense in trying to ensure a favorable result. The Upper Silesian plebiscite put to the test not only local loyalties to two rival national programs but also two broad understandings of how people “become national” in the modern era. According to one model, often described as “civic” or, more controversially, “Western,” the inhabitants of a given state are gradually shaped into a homogeneous cultural nation through the work of the schools, the military, and other top-down integrative institutions.2 Perhaps the best-known account of this process is Eugen Weber’s classic Peasants into Frenchmen, which described how, during the early decades of the Third Republic, an order “imposed by men of different code and speech” became accepted by “people of all sorts who had been exposed to such ways and acquired a taste for them.”3 Officials and publicists in Germany argued that something very similar could take place—indeed, had been taking place—in that country’s borderlands, particularly in an area, like Upper Silesia, that had been a part of the state of Prussia for almost two centuries. But Polish national activists, espousing what is often labeled an “ethnic” or “Eastern” model of nationalization, insisted that this state-driven process had things precisely backwards. Legitimate, viable nations began with a people who already share a common language and other elements of a common culture. Then, in a process described most systematically by Mirsolav Hroch, activists cultivated a national high culture, mobilized a mass constituency behind demands for cultural and political autonomy, and ultimately created a fully differentiated national society.4 Polish nationalists in Upper Silesia had been followingPage 3 → this script since the late nineteenth century and expected that the plebiscite would provide a fitting climax for the “awakening” of the region’s Polish-speaking majority into full national consciousness. When the plebsicite was held and the votes tabulated, the outcome—a 60 percent to 40 percent margin in favor of Germany—provided some validation for each narrative of nation building but a resounding victory for neither. A substantial minority of “civic Germans” had voted for union with Poland, while a substantial minority of “ethnic Poles” had opted for Germany.5 Among the many questions raised by the Upper Silesian plebiscite, perhaps the most provocative was generated not by the final tally but by the process leading up to the vote. Like most elections—at least ones that we would

deem plausibly democratic—the plebiscite was preceded by a period of campaigning that involved much more than simply exhorting a predetermined constituency to make its way to the polls. Judging by their actions, each side clearly assumed that a substantial proportion of voters was undecided in its national orientation and awaited persuasion. German and Polish activists distributed hundreds of thousands of newspapers, fliers, pamphlets, and posters—usually printed in both languages or in a counterintuitive language (i.e., pro-German appeals in Polish; pro-Polish appeals in German), advising voters of the practical benefits of joining one prospective nation-state and the drawbacks of joining the other. More generous land reform, lower taxes, the absence of conscription or reparations, and better social insurance programs were all aggressively advertised as reasons to opt for Germany or for Poland. In a “normal” domestic election, of course, a voter swayed by such appeals to vote for a candidate or party would be thought to have indicated a provisional preference, one that might change by the next election—or, indeed, the next week. Could Upper Silesia’s plebiscite voters, then, be assumed to have indicated an enduring “national identity,” a loyalty carefully constructed over generations and impervious to subsequent revision? Many contemporary observersPage 4 → had their doubts. One described the swing voters of the plebiscite as exhibiting a sense of “suspended nationality” (schwebende Volkstum).6 Familiar to varying degree with both German and Polish languages, these residents’ national allegiances were mutable and conditional, oscillating between cultural connections to Poland and familiarity with the rights and obligations of German citizenship. Their national leanings were uncertain going into the plebiscite, and their casting of a ballot for one nation or another seemed to provide remarkably little long-term national clarity. Upper Silesia continued to be known through the interwar period—and, indeed, until the present day—as a zone of “mixed, fluid, and ambivalent national identification.”7 Entertaining the possibility that people may be subjected to multiple processes of nationalization without becoming irretrievably immersed in any of them requires some rethinking of the prevailing “modernist” paradigm of nationalization. Influential works by Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger have, to be sure, made us all aware of the novelty of national communities and the hard ideological labor that has gone into their construction.8 But while encouraging skepticism toward mythologized national histories stretching back into the mists of time, this literature has only tended to reinforce belief in the irresistibility of nationalizing programs once they gain momentum in the modern era. To cite a metaphor famously deployed by Gellner, medieval and early modern cultural affinities might show the fluidity of a painting by Kokoschka, but the needs of industrial economies ultimately impose the clarity of a Modigliani.9 Upper Silesians’ persistent national ambivalence and national indifference is something of an embarrassment for such a model. Industrialized since the early nineteenth century, with almost universal literacy, and long familiar with the mass political mobilization and association culture of Wilhelmine Germany, the region could not easily be lumped in with such rural, isolated areas as Podlesie in eastern interwarPage 5 → Poland, where “political immaturity” has been credited with leading peasants to eschew national labels and declare themselves simply “local” as late as the 1920s.10 Relatively few works of historical research have questioned the muscular teleology powering the modernist theory of nationalization. Indeed, most have reinforced it. Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen, cited earlier, has provided an influential template for narrating nationalization as modernization: what brings his subjects together in one story is not their origins, which are persuasively portrayed as heterogeneous and locally rooted, but their shared destination as Frenchmen in the making. In more recent years, a number of subtle regional studies exploring the interplay between the transformation of local communities and the creation of national communities have complicated portrayals of nationalization as straightforward absorption of the periphery by the center.11 People in the provinces, we have been usefully reminded, have appropriated the national cause for their own purposes, contesting and reshaping what it meant to be French or German or Spanish. But in these monographs as well—even one focused on an area straddling the (unusually stable) French-Spanish boundary—the “provincials” in question faced little uncertainty about which nation they were helping to create. The tradition of narrating stories of nation building from within a given nation has not, however, been limited to the geographically stable nation-states of Western Europe. In a number of recent studies of nation building in the lands of partitioned Poland, scholars have duly stressed that a Polish national consciousness was neither present nor destined to develop among a majority of local peasants. Yet the possibility of not becoming Polish remains

rather hypothetical; those under scrutiny are, by definition, precisely the inhabitants who embraced Polishness.12 MiroslavPage 6 → Hroch’s influential analysis of the stages of development of stateless nationalist movements also involves an internalist approach, using each nation-to-be and its boosters as a given unit of study.13 In his later work, however, Hroch admitted that this approach did not illuminate the full picture; what was needed, he noted, was not only continued study of nationalizing elites but also inquiries into “nationally unconcerned” intelligentsias who “by reason of their education and ethnicity, could have participated in the national movement, but did not do so.”14 I would push this point further. The virtual absence of such groups in European historiography is not just a “gap,” an unfortunate lacuna in historians’ research agendas. It reflects, rather, a fundamental difficulty in imagining individuals and groups who operate outside of a definite national context, actors whose anationality might provide a useful external perspective for exploring not only the internal engines of nationalization but also the limits of such processes. Part of the challenge of exploring the phenomenon of national indifference, of course, is envisioning whether and where residents of modern societies could plausibly escape the omnipresence of the nation. What alternative cultural elites, ideologies, or forms of social integration existing in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might validate the behavior of national boundary crossers? One nonnational institution that continued to play an important role in the lives of tens of millions of East Central Europeans—and that has recently received some overdue historiographic scrutiny—was the Habsburg Monarchy. At a time when the machinery of state in such countries as France and Germany was being unabashedly employed in the service of nationalization, the dynasty, the army, and the upper echelons of the civil service in the Habsburg Monarchy (especially in its Cisleithanian half) remained staunchly supranational, cultivating their own distinctive sense ofPage 7 → corporate consciousness.15 In addition to allowing some residents of the monarchy to remain aloof from nationalist politics, the monarchy’s attempts to play honest broker among rival nationalist programs ensured that in some of the most hotly contested regions, such as the Bohemian crown lands, no one national camp became dominant. In the short term, this translated into a much more fluid and open-ended national landscape, with substantial populations of national “amphibians.” But in the long run, the strategy of managing national groups rather than forcing through the triumph of a single national program encouraged an ever more thorough sorting out of individuals into discrete national constituencies. A “fair” distribution of power along national lines, after all, required some calculation of national groups’ demographic strength, spurring efforts to assign a clear and singular national identity to individuals. Since the remaining nonnational institutions were so firmly connected to the dynasty, the latter’s sudden and irrevocable disappearance from the scene in 1918 left national groups as the only viable heirs to the Habsburg succession. In Upper Silesia, of course, state institutions were already being fitfully deployed on behalf of a nationalizing agenda in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and any lingering doubts about the Prussian monarchy’s devotion to cultural germanization had vanished by the time of the Kulturkampf. But there was another institution—more ancient than the Habsburg Monarchy and, crucially, more durable—that did pursue interests independent of any particular nationalist program: the Roman Catholic church. Even a superficial look at the demographics of the region suggests that Catholicism might have played an important role in shaping relations between linguistic and national groups: some 90 percent of the total population was Roman Catholic, including almost all Polish speakers and the overwhelming majority of German speakers. But it is only when one looks deeper into the role of the church in Upper Silesian life that one starts to appreciate the capacity of confession to complicate the process of national polarization. Religious practices—worship services, confession, communion, processions, pilgrimages, religious education—played a prominent part in everyday life; parish-based associations constituted thePage 8 → leading form of social organization; and Catholic-oriented periodicals dominated the public sphere. In appreciating the centrality of the church in the lives of Upper Silesian Catholics, it is not necessary to take at face value the pronouncements of local priests who proclaimed their people as “beyond all others exceptionally religious.”16 Social scientists using a variety of quantitative data, from rates of church attendance to the density of religious associations, have also pinpointed Upper Silesia as one of the most observant regions in twentieth-century Poland.17 This vibrant religious sphere was presided over by a parish clergy that was not only omni-competent—playing the roles of labor organizer, newspaper editor, and parliamentary

representative, as well as preacher and confessor—but also notoriously difficult to place into national categories. Both sympathetic contemporaries and later, more hostile scholars wrote of the bulk of the clergy as nationally “indifferent,” ready to “answer in the language in which they are asked,” and possessed of a mentality that judged things “exclusively from the viewpoint of the church, treating national matters only secondarily or indifferently.”18 The suggestion that a religious community and a confessional elite could pose a serious challenge to the formation of national cultures well into the twentieth century throws another wrench into the engine driving modernist theories of nationalism. Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner have discussed religious communities almost exclusively in terms of the “great sacral cultures” of the Middle Ages, cultures that were inexorably eroded by modern modes of thought and industrial modes of economic production and eventually superseded by the vernacular high cultures of nation-states. To the extent that religious allegiances have persisted, sometimes in virulent forms, scholars of nationalism have concentrated on the congruence between older confessional and emerging national communities, leading to what Gellner called a “transition from faith to culture” and a “fusion with ethnicity and eventually with a state.”19 In the era of nationalism,Page 9 → in other words, Roman Catholicism is transformed into a cultural marker of being a good Pole or Irishman, Orthodoxy into a marker of being a good Serb and Russian, and Protestantism into a marker of being a good American or English person. This virtual dismissal of religion as an autonomous factor in the late modern world, however, is difficult to reconcile with recent historiography on the social history of religion, particularly Catholicism. A growing body of scholarship has demonstrated that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe’s largest religious community, rather than atrophying, was undergoing a thorough transformation and revitalization. Mobilized into new forms of devotional practice, social organization, and political activism, Catholics in many parts of Europe were more densely connected to their church and their coreligionists at the turn of the twentieth century than they had been a century before.20 The German historian Olaf Blaschke has gone so far as to label most of the modern era, from the nineteenth century through the 1960s, as a “second confessional age.”21 Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser have characterized the resurgence of religious controversy in the nineteenth century somewhat differently, noting that the marquee antagonists of this era’s religious struggles were not so much confessional communities fighting one another but, rather, Catholics freshly mobilized by their church to combat secularizing liberals.22 In Culture Wars, an edited volume drawing together analyses of Catholic-secular conflicts across Western and Central Europe, Clark and Kaiser make a plea for looking more closely at the similarities between these struggles and treating nineteenth-century Europe as, in many ways,Page 10 → “a common politico-cultural space.” This can only be applauded. But this work of international comparison, I would add, needs to involve not only looking beyond the national case study but also looking below and inside it, questioning whether “the nation” was, in fact, as the editors argue at one point, always “the most encompassing” good over which Catholics and anticlericals fought.23 While each of the contributions to Culture Wars is labeled as a discrete national “case,” some of these essays actually point to ways in which Catholic-secular conflicts spilled beyond contestation of the meaning and ownership of a given nation into questioning of the outer contours of national units. Consider Robert Nemes’s study of Catholic opposition to civil marriage laws in Hungary in the mid-1890s: while many of the protagonists in this conflict strove to define the conflict as a family feud among Hungarian patriots, some of the Slovakspeaking Catholics mobilized during the controversy experienced it as a catalyst to separate from the Hungarian nation altogether.24 Far from being “encompassing,” national boundaries in late nineteenth-century Europe—especially, but not exclusively, its eastern half—were very much works in progress, and intra-national struggles over religion could and did morph into religiously fueled bids for national autonomy. While it was hardly uncommon for religious revivals and conflicts to “jump” from one national framing to another, the national compartmentalization of scholarship makes it difficult to track such stories. This has been especially apparent in trying to analyze a borderland Catholicism straddling two research fields—“German Catholicism” and “Polish Catholicism”—that have developed in near-total isolation from one another, each cultivating its own divergent set of problems and preoccupations. Scholarship on Catholicism in modern Germany has focused on Catholics’ status as an embattled minority and the resulting development of a cohesive, largely

self-contained sociomoral milieu. Analysis of milieus (not only Catholic, but also socialist/working-class and, more questionably, rural Protestant and urban liberal) originally developed as part of the pursuit of Germany’s Sonderweg: the division of the populationPage 11 → into inward-looking subcultures, it was argued, impeded the evolution of effective catchall parties and thus contributed to the failure of democracy.25 Emphasis on German exceptionalism has recently faded as scholars have paid more attention to similar developments in other countries (Dutch pillarization, confessional cleavages in Switzerland, clerical and anticlerical camps in countries with a Catholic majority). Subsequent research has also taken divergent directions regarding what, exactly, was unhealthy about the development of a distinctive Catholic milieu within the German Empire. Anglo-American scholars have tended to stress the genuine hostility that Catholics faced from liberal national elites, whose hatred of the Catholic church was interlaced with fear of democracy and of female emancipation.26 A number of German authors, by contrast, have seen the isolation of the Catholic milieu as largely a result of internal developments, an authoritarian “ultramontanization” manifested in increased regulation of sexual mores and hostility toward Jews.27 In addition to this underlying debate regarding the dangers of fundamentalism and the virtues of pluralism, recent research on Catholicism has also been concerned with more empirical questions of subcultural cohesion, internal differentiation, and boundary maintenance: How did the Catholic milieu emerge and sustain itself during a period of profound social transformation?28 To what extent was the Catholic milieu held together and “managed” by the clergy, and to what extent did it involve a delicatelyPage 12 → negotiated coalition of socioeconomic interest groups?29 What are we to make of the significant number of Catholics, from middle-class liberals in the Rhineland to working-class Social Democrats in Munich, who remained consistently aloof from the Centeroriented milieu?30 These lines of inquiry have generated a formidable body of research, most of it devoted to building a composite picture of das katholische Deutschland from the ground up, through the accumulation and comparison of regional studies. By the turn of the twenty-first century, according to one bibliographical count, there were over a hundred monographs and articles to various regional Catholic milieus.31 Some scholars have complained that this approach to Catholic Germany has exaggerated its isolation from the main currents of German culture and society, particularly Catholics’ engagement with German nationalism.32 But if this literature has, in some ways, been excessively subcultural and hence not “German” enough, it has, in other ways, been far too comfortably and uncritically embedded in a German national historiography. In the bibliography previously noted, it is striking that not one of the hundred-odd studies of the Catholic milieu deals with territory outside the current Federal Republic. In neglecting all those Catholic citizens who lived either east of the Oder-Neisse Line or in Alsace Lorraine—almost a third of imperial Germany’s Catholic population—historians of the Catholic milieu have missed an opportunity to investigate some fundamental questions about the internal dynamics and external boundaries of this subculture. To what extent did the formation of a dense and cohesivePage 13 → Catholic community ameliorate intraconfessional linguistic differences and facilitate integration into the German state? Alternately, to what extent did confessional alienation from German mainstream culture precipitate a sense of ethnic differentiation and spur secessionist aspirations among previously loyal citizens? Scholars operating on the Polish side of the historiographic divide have had equal (but distinctive) difficulties in viewing the frontier between German and Polish Catholicism as a fluid zone begging for scrutiny rather than an impermeable outer limit. If German Catholicism has been defined by its minority status and problematic relationship to national high culture, Polish Catholicism has often been imagined as central to—indeed, indistinguishable from—national identity. As a result, almost every historian of modern Poland ends up devoting some serious consideration to Catholic institutions, beliefs, and/or practices. But the habitual equation of Catholicism with the Polish national cause has, paradoxically, probably done more to inhibit than to inspire research into the social history of religion in the Polish lands.33 It has provided a one-dimensional explanation for all signs of religious vigor and has dampened curiosity about regional differences in religious observance. The limitations of this approach are evident in the work of Daniel Olszewski, one of the few Polish church historians to attempt a systematic investigation of Catholic religious life in the nineteenth-century Polish lands. While making the usual argument linking high levels of religious practice to the linkage between faith and fatherland, he also cites the high levels of observance in heavily industrialized Upper Silesia as the Polish church’s most

spectacular success story. It remains unclear whether and how his overall explanation covers this specific case. Indeed, despite the fact that Upper Silesia stands in some ways as the “star” of his account, Olszewski did not do primary research there; all the church records for this period, after all, are in German.34 The categorization of Poland as a pure case of “national Catholicism” has also made itPage 14 → difficult to conduct potentially promising comparisons with Catholic revivals in other parts of Europe. Clark and Kaiser, for example, decided against including essays about either Poland or Ireland in Culture Wars, because they were assumed to lack the intranational diversity and controversy that characterized the other contributions.35 The perception of Catholicism and Polishness as forming an inextricable, symbiotic unity has been reinforced by—and, in turn, has further reinforced—the geographic distribution of regionally focused historiography. The Posen region, where the stereotype of the Pole-Catholic and German-Protestant corresponded most closely with demographic reality, has attracted a disproportionate share of research, sometimes (especially in Anglophone historiography) standing in for the entirety of the “Prussian East.”36 By contrast, areas along the German-Polish linguistic frontier where national and confessional divisions did not neatly overlap—Upper Silesia and Ermland, with their large numbers of German-speaking Catholics; Cieszyń Silesia and Masuria, with their large number of Polish-speaking Protestants—have been the focus of far fewer scholarly inquiries, hardly any of them published in English.37 Page 15 → There is, of course, a considerable German and (especially) Polish historiography devoted to Upper Silesia, but in this literature as well, evidence of national ambiguity or indifference has failed to come fully into focus. Through most of the twentieth century, this was largely due to historians’ rather open and unabashed preoccupation with the development of their own national movements. As late as 1996, for example, a biographical dictionary of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Silesian Catholic clergy included almost every priest who adhered to the Polish cause in the period before the First World War but only a handful of other (germanophile or nationally neutral) clerics.38 This national exclusivity has relaxed noticeably in the past decade, and much recent Polish and German scholarship on Upper Silesia, including church history, has demonstrated a welcome turn away from national claims making and a fresh curiosity about national ambiguity.39 In some ways, however, this latest wave of scholarship has only deepened the puzzle of Upper Silesia. Because almost all of these studies only pick up the story after 1922—indeed, many focus exclusively on the years after 1945—we have a much better sense of the ongoing resilience of national indifference after the heyday of nationalizing pressures than we do of what actually happened during the formative years at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century.40 How, we have been left to wonder, did the nationalizing pressures of those earlier years, a period when all signs pointed to a sorting out of inhabitants into discrete “ethnic groups,” produce a population apparently so detached from either Germanness or Polishness? In trying to reconstruct some sense of the distinctive bilingual Catholicism of Upper Silesia’s industrial triangle, I have carved out a unit of study thatPage 16 → is rather fuzzy and variable but, I believe, appropriate for this book. The classic unit of study for students of Catholicism—the diocese—was not a viable option here, since the bishopric of Breslau, the largest in Germany and the second largest in the world in the late nineteenth century, is simply too vast an entity to tackle in a fine-grained, microhistorical way.41 The centripetal pull of the diocesan capital of Breslau does, to be sure, sometimes figure prominently—for example, in the educational trajectories of parish priests or the disciplinary thunderbolts periodically hurled down by the bishop. But to get any clear sense of the rhythms of everyday devotional practice, we need to direct our gaze closer to the ground. The local parish is, in some respects, the ideal scale, and there will indeed be moments in this book when a specific parish and the personalities of its pastors and curates will come into sharp focus. But any claims to follow a single parish in this period and this part of the world would, in the end, be a bit disingenuous. One of the defining characteristics of the parishes of the industrial region, after all, is that they were regularly being subdivided and reconfigured to keep up with runaway population growth; any parish selected in 1890 would likely be three or four parishes by the time we followed it through to 1922. Since the study of multiple parishes was unavoidable, while the study of hundreds of parishes seemed inadvisable, I have settled on a compromise unit of study: the deanery of Myslowitz, an evolving

cluster of parishes that included the cities of Kattowitz, Königshütte, and Myslowitz as well as nearby pit villages and working-class suburbs (see fig. 1). This collection of parishes will, I hope, quickly emerge for readers as a distinctive, vivid, and (at least in some ways) coherent world, even though the words available to designate it (deanery, conurbation) are hopelessly bloodless and abstract. The structure of this book is, at least at first glance, much more straightforward. The narrative is essentially chronological, tracing Upper Silesian Catholicism from the winding down of the Kulturkampf through the plebiscite of 1921. But readers in search of a single, muscular teleology will be disappointed. Those accustomed to discussions of borderlands as zones of ethnic conflict will certainly come across episodes of polarization and escalating violence. But they are more likely to be struck by the ways in which rival national programs instead generated cynicism and exhaustion, effectively deflating one another with their own successes. The well-known ideological symbiosis between Polish nationalism and RomanPage 18 → Catholicism will be given due attention, as will the German state’s notorious shortcomings in achieving the assimilation of linguistic minorities. But as I look more closely at events in Upper Silesia, these stereotypes will often be turned on their head. Readers will find Polish nationalists and Polish-speaking Catholic priests engaged in strident polemical battles with one another. Readers will also encounter programs of cultural germanization that actually seemed to attract, rather than repel, their targeted audience. Students of ultramontane Catholicism will no doubt recognize the authoritarian pretensions of Upper Silesia’s parish priests and the totalizing claims of the region’s Catholic milieu. They may, however, be surprised to see how easily these visions of subcultural cohesion were punctured and how often clerical authority was defied. All of these apparent paradoxes might be described—or dismissed—as manifestations of regional peculiarity. This book is, to be sure, a locally rooted and particularist tale. But it is also very much a transnational, European story, one that is driven forward by intensive, overlapping engagement in broader trends associated with the German Empire, with the Polish-speaking lands, or with Catholic Christendom. Blurring the seductive, but deceptive, clarity of those self-contained narratives is, I would argue, a price worth paying in order to shed new light on the ways in which millions of people have navigated between them. Page 17 → Jan Kapica, “Zur Lage in Oberschlesien,” Schlesische Volkszeitung, nos. 36 and 38 (1906), quoted in Emil Szramek, “Ks. Jan Kapica: Życiorys azarazem fragment z Historji Górnego Śląska,” Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjació Nauk na Śląsku 3 (1931): 31. 1 Sarah Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, with a Collection of Official Documents (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933), 211. 2 This civic/ethnic distinction is ubiquitous in the literature on nationalism, but see especially Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of Its Origins and Background (New York: MacMillan, 1946); John Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, ed. E. Kamenka (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), 22–37. 3 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 487, 492. 4 Miroslav Hroch, Social Conditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 5 Since the brief period immediately following the plebiscites, English-speaking scholars have shown astonishingly little interest in a vote that once held the rapt attention of Europe. During the past seven decades, only Richard Blanke and T. Hunt Tooley have given the plebiscite sustained attention. See Richard Blanke, “Upper Silesia, 1921: The Case for Subjective Nationality,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 2 (1975): 241–57; T. Hunt Tooley, “German Political Violence and the Border Plebiscite in Upper Silesia, 1919–1921,” Central European History 21 (1988): 56–98; idem, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918–1922 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 6 Rudolf Vogel, “Deutsche Presse und Propaganda des Abstimmungskampes in Oberschlesien” (PhD diss., Philosophische Fakultät der Universität Leipzig), printed by the Oberschlesische Zeitung in 1931.

7 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 9 Gellner, 139. 10 Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 35, 37. 11 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Würtemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 12 Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Patrice M. Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 13 See the interesting recent attempt by Tomasz Kamusella to examine the competition of different nationbuilding programs for the loyalties of Upper Silesians in the nineteenth century: Silesia and Central European Nationalism: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918 (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007). 14 Miroslav Hroch, “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ron Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 60–77 (quote from 69). 15 Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848–1916 (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005). 16 Memorandum on the Religious Aspect of the Upper Silesian Problem, n.d. [probably 1921], signed by Prelate Tylla, Clerical Councillor Buchwald, and Vicar Strzyz. 17 Jerzy Bartkowski, Tradycja i polityka: Wpłsyw tradycji kulturowych polskich regionów na współczesne zachowanie spo łeczne ipolityczne (Warsaw: Instytut Socjologii, Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2003), 250–51. 18 Den Oberschlesiern zur Aufklärung vor der Abstimmung, von einem oberschlesischen Priester (1921), 14; Alexander Rogalski, Kościół Katolicki na Śląsku (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Pax, 1955), 115. 19 Gellner, 72. See also E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67–68, 124. 20 This literature is far too vast and varied to do justice to it in a footnote, so I list here only some Englishlanguage work focused on Central Europe that played a particularly important role in shaping my own thinking: Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Margaret L. Anderson, Windthorst: A Political Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981); idem, “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” Central European History 19 (1986): 82–115; idem, “Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History 63 (1991): 681–716; idem, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in Nineteenth Century Germany,” Historical Journal, Fall 1995; David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin May in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (New York: Random House, 1993); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 21 Olaf Blaschke , Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutshcland zwischen 1800 und 1970: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002). 22 Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in NineteenthCentury Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2–3.

23 Ibid., 2–3, 7. 24 “The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary,” in Clark and Kaiser, 313–35. For the Slovak trajectory leading out of this Hungarian secular-Catholic conflict, see James Felak, “At the Price of the Republic”: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929–1938 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). 25 The classic text on the development of milieus as a problem for German democracy is M. Rainerr Lepsius’s “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wirtschaft, Geschichte, und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift Friedrich Lütge, ed. W. Abel (Stuttgart, 1966), 371–93 (quote from 383). 26 Michael Gross, The War against Catholicism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Margaret L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Imperial Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), chapters 4–5. See also Black-bourn’s Marpingen, though Blackbourn’s attitude is more ambivalent. 27 On growing authoritarianism in the socialization of clergy, see Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, Klerus und abweichendes Verhalten: zur Sozialgeschichte katholischer Priester im 19. Jahrhundert: Die Erzdiözese Freiburg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994); on anti-Semitism, Olaf Blaschke, Katholizismus und Antisemitismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997). 28 See, for example, Antonius Liedhegener’s impressive study Christentum und Urban-isierung: Katholiken und Protestanten in Münster und Bochum, 1830–1933 (Paderborn: F. Schönigh, 1997). 29 On the coordinating role of parish priests, see Olaf Blaschke, “Die Kolonisierung der Laienwelt: Priester als Milieumanager und die Kanäle klerikaler Kuratel,” in Religion im Kaiserreich: Milieus—Mentalitäten—Krisen, ed. Olaf Blaschke and Frank-Michael Kuhle-mann (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser, 1996). Wilifred Loth, by contrast, has stressed the internal heterogeneity of German Catholicism in “Soziale Bewegungen im Katholizismus des Kaiserreichs,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 17 (1991): 279–310. David Blackbourn also emphasized the importance of socioeconomic interests in his early work Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Würtemberg before 1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). 30 See, for example, the contributions by Thomas Mergel and Karl Heinrich Pohl in Blaschke and Kuhlemann’s Religion im Kaiserreich. 31 Arbeitskreis für kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Münster, “Konfession und Cleavages im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Erklärungsmodell zur regionalen Entstehung des katholischen Milieus in Deutschland,” Historisches Jahrbuch 120 (2000): 358–95. 32 Barbara Stambolis, “Nationalisierung trotz Ultramontasierung oder: ‘Alles für Deutschland, Deutschland aber für Christus,” Historische Zeitschrift 269 (1999): 57–97; Siegfried Weichlein, Nation und Religion: Integrationsprozesse im Kaiserreich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004). 33 It is telling—and to a casual observer, no doubt surprising—that while many leading Anglophone historians of Germany have recently devoted attention to the Catholic revival, hardly any Anglophone historians of Poland have focused squarely on Catholicism in their research. A major exception is Brian Porter, whose interests in the intellectual history of Polish national ideology have recently taken a religious turn: see “Hetmanka and Mother: Representing the Virgin Mary in Modern Poland,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 2 (May 2005): 151–70; “The Catholic Nation: Religion, Identity, and the Narratives of Polish History,” Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 2 (March 2002). 34 Daniel Olszewski, Polska kultura religijna na przeomie xix i xx wieku (Warsaw: Instytut Wydawniczy Pax, 1996). 35 Clark and Kaiser, 7–8. 36 William W. Hagen’s Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1770–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) is focused almost exclusively on the “historic” Polish lands, with very little on Upper Silesia. Other English-language works that focus on the Posen region, though not quite so exclusively, include John J. Kulczycki’s School Strikes in Prussian Poland, 1901–1907: The Struggle over Bilingual Education (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1981) and Lech Trzeciakowski’s The Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland (East European Monographs [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990]). 37 Not only has there been no English-language study of Catholicism in Upper Silesia, but, remarkably, there has been no solid English-language historical survey of the region in the seven decades since William

Rose’s The Drama of Upper Silesia (Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Daye, 1935). Industrialization and labor organization have been the only themes that have generated anything close to an English-language literature on the region: Lawrence Schofer’s The Formation of a Modern Labor Force: Upper Silesia, 1865–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) and Laura Crago’s “Nationalism, Religion, Citizenship, and Work in the Development of the Polish Working Class and the Polish Trade Union Movement, 1815–1929: A Comparative Study of Russian Poland’s Textile Workers and Upper Silesia’s Miners and Metalworkers” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1993). Of the other regions listed, only Mazuria has been the subject of a recent English-language monograph, Richard Blanke’s Polish-Speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among the Masurians since 1870 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001). German scholarship on these areas has been expanding more quickly: see Robert Traba. Niemcy—Warmiacy—Polacy 1871–1914: Z dziejwów niemieckiego ruchu katolickiego i stosunków polsko-niemieckich w Prusach (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Badań Naukowych im. W. Kętrzyńskiego Wspólnota Kulturowa “Borussia,” 1994); Andreas Kossert, Preußen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen Nation-alismus 1870–1956 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2001). 38 Mieczysław Pater, Słownik biograficzny katolickiego duchowieństwa śląskiego xix i xx wieku (Katowice: Księgarnia św. Jacka, 1996). 39 Studies focused on the Catholic church include Jerzy Myszor’s Duszpasterstwo Parafialne na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1821–1914 (Katowice: Drukarnia Diecezjalna w Katowicach, 1993) and Historia Diecezji Katowickiej (Katowice: Drukarnia Archidiecezjalna, 1999); Lech Krzyżanowski’s Kościół katolicki wobec mniejszości niemieckiej na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1922–1930 (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytet Śląski, 2000); and Jarosław Macala’s Duszpasterstwo a narodowość wiernych: Kościół katolicki w diecezji katowickiej wobec mniejszości niemieckiej 1922–1939 (Wrocław: Uniwersytet Wrocławski, 1999). 40 Some examples of recent literature focused on the aftermath of the Second World War are Bernard Linek’s Polityka antyniemiecka na Gornym Slasku w latach 1945–1950 (Opole: Instytut Opolski, 2000) and Maria Wanda Wanatowicz’s Od indyferentnej ludnosci do slaskiej narodowosci? Postway narodowe ludnosci autochtonicznej Gornego Slaska w latach 1945–2003 w swiadomosci spolecznej (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2004). 41 Hans-Georg Aschoff, Kirchenfürst im Kaiserreich—Georg Kardinal Kopp (Hildesheim: Bernward, 1987), 76.

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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 first 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 thePage 20 → footnotes and the fine 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 defined 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 first major industrial strike, the push to germanize local primary schools. Once these experiences came to be defined 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 first 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 fulfill St. Paul’s injunction to be “all things to all men.” It was hardly surprising that this precarious balancing act began toPage 21 → break down by the last decade of the nineteenth century, as nationalist and socialist activists drew attention to the social and cultural contradictions of Upper Silesia’s Catholic milieu. But the challenge that these ideological entrepreneurs faced was not simply the

negative one of undermining clerical authority. They wanted to ensure that their efforts resulted in an effective appropriation and reinvention of the regional solidarity achieved during the Kulturkampf, not the irrevocable shattering of that solidarity. This challenge was most acute for the emerging lay elites whose vision was most ambitious: the Polish-national editors who hoped not only that the overwhelming majority of Upper Silesia’s Catholic population could be redefined as a Polish Catholic people but also, crucially, that most parish priests could be persuaded to embrace this new understanding of communal identity. When a majority of the local clergy balked at this invitation to join the Polish national movement, it unleashed a kind of low-level civil war across the region’s Catholic milieu, as parish priests and national activists maneuvered not only to claim the political loyalties of the old Centrist electorate but also to shape the tenor of the region’s associational life and the linguistic orientation of everyday devotional activities.

The Legacy of the Kulturkampf On February 9, 1872, Karol Miarka, a former schoolteacher who published a Polish-language newspaper in the far southeastern corner of the German Empire, had the distinction of being quoted at length by Otto von Bismarck on the floor of the Prussian Landtag. The chancellor read excerpts from Miarka’s “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—Save Us, for We Are Perishing!” a passionate editorial that had been published in Katolik shortly before a special election in the Reichstag constituency of Pless-Rybnik. The race pitted Father Edward Müller, a Berlin-based Catholic priest running under the banner of the Center party, against the Duke of Ratibor, a wealthy local (and Catholic) magnate affiliated with the government-supporting Free Conservatives. Miarka accused Upper Silesia’s other aristocratic, Free Conservative parliamentarians of having betrayed the trust of local voters by failing to defend the Catholic church. Only Father Müller, he went on, had demonstrated his faithfulness to his constituency by affiliating with the Center party, and now “masons, Jews, and liberals” were demanding the removal of this honest tribune of the people. Such shrill language and such divisive attitudes, Bismarck suggested, were typical ofPage 22 → many Catholic priests—indeed, he seemed to be under the impression that Miarka himself was a priest—and he accused the Katolik editor of having conspired with the local clergy (“in part of German nationality”) to create a “Polish faction” out of the hitherto “always true Upper Silesians.”3 The German chancellor, of course, had his own reasons for using Miarka’s words to evoke what was, to most of his audience, a monstrous fusion of ultramontanism, Polish nationalism, and economic populism. But no one could doubt that the political phenomenon that had caught Bismarck’s attention was indeed remarkable. Müller’s initial victory over the Duke of Ratibor the previous year (the election was later invalidated due to alleged politicking from the pulpit) had been one of the most spectacular outcomes of Germany’s first elections under universal male suffrage. This early triumph for the newly formed Center party was a harbinger of things to come. By 1873, a majority of Upper Silesia’s Reichstag constituencies had fallen to the Center. By 1881, all but one were electing Centrist representatives. In the meantime, the circulation of Katolik, the de facto regional party organ, rose steadily, from twenty-five hundred copies in 1871 to eight thousand in 1879.4 What, exactly, was driving these trends? Margaret L. Anderson, a historian of elections in imperial Germany, has viewed the PlessRybnik upset as part of the larger German (or, more precisely, Prussian) story of successful clerical mobilization of Catholic voters during the Kulturkampf.5 For such Polish historians as Mieczyslaw Pater, however, there was very little that was “German” about the triumphs of the “German” Center party. Pointing both to the crucial role that Miarka’s Katolik played in the Center’s electoral breakthroughs and to the clear evidence of Polish-patriotic motifs in many of Miarka’s own writings, Pater has argued that the Upper Silesian Center was, in terms of popular understanding, not far from the “Polish faction” described by Bismarck.6 It is, of course, unnecessary to choose between characterizing the Center’s victories in Upper Silesia as either a “clerical” or a “Polish” phenomenon. As Anderson has written of Miarka’s “jeremiads,” “confessional,Page 23 → social, and Polish nationalist themes were impossibly entangled.”7 But entanglement did not preclude some attempts at prioritization. What is intriguing about Miarka’s rhetoric is the fact that at the time that the popularity of both Katolik and the Center took off, confessional themes were becoming much more prominent, while national themes were becoming more muted. During the 1860s, the Polish cause had clearly been at the top of Miarka’s agenda. His 1863 polemic A Voice Crying in the Upper Silesian Wilderness was focused squarely on linguistic, rather than confessional, desiderata. Indeed, Miarka’s mentor during these years, Pawel Stal-mach, was not even a

Catholic but, rather, a Lutheran pastor and Polish national activist based in Austrian Silesia.8 But after he began publishing Katolik in Königshütte in 1869 and especially after German unification and the First Vatican Council began fueling a rise in confessional tensions, Miarka increasingly privileged religious themes over national or even linguistic ones. This prioritization was sometimes quite explicit: in a list of Upper Silesian grievances published in 1873, the rights of the church were put in first place, followed by the preservation of the confessional school; defense of the Polish language was third. The promotion of popular heroes also suggested that confessional solidarity now trumped national solidarity. Not only was Father Müller, a German priest who did not speak any Polish, held up as the champion of Upper Silesian interests, but the entire Center delegation was described in Katolik as consisting of “men who act according to the will of the people.”9 By contrast, Father Pawel Kamiński—a gifted orator and Polish patriot who had collaborated with Miarka at the end of the 1860s—was shunned as an outcast after he joined the Old Catholic movement and was excommunicated by the Vatican in the summer of 1871.10 Kamiński’s name would surface in an implausible range of contexts during the Kulturkampf, suggesting the centrality of religious orthodoxy in Upper Silesians’ understanding of communal boundaries during these years. During the Königshütte miners’ strike of 1871—Upper Silesia’s first major instance of labor unrest—demands that had initially focused on classic trade-union issues, such as working hours, were increasingly connected to religious desiderata by senior miners affiliated with thePage 24 → Königshütte Casino, a Catholic association founded by Miarka. In a petition to the minister of trade, complaints about increases in workloads and declines in real wages were interwoven with protests against the assault on the rights of the church. The fitting of workplace grievances into perceptions of an overarching threat to the integrity of the confessional community can be seen in the miners’ complaints about the planned introduction of coupons to regulate entry into and exit from the mines. The coupons were to be marked by the initials “K.G.”—standing for Königsgrube. But rumors soon circulated that the “G.” stood for Grundmann, an unpopular mining director and a reported Freemason, while the “K.” stood for the Old Catholic Kamiński.11 In the spring of 1871, despite attempts at mediation by the local clergy, confrontations between workers and employers escalated, resulting in mass arrests, the summoning of troops, and the deaths of several dozen miners. A number of Jewish-owned taverns and stores were damaged during the unrest. Although these attacks involved economic motives (ledgers were often the first targets of rioters), the framing of the struggle with employers as a defense of religious interests was certainly conducive to such assaults on the property of religious “outsiders.”12 Upper Silesia’s primary schools would also become scenes of violent confrontation during the Kulturkampf, with the “heretic” Kamiński again personifying assaults on “the Catholic people.” The first major outbreaks of unrest occurred in 1872, when rumors that local schoolchildren might be deported westward, to Alsace or even to Paris, prompted mothers to march into schoolrooms to “rescue” their sons and daughters. The ostensible reasons for the feared transfers were murky. In some versions, children whose parents had voted for the Duke of Ratibor and against Father Müller would be recruited for relocation by the state; in other versions, those who had shown most proficiency in German would be relocated. Linguistic issues, in other words, were far from absent, but they were entangled in more general anxieties about threats to the integrity of the local community. To the extent that such anxieties crystallized around any single issue, it was the specter of apostasy. In 1875, reports that Father Kamiński would be serving as the government-sanctioned Catholic religion instructor set off a renewed panic, prompting mothers to storm schoolhouses andPage 25 → break windows to evacuate their children.13 Parents also mobilized to protect “real” (i.e., ultramontane) priests who attempted to organize underground religious education classes, leading to clashes with police.14 As such episodes suggest, the hottest years of the Kulturkampf were a time of volatile popular protest against the state, employers, and religious outsiders—protests broadly in defense of the church and clergy but largely outside their control—rather than a period of systematic confessional milieu building. By the mid-1870s, there were, to be sure, dozens of Catholic associations operating in Upper Silesia—Catholic casinos, men’s associations, journeymen’s associations—and to anxious government officials, this already had the makings of an ultramontane machine.15 A few of these groups, such as the casino founded by Miarka in Königshütte, maintained memberships of several hundred and, as we have already seen, played a role in shaping popular protests. On the whole,

however, associational life at the time remained ad hoc and localized, dependent on the energy of individual pastors or activist laymen. As in the rest of Catholic Germany, the organizational muscle that eventually came to define the Catholic milieu would only fully develop later. The immediate legacy of the Kulturkampf, what gave it such power as the founding myth of Upper Silesian Catholicism, was the experience of plebiscitary clarity that it provided. At key moments—at the ballot box, in the workplace, in the classroom—the population had seemed to rally monolithically behind the clergy and against the state. This solidarity between priests and parishioners would be recalled three decades later by Father Jan Kapica, a priest who had only been a child at the time but had clearly assimilated the understanding of the Kulturkampf as a golden age. Earlier, it was a pure joy to be a priest, a Catholic, a Centrist in Upper Silesia, where the people stood unified against the enemy like an un-conquerable phalanx. The priest was the born leader, the people formed an incomparably loyal army; German and Pole, they were brothers. The battle song rang: I am a Catholic and want to remain a Catholic!16 Page 26 → This martial euphoria came at a high price. A quarter of the clergy of the diocese of Breslau faced fines or imprisonment for violations of Kulturkampf-era legislation, and placement of new priests in parishes came to a virtual standstill. By 1881, over 20 percent of the pastoral positions that had existed in the diocese of Breslau in 1873 were vacant.17 Approval for the founding of new parishes and new church construction also effectively came to a halt. In the deanery of Myslowitz, one of the most heavily industrialized and densely populated in the diocese, not a single new parish was established between 1872 and 1893—a period in which the Catholic population of the deanery more than doubled.18 By 1891, excluding the outlying, largely rural parish of Dzietzkowitz, the deanery had reached the staggering averages of 16,713 parishioners per parish and 7,428 parishioners per priest.19 By comparison, the 1877 figures for Paris, the showcase of urban de-Christianization, were 16,859 parishioners per parish and 3,334 parishioners per priest.20 Not surprisingly, priests often complained of the church’s facilities and personnel being stretched to the breaking point. Father Josef Michalski, pastor in Lipine, wrote to the bishop of Breslau in 1892 that hundreds of parishioners surrounded the church during each mass, since there were no places left to sit or stand inside. During the summer, he resorted to delivering the homily outside in order to accommodate the throng.21 In one of his annual Lenten pastoral letters, Bishop Georg Kopp himself cited the example of an Upper Silesian parish of eighteen thousand where a number of worshipers were reported to have fainted while crowding into a service at the local church, which could only accommodate eight hundred.22 For the moment, these anxieties about the crisis in religious “supply” did not seem to translate into any sense of a looming crisis in religious “demand.”23Page 27 → In Bogutschütz, the pastor reported to the dean that “the parishioners fulfill their religious duties with enthusiasm” and that “the greatest part of the community is churchoriented [kirchlich] and devout.”24 The behavior of parishioners in Lipine was also deemed “laudable . . . despite constant immigration from outside.”25 These qualitative judgments were buttressed by various quantitative indices used by the clergy to gauge popular piety and morality. The percentage of Catholics fulfilling their obligation to go to confession during the Easter season was consistently high through the 1890s—usually over 60 percent of the total population of the parish, which translated into almost 90 percent of those old enough to commune.26 Other measures of popular adherence to the church’s moral norms were similarly gratifying for the clergy. Only 2–3 percent of births in the Myslowitz parishes were outside of marriage, confessionally mixed marriages were extremely rare, and avoidance of baptism or church burial was all but unheard of.27 Priests did, to be sure, occasionally worry that the sheer overtaxing of the church’s physical plant might lead to a breakdown in churchgoing habits. In Königshütte, for example, Father Lukaszczyk wrote that the “better classes” pointed to the cramped conditions in the sanctuary “to excuse themselves from attending church.”28 But the evident devotional enthusiasm of “the Catholic people,” despite such inconveniences, led most priests to describe the shortage of pastoral staff and worship space as an invigorating pragmatic challenge rather than a sign of imminent devotional collapse. Pastors often wrote indulgently of the difficulties that their parishioners—particularly those of more humble means—faced in making it to a Sunday service. In lobbying for the construction of a new filial church in the town of Brzezinka, Father Klaszka of Myslowitz argued that “with a

distance of 3¾ kilometers to the city, it is almost impossible to visit Page 28 → divine services for those workers who are coming off duty on Sunday mornings,” that is, after a Saturday night work shift.29 The clergy also referred sympathetically to the peculiar problems faced by female parishioners. According to the pastor of Dzietzkowitz, mothers without older children “can come to church at most every four weeks” because of the need to look after the house; in Kattowitz, it was deemed “not possible” for “many service girls and housewives” to attend church unless a new early morning service was offered, again presumably to allow them to return to their domestic duties by midmorning.30 As has been noted among other working-class populations, these scheduling constraints contributed to (and were accommodated by) a rhythm of weekly worship that was only loosely centered on Sunday morning. While attendance at these “main” services was not exceptionally high—under 40 percent of the population, according to one rough estimate—participation in evening and weekday services was reported as extremely heavy.31 The conviction that the piety of the Upper Silesian people, so dramatically demonstrated during the Kulturkampf, could override any bricks-and-mortar limitations remained strong among the region’s clergy. But pastors were hardly resigned to seeing the church develop into a church of the catacombs; maintaining the faith as they knew it required an infusion of new priests and an extension and revitalization of the parochial network. Indeed, whatever reservations many priests had about the arrival in Breslau of Georg Kopp, the new “state-friendly” bishop appointed head of the diocese in 1887, Upper Silesia’s clergy was happy to exploit Kopp’s efforts to normalize church-state relations as an opportunity to recover from the infrastructural paralysis of the Kulturkampf.32 In 1890, the deaneryPage 29 → of Myslowitz consisted of nine parishes, the same number as in 1872. Over the next quarter century, that number doubled.33 Church construction became a veritable way of life in Upper Silesia’s booming industrial region, as the career of Father Ludwig Skowronek illustrates. From his installation as pastor of the working-class parish of Bogutschütz in 1889 until the First World War, Father Skowronek was almost constantly engaged in overseeing at least one church-building project: first of a new brick church in his home parish, then of two churches in “daughter” parishes— Zalenze and Eichenau—created from the repeated subdivision of Bogutschütz. 34 Finding the resources to pay for these projects highlighted the ambiguities of the church’s position in the wake of the Kulturkampf. Was the revival of church construction a sign of a return to more “normal” patriarchal conditions, with funding benevolently flowing from the state and employers? Or were building programs to be defined as bottom-up “people’s projects,” pursued independently from or even in defiance of the authorities? Although many existing parishes operated under the patronage of aristocratic-industrialist magnates or the king of Prussia, these traditional patrons often proved grudging in their contributions and did not hide their skepticism about the need for or desirability of additional Catholic churches. During the fund-raising campaign in Zalenze, for example, the patron of the parent parish of Bogutschütz, the mining company of Giesche’s Erben, argued that a onetime provision of building materials should exhaust not only its contribution to construction of the church but also any obligation to the new parish’s ongoing operating costs.35 Such attitudes reflected a long-term trend; most new parishes established after the Kulturkampf were under the “free” patronage of the bishop of Breslau rather than that of a local magnate, and even many ofPage 30 → those that had previously had aristocratic-industrialist patrons devolved to the direct patronage of the bishop by the First World War.36 As further evidence of his hostility to the church-building project in Zalenze, the Giesche director also objected to the decision of the local commune to make a donation to the construction of the church, and it was probably the mining company’s hostility that led government officials in the district of Oppeln to withhold approval for an allocation from the Freikuxgelderfond, a community fund (compiled from payments by local miners but administered by employers and the state) that had traditionally helped to finance church-building projects.37 Faced with such foot-dragging at the top, Father Skowronek, the Bogutschütz pastor, did not hesitate to frame the church-building project as a populist initiative. He announced early in the fund-raising campaign that the new church would be dedicated to the 104 miners who had been killed in a catastrophic mining accident in the nearby Cleophasgrube.38 When the Giesche director and local state officials expressed skepticism about the cost and perceived extravagance of plans for the new church, Skowronek insisted to Cardinal Kopp that parishioners “do not wish to hear of an austere government project,” adding, “[T]he complete apathy of the community would be

the unavoidable consequence if I do not follow through on the first project.”39 This claim to a popular mandate was strengthened by the results of the first elections to the governing bodies (the Kirchenvorstand and Kirchengemeindevertretung) of the newly formed parish of Zalenze, in which backers of Skowronek’s building plans emerged victorious. The new council demonstrated its enthusiasm by proposing ever higher tax rates to help pay for the new building. Whereas the normal “maximum” rate for church taxes was 30 percent of the state income tax, the Zalenze Kirchenvorstand committed the community to a rate of 50 percent and would have raised this to 100 percent if the president of the district of Oppeln had not intervened, declaring such a rate unsustainable.40 When Father Skowronek turned to the pages of the Center-affiliated Obserschlesische Volksstimme to publicize Giesche’s miserliness and failure to support the building fund properly, Giesche’s chairmanPage 31 → complained to Cardinal Kopp about the feisty pastor’s agitation “against the government, against the property owners of Zalenze, as well as against Germandom”—the last of these allegedly demonstrated by a refusal to allow German singing clubs to participate in funerals for the victims of the Cleophasgrube catastrophe.41 For the chairman of Giesche, as for his interlocutors in the administration of the district of Oppeln, Father Skowronek’s apparent identification with “the people” against employers immediately raised the specter of partisanship on behalf of Poles against Germans. Until quite recently, it had been self-evident that working-class Catholics in Upper Silesia’s industrial region spoke Polish. At midcentury, only 672 out of almost 65,000 Catholics in the old deaneries of Beuthen and Tarnowitz (at the time including almost the whole industrial region) were recorded as being of German nationality. But the demographic transformations of subsequent decades had complicated this once-easy conflation of confession and language. It was not that a particularly large number of German-speaking Catholics had entered the region. Long-distance migration into the industrial region played a relatively minor role in the region’s overall population growth, which was primarily fueled by high birth rates and short-range in-migration from the industrial counties’ (overwhelmingly Polish-speaking) immediate hinterland.42 Among residents of the industrial region in 1900, fully 96 percent were born within the province of Silesia, and over 85 percent were born within the district of Oppeln.43 But the combination of a relatively modest influx of German-speaking migrants and the systematic efforts of the government to inculcate German literacy through the primary schools spurred a gradual, but far-reaching, cultural metamorphosis among the local population in the final decades of the century. Rather than hearing exclusively the local dialect of Polish, residents of the conurbation were now encountering German-speaking mining fore-men, shopkeepers, and petty officials, and these individual encounters were further amplified by the growing saturation of urban areas by German newspapers, libraries, associational meetings, and theater performances. Page 32 → An 1889 language survey of the parishes of the deanery of Myslowitz—which encompassed the two urban counties (Stadtkreise) of Kattowitz and Königshütte, as well as large portions of the “rural” counties (Landkreise) of Beuthen and Kattowitz (in fact consisting mostly of pit villages and working-class suburbs)—illustrates the inroads of germanization. While the categorizations used in the survey are necessarily rough and subjective, the survey is heuristically useful in drawing a distinction between unambiguous “Germans” and those of Polish or mixed backgrounds who had become proficient in German (see table 1). The number of “real” Germans, while still a small proportion of the total Catholic population, had grown exponentially since midcentury. It seems likely that most of these immigrants were skilled workers or artisans coming from the southwestern counties of Upper Silesia; German bureaucrats assigned to the region were likely to be Protestants, and it is doubtful that many Catholic German workers from the Rhineland would have made the long trek to an area where wages were generally much less attractive.44 In most parishes, however, “real” Germans were far less numerous than Catholics of Polish-speaking background who had acquired some level of German linguistic facility. Polish historians have often complained that counts of residents “proficient” in German were artificially inflated by lumping in people “who could hardly use a few German phrases.”45 But local pastors seemed to take seriously their instructions to count as proficient (mächtig) in German only those who could comprehend a Germanlanguage sermon. In such outlying working-class suburbs as Rosdzin or Boguschütz (and even more so in Dzietzkowitz, which could still be classified as a village), priests did not hesitate to report that such parishioners

were few and far between. The commissioner of the Pless commissariat (the larger ecclesiastical unit containing the Myslowitz deanery) wrote to Kopp that outside of the largest cities, “a not insignificant percentage [of the population] can make themselves understood in the German language in the course of ordinary life but are not in a position to benefit from even the simplest German sermon.”46 By contrast, the commercial and administrative centers of Königshütte, Kattowitz, and Myslowitz and the heavy industrialPage 33 → center of Siemianowitz—which collectively contained roughly half of the population of the Myslowitz deanery—now clearly contained a significant proportion of both monolingual Germans and proficient German speakers of Polish descent. In these urban or semiurban areas, in which knowledge of German imparted by the schools was reinforced by a greater density of German-language publications, associational activity, and professional interaction, the population was becoming genuinely bilingual. Upper Silesia’s parish priests could hardly fail to take note of this phenomenon; indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, they were arguably its most highprofile embodiment. The seemingly straightforward question of how many Upper Silesian priests were “German” and how many were “Polish” is, in practice, extraordinarily difficult. According to official Prussian statistics from 1893, only fortyfour pastors and curates in the diocese of Breslau spoke Polish as their mother tongue.47 Even if we make the assumption that all of them worked in the Upper Silesian portion of the diocese, this would mean that barely 10 percent of the local clergy was “Polish.” Yet, well-informed contemporary observers gave a very different assessment of the clergy’s national makeup. Adam Napieralski, the editor of Katolik, wrote to his colleagues at Przeglad Katolicki in the summer of 1898 that 250 of the 400 Page 34 → priests working in Upper Silesia originated “from the Polish people.”48 Zdzislaw Surman, a late twentieth-century historian, concluded from a study of priests stationed in the area from the 1850s through the 1880s that most were “of Polish-Silesian and popular lineage in a linguistic and cultural sense.”49 These seemingly contradictory characterizations are reconcilable if we introduce a dynamic element into our national categorizations. Father Stanislaw Stephan, in a text aimed at explaining the tendency of Upper Silesian priests to use German in communicating with one another, argued that for all of those who were born in cities (45 percent at the turn of the century), as well as roughly half of those born in smaller towns and villages, German would undoubtedly have been “the conversational language at home” when they were growing up.50 Homes where German was “the conversational language” could, of course, have been homes headed by people who themselves had once spoken Polish at home—who originated, in Napieralski’s words, “from the Polish people.” As a later clerical observer, Father Emil Szramek, bluntly put it, Upper Silesian priests “were recruited from the already germanized ranks of teachers and officials.”51 So, while only a minority of the clergy could accurately be described as having a Polish “mother tongue,” many more presumably had Polish as a “grandmother tongue.” The national indeterminacy of Upper Silesia’s parish priests was exacerbated by the fact that almost all of the region’s clergy, in order to fulfill their pastoral duties, had to be functionally bilingual—or “utraquists,” to use the terminology of the day. In the predominantly Polish-speaking areas of Silesia, only 11 percent of priests were not labeled as utraquists in 1887; over the next twenty years, this percentage rose only to 12 percent.52 The requirement of bilingualism, coupled with the German state’s refusal to allow more than minimal formal training in Polish, meant that essentially the only priests qualified to work in Upper Silesia were those whoPage 35 → had grown up in Upper Silesia and thus knew Polish from childhood. Indeed, Surman’s study of clergy stationed in the region found that “almost 100 percent were born Upper Silesians.”53 My own, more limited survey showed a similar pattern: of twenty-three priests working in the deanery of Myslowitz in 1891, twenty-two were born in Upper Silesia, most in the small- to medium-sized towns and rural areas immediately south and west of the industrial triangle.54 Father Szramek’s reference to priests being recruited especially from the “germanized ranks of teachers and officials” has also been borne out by subsequent studies. Of the priests Surman examined, 30 percent had a father who was a primary school teacher or lower-level official, while most others also had occupations that placed them broadly within the Mittelstand (e.g., independent farmers or artisans).55 In a region where most people worked as wage laborers, this was not exactly a plebeian recruitment profile, but it was also not especially elitist. Schoolteachers or railroad employees, after all, were usually the product of modest intergenerational social mobility, not representatives of a congealed caste. It is worth noting, by way of contrast,

that across the Russian frontier, in Warsaw, fully 90 percent of the parish clergy was of gentry (szlachta) background.56 Upper Silesian boys aiming for the priesthood, especially those who entered primary school after 1872, faced an almost exclusively German-language educational trajectory. Exposure to Polish in the classroom was limited to religious instruction during the first couple years of primary school. Pupils deemed to be talented would be encouraged by teachers and priests to go on to the nearest Gymnasium and then on to four or five years of philosophical-theological study at the University of Breslau. Only at the end of their educational odyssey, during the year of seminary training (also in Breslau) aimed at preparing priesthood candidates for their pastoral duties, did many students who sought placement in the Polish-speaking regions of the diocese formally study the Polish language—for a single hour each week.57 One polonophile priest who took the required Polish-languagePage 36 → examination at the seminary said that the expectations were “so minimal” that he considered it “a pure joke.”58 The result was that the Polish used by most Upper Silesian priests had a more colloquial than literary quality. Polish-patriotic critics labeled it “a miserable Wasserpolnisch ” (a pejorative term for the local Silesian dialect), the kind of language that ordinary people used “at work, among the horses, among the cows.”59 More sympathetic observers noted the value of this unpretentious style in minimizing the distance between pastors and parishioners.60 Given the exclusion of any formal training in the Polish language until the end of the educational process, it is easy to understand why the priest Aleksander Skowroński, later to emerge as among the most staunchly Polishpatriotic priests in Upper Silesia, was still writing to friends and relatives in German at the age of twenty.61 But as examples like Skowroński’s also indicate, total immersion in German-language instruction was not enough to instill a pervasive allegiance to “Germandom” in every seminary student. A student circle devoted to fostering the Polish language and literature—the Society of Upper Silesian Students—operated at the University of Breslau from 1892 to 1899, drawing most of its members from the theology students.62 Persistent government complaints that theology students were going to Posen during their vacation periods for instruction in Polish eventually drove Bishop Kopp to dissolve the group.63 In the meantime, however, a new organization, the Polish Circle (Kółko Polskie), had been founded by Breslau theology students to facilitate the cultivation of Polish language skills among aspiring priests. During its decade-long existence (1895–1906), the Kółko enrolled almost 250 seminarians as members, testifying to the breadth of interest in the Polish language and the recognition of its central importance for pastoral work. This imposing membership, however, was also a sign of the internal heterogeneity of the organization. One polonophile priest recalled the “strange situation” within the Kółko. Page 37 → Members of the Circle, originally considering themselves Poles but later seduced by Center propaganda, went over to the German side— and vice versa, unenlightened Upper Silesians who entered the Circle as “Germans” and only for “practical” reasons, later left as conscious Poles. But there were also those who were conscientious members of the Circle as well as Poles who began to become indifferent after their theological studies and distanced themselves more and more from everything Polish, blindly following the banner of the Center, the most dangerous germanizer in Silesia.64 This oscillation between Germanness and Polishness, between power holders and subalterns, was, in many ways, the source of the Upper Silesian clergy’s clout. University-educated and connected to a broader cultural and political universe, priests were clearly an elite, but they nonetheless maintained credibility as a “people’s elite,” as local boys who were recruited from and had returned to their local communities and who were able to speak the inhabitants’ language (in both the literal and figurative sense) more convincingly than state officials, employers, or their own distant diocesan superiors. But the cultural and social liminality of Catholic priests was also a precarious position. Although one of the legacies of the Kulturkampf had been a prioritization of religious issues as Upper Silesians’ marquee desiderata (a development that tended to affirm the clergy’s status as default leaders of the community), another precedent set during the 1870s was the heady experience of polarization—of stark opposition between the state and employers, on the one hand, and “the Catholic people,” on the other. The

clergy’s habit of being “all things to all men” sat uneasily with such heroic memories, creating an opening for an alternative lay elite and/or a militant minority of Upper Silesian priests to refashion linguistic, economic, and confessional grievances into a new version of “the cause.”

The Genesis of the “Polish Center” “Political leadership in Upper Silesia no longer belongs to the clergy,” complained a Silesian pastor in 1895, “but to the ‘Posen triumvirate.’”65Page 38 → This “triumvirate” consisted of Adam Napieralski, Bronislaw Koraszewski, and Jan Maćkowski, the editors, respectively, of Katolik, Gazeta Opolska (The Oppeln Gazette), and Nowiny Raciborskie (The Ratibor News). These newspapers together provided the leadership of the Polish national movement that gained the upper hand in Upper Silesia’s Center party politics during the early 1890s. Each of the “Posen editors” had immigrated to Upper Silesia while in his midtwenties to invigorate the existing Polish-language press (in the case of Katolik) or to found new publications (Nowiny Raciborskie was founded in 1889, Gazeta Opolska in 1890). The three journalists’ nonlocal origins were repeatedly invoked by contemporary German commentators, as well as later German historians, to suggest that Polish national sentiment was an artificial import brought to Upper Silesia by outside agitators.66 The contribution of migrants from the Posen region to the development of Polish national sentiment in Upper Silesia was indeed crucial, as contemporary activists and later Polish historians readily admitted.67 But the success of this new generation of Polish editors in rallying Upper Silesian voters cannot simply be dismissed as the heavy-handed transference of a fixed national model from Posen. The development of a “Polish Center” was, rather, a uniquely Upper Silesian phenomenon, an innovative fusion of Polish nationalism, political Catholicism, and socioeconomic populism that appealed to a wide array of local concerns and experiences. Early attempts to shift Upper Silesia’s political complexion from “Catholic” to “Polish” had compiled an inauspicious record. In 1881, when a group of Polish activists tried to field a Polish electoral committee independent of the Center, Miarka’s successor as editor of Katolik, Father Stanisław Radziejewski, dismissed the bid as “a farce.” Embarrassingly disavowed even by some of those local Polish Catholics that it had put forward as candidates, the committee collapsed well before the elections took place.68 Radziejewski, like Miarka before him, believed that Polish linguistic grievances—above all, the restoration of Polish-language religious instruction—could most effectively be advanced within the framework of thePage 39 → Center and as an adjunct of the confessional cause. At every Katholikentag, the annual provincial meeting of Center party loyalists, there was a separate Polish-language session or, at the very least, a designated time slot for Polish speeches, in which Katolik -affiliated activists were given an opportunity to push linguistic demands more forcefully than their German-speaking colleagues ever would. At the gathering in 1881, for example, Father Radziejewski exhorted his listeners, “God made the Upper Silesian people Polish, and whoever wishes to serve them must maintain them as such.”69 The Katolik camp, in short, pursued a recognizably national rhetoric while shunning pursuit of any independent national organization. The three young “Posen editors” shared a conviction that this pattern of deference to the provincial Center party leadership needed to be shaken up. At first, it seemed that the editor of Nowiny Raciborskie, Jan Maćkowski, and the newspaper’s locally born owner, Dr. Józef Rostek, might lead the way to a more autonomous Polish party in Upper Silesia.70 When a local Center party in Ratibor in 1891 failed to provide sufficient representation for Polish activists, Rostek summoned a rival Polish Catholic committee as a protest, forcing Center party leaders to negotiate a rapprochement.71 But Nowiny’s defiantly national stance risked alienating not only the aristocratic grandees of the provincial party but also the local parish clergy, as became apparent when Nowiny published an article accusing Bishop Kopp of facilitating the germanization of Polish-speaking children. Leading pastors soon circulated an open letter condemning the newspaper, and only a handful of the priests working in seven Upper Silesian deaneries refused to add their signatures.72 While Nowiny’s feistiness generated controversy, the old Polish-language flagship Katolik —with its incomparable Kulturkampf-era pedigree, its strategic location in the heart of the industrial region, and its resulting higher circulation—ended up playing the most decisive role in reshaping the Polish movement in Upper Silesia.73 The new Katolik editor, AdamPage 40 → Napieralski, clearly disapproved of the confrontational style adopted by

Maćkowski. During Nowiny’s public disputes with the party and church leaders, Katolik maintained an awkward silence, punctuated by carefully worded appeals for reconciliation. Not surprisingly, Polish historians have tended to be sharply critical of this “far-reaching caution” and of Napieralski’s “lack of faith in his own strength and timidity.”74 This tactical caution, however, can be seen as the flip side of an ambitious long-term strategy, aimed at overcoming what Napieralski saw as daunting obstacles to the development of a lasting Polish national consciousness in Upper Silesia. Previous attempts to establish “Polishness” through a sudden secession by middleclass activists had, after all, ended badly, suggesting that future promotion of the national cause might benefit from some thorough re-thinking of its meaning and the sources of its ostensible appeal. The first and most obvious imperative was making Polish nationalism—hitherto dominated by aristocrats and middle-class professionals in Posen and West Prussia—an ideology that would resonate among Upper Silesia’s workers and peasants. Napieralski was keenly sensitive to the lack of identification or even sympathy that most Upper Silesians displayed toward the Polish cause. In one letter, he bluntly told his colleague Bronisław Koraszewski at Gazeta Opolska: You deceive yourself if you think that our people have matured to an essentially national sentiment. You judge everything by those individuals that surround us. But you know from the correspondence to Katolik what the people’s spirit is like. Have mercy! Have some responsibility before God and the cause! In these matters, I will not proceed on shaky ground. Never!”75 Napieralski was convinced that developing a successful national (narodowy) movement in Upper Silesia first required building a convincing people’s (ludowy) movement. In such a heavily industrialized region, thisPage 41 → meant, above all, speaking about workers’ economic grievances, which activists for the newly legalized Social Democratic Party were energetically highlighting. In an interview given at the end of the 1890s, Napieralski elaborated on how thoroughly the political program of Polish nationalists needed to be expanded and revised to accommodate the specific economic interests of Upper Silesians: “Among us, nationality is most closely associated with social and economic issues. Workers’ wages, worker protection laws, the tax system, railroad rates, tariff politics—all of these are national issues for us in Silesia.”76 The second imperative of Naperialski’s strategy was establishing the essential compatibility between Polish national activism and orthodox Catholicism. This was not such an easy a task at a time when nationalism was still perceived by many church leaders to be synonymous with anti-clericalism and revolution. From republican France to newly unified Italy and Germany to the archetypal Slavic national revival in the Czech lands, the cause of “the nation” had repeatedly been defined by an agenda of curtailing the power and influence of the Catholic church in public life. The papacy and Catholic episcopate had in turn developed an instinctive suspicion of “the so-called nationality principle,” seeing in it a source of disorder in the church and in the international system.77 In Upper Silesia, the confrontational tactics of such newspapers as Nowiny Raciborskie seemed likely to replicate this pattern of opposition between national movements and the church, opening up what were, for such a pious Catholic and Polish patriot as Naperialski, two equally disastrous possibilities. Either Polish-speaking Upper Silesians would heed their pastors and shun the national movement, or they would be won over to the Polish cause in the teeth of clerical opposition and, in the process, become totally estranged from the church. To head off both of these dangers, Katolik coupled its promotion of Polish nationality with repeated assurances of its absolute fealty to the Catholic church. Papal encyclicals and pastoral letters from the bishop were prominently announced and often reproduced in their entirety, while the masthead of every issue of Katolik announced the blessings bestowed on the newspaper by Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII. Katolik also pointedlyPage 42 → criticized the liberal, anticlerical stance of Czech nationalists, arguing in one article: “[O]ne’s nationality and mother tongue are great treasures, but holy faith above all. Whoever is merely a nationalist [narodowcem] and has no faith will be weak, because holy faith gives life, gives strength, gives power.”78 Readers were assured that the leaders of the church were squarely “on the side of the Polish Catholic people” and that Upper Silesia’s clergy in particular “have long adhered and continue to adhere today to the principle of justice and could not in any way lend a hand to the de-nationalization of the people.”79

The interaction of these different elements in Napieralski’s strategy were most vividly on display in Katolik’s negotiation of the Reichstag elections of 1893, which effectively gave birth to a “ Katolik party” within the Silesian Center. An election had been called after the Reichstag voted down a government bill authorizing a substantial tax increase to fund the expansion of the German army. The army bill had polarized Germany’s political scene, causing a particularly bitter split within the Center party. A conservative, loyalist wing headed by Silesian noblemen Franz von Ballestrem and Karl von Huene favored voting for such a bill, while a more populist, oppositional wing coalescing around Ernst Lieber was steadfastly against it. The pro-army wing—enjoying the support of such high church leaders as Bishop (soon to be Cardinal) Kopp, and the new archbishop of PosenGnesen, Florian Stablewski, as well as the passive approval of Pope Leo XIII himself—sought to accelerate the rapprochement between the German government and the Catholic church through a strategy of accommodation and expressions of Prussian patriotism.80 Opponents of the army bill, concentrated among lower- and middle-class voters in southern and western Germany, maintained a thorough distrust of Prussian militarism and resented increases in regressive indirect taxes during a severe economic recession. When a modified version of the army bill came up for a vote in the Reichstag in early May 1893, the aristocratic supporters of the measure suffered a crushing defeat. Only 11 of 106 Center delegates voted for the bill (seven of them from Silesia), and most of thosePage 43 → voting in favor felt compelled by the unpopularity of their position to withdraw from their Reichstag seats just as new elections approached.81 In a remarkable turn of events, the great industrial magnates of the Silesian Center party were now effectively cast in the role of party renegades, providing the Polish press with an opportunity simultaneously to rebel against the provincial Center leaders and to proclaim their faithfulness to the mainstream of the Center party as a whole. Shortly after the army bill was voted down in the Reichstag, Katolik drew a sharp distinction between the handful of barons and counts who voted for the bill and the other Upper Silesian delegates, who were “neither aristocrats nor great lords, but rather came from the middle class or from the people” and proved loyal to the “Center of Windthorst” (Windthorst was the recently deceased, highly popular leader of the party).82 Upper Silesia’s electoral districts—like many constituencies throughout Catholic Germany—witnessed fierce intraparty struggles, as conservatives who favored the army bill and populists who were against it maneuvered for control of local electoral committees and often ended up running competing candidates in the general election held on June 15.83 In almost every one of these races, the candidate backed by the Polish press won by a lopsided margin. It was a sweeping vindication for Napieralski’s political program, particularly since the region’s most wellpublicized result was the victory of Katolik favorite Julius Szmula in the newspaper’s home district of BeuthenTarnowitz. Szmula effectively emerged as the tribune of the “Upper Silesian people’s party” that Napieralski hoped to form out of the regional Center party. A landowner and former major in the Prussian army, Szmula had acquired a reputation for supporting populist causes and was once characterized as the Silesian version of Irish firebrand for home rule Charles Stewart Parnell, presumably because he was originally a Protestant (he later converted to his wife’s Catholicism), just as Parnell was ofPage 44 → Protestant English settler background.84 In addition to being a staunch opponent of the military bill, he was a passionate advocate of the various linguistic, economic, and religious demands championed by Katolik: restoration of Polish-language religious instruction in primary schools, an eight-hour workday and higher wages, strengthening of confessional schools, and repeal of the ban on the Jesuit order.85 Szmula was also one of only two Upper Silesian delegates who spoke and wrote Polish fluently. The reelection of Major Szmula became the centerpiece of Katolik’s electoral campaign, and his resounding two-to-one victory on election day underlined the newspaper’s clout among the voters of the industrial region. What made Szmula’s triumph all the more stunning—but also struck a profoundly discordant note in Napieralski’s plans—was the fact that it was achieved in the face of the almost unanimous opposition of the lower clergy. While the opposition of high-ranking prelates like Cardinal Kopp was expected, the mass of Upper Silesian pastors and curates in the intra-party strife of 1893 had actually leaned in favor of the populist wing of the party. In many districts, parish priests made common cause with the Polish press in backing more populist candidates against aristocratic advocates of higher military spending; indeed, in several cases, the populist candidate was a priest.86 In the urban, industrial constituency of Kattowitz-Zabrze, the clergy remained united around the candidacy of Paul Letocha, the other fluent Polish speaker in the Upper Silesian Reichstag delegation and a well-known champion of

workers’ rights and Polish-language religious instruction.87 But in Beuthen-Tarnowitz, the area’s senior pastors cooperated with more conservative party elders in rejecting Major Szmula as the official Center candidate in favor of Father Leopold Nerlich, the widely respectedPage 45 → pastor of the parish of Piekar.88 Most of the industrial region’s clerics closed ranks around their colleague, and the race quickly took on the shape of a test of strength between the clergy and Katolik. It was a confrontation that neither side relished. The clergy, well aware of Szmula’s popularity, had raised no objection against him during the previous eight years that he had represented the district. At the very meeting in which Nerlich was nominated, Father Lukaszczyk of Königshütte had joined Napieralski in warmly praising Szmula’s record as a Center delegate.89 Likewise, Father Schmidt of Kattowitz reportedly advised his colleagues that opposing Szmula would be a mistake.90 Napieralski, in turn, was clearly distressed by the fact that Szmula was being challenged by a priest, and he took every opportunity to argue that this situation was the result of a temporary misunderstanding. Katolik unearthed positive quotes about Szmula from various priests (including Nerlich himself), and parishioners were reminded that even as they opposed the clerics’ candidate for the Reichstag, they should treat their pastors “with the dignity and honor due to the clergy.”91 Given Szmula’s popularity, the basically proclerical posture of his allies at Katolik, and the willingness of the clergy to work with other populist candidates, the clergy’s decision to fight Szmula’s campaign rather than join it looks rather puzzling. The primary source of unease with his candidacy, it seems, was the suspicion that the priorities within the Center party “cause” were being subtly, but fundamentally, rearranged by Szmula and his supporters in the Polish press: the Upper Silesian Center, in other words, was in danger of becoming a Polish national party that supported the rights of the Catholic church rather than a Catholic party that supported the rights of Polish speakers. The most revealing expression of this fear—and apparently one of the sources of its diffusion among key parish priests—was a letter that Szmula’s colleague Paul Letocha sent to Norbert Bończyk, pastor of one of the parishes in the city of Beuthen. Letocha reported that the major was defiant about Count Ballestrem’s efforts to purge him and was prepared to launch an autonomous “people’s party” inPage 46 → Upper Silesia or even to join the Polish party (Koło Połskie) if his renomination by the Center party was denied. This prospect deeply upset Letocha, who considered such a move “a betrayal of Upper Silesia and of our holy cause,” moving him to share the conversation with “the born leaders of the people” (i.e., the clergy) in order to devise a strategy for preventing the “possible shattering of the Center.” Letocha himself proposed to Bończyk that if Szmula was compelled by the clergy to declare that he “firmly and immovably adhered to the Center,” such a declaration “would have to satisfy Count Ballestrem and will satisfy him if he sees that the clergy stand behind Szmula. ”92 It seems that the unwillingness of Major Szmula to submit to such clerical adjudication made him irreparably suspect in the clergy’s eyes. At the local Center committee meeting that rejected Szmula’s renomination, Father Konietzko of Radzionkau gave voice to his concern about Szmula’s ultimate allegiances. The “Polish people’s party,” Konietzko argued, “says that it stands on the platform of the Center, but above all it stands for the Polish cause.” The Polish newspapers present [Szmula] as the leader of the Polish movement in Upper Silesia. We priests cannot permit that a Polish people’s party is created in Upper Silesia; we cannot permit that what happened in the Czech lands should happen here.”93 This conviction that Szmula’s campaign threatened to “put Polish nationality in first place and faith in second place” (as another priest put it)94 represented a striking rejection of Napieralski’s assurances that the Polish national movement was in happy symbiosis with Catholicism. The clergy’s aversion to Polish nationalism is all the more remarkable considering that the priests making these arguments seemed like such excellent candidates to be Polish “priest-patriots.” Father Konietzko had studied Polish literature during his seminary days in Breslau and belonged to the Society of Polish Upper Silesians.95 Father Josef Michalski—who also opposed Szmula and reportedly called Napieralski a “scoundrel” during the electoral campaign—had gained a reputation as “the greatest preacher in UpperPage 47 → Silesia” with his rousing Polish sermons and consistently promoted the use of Polish vernacular songs in churches.96 Father Bończyk, the priest that Letocha turned to for advice and support in heading off the potential secession of a Polish people’s party, was known as the “Upper Silesian Homer” for his

Polish-language poetry, and his social activism won the high regard of both Napieralski and later Polish historians.97 The refusal of priests who were so well-disposed to the Polish language to adhere to Szmula and Napieralski’s electoral movement demonstrates the difficulty the Upper Silesian clergy had in reconciling overt national activism with their understanding of the Catholic cause. As powerful as were the sympathies of many priests for the Polish language and, in many cases, Polish literature and culture, Upper Silesian clerics always felt the pull of countervailing ties to the German Catholic world, to the German language, and to the Prussian/German political community. Father Bończyk, whose own poetry and literary tastes were decidedly bilingual, argued to the attendees of the Katholikentag back in 1888: God gave the Polish people a different speech than their German brothers, but the same heart. . . . The Lord God created us Upper Silesians in Prussia and therefore desired that we remain in the Prussian state together with our brother Germans and support each other. . . . I am not saying that we should forget our language, only that we should also add German. Acquiring two languages, the Upper Silesian people will stand on a higher level of civilization and will stand more certainly, since they will be on two legs instead of one.98 This last metaphor sheds some light on the fine, but decisive, line separating most of the Upper Silesian clergy from the Katolik camp. Where many priests equated bilingualism with bipedalism, both providing stability and balance, Napieralski viewed the clergy’s hybrid cultural ties in much more ominous—albeit sympathetic—language. Page 48 → The Upper Silesian clergy find themselves, so to speak, between the hammer and the anvil. On the one hand, they are suspected by the government of making propaganda for the Polish language. . . . On the other hand, many make the accusation that they want to germanize the Polish people. The entire clergy, from His Excellency the bishop to the youngest curate, find themselves in this difficult position.99 The implication of the “hammer and anvil” metaphor—that the clergy were in an ultimately untenable position and needed to declare a fundamental allegiance to one linguistic cause or the other—lent a threatening edge to Katolik’s repeated proclerical utterances. As Napieralski’s newspaper made clear as the 1893 election campaign reached a climax, the Polish movement welcomed and hoped for support from the region’s priests, but it would not wait on their approval forever. Upper Silesia’s Polish voters, Katolik declared defiantly in the closing week of the campaign, “had to stand on their own two feet” and wanted “freedom for themselves in political matters.”100 The results of the 1893 Reichstag vote, particularly Szmula’s convincing win, demonstrated the electoral viability of a “Polish Catholic people’s movement,” even in the absence of significant clerical support. Ten years later, Napieralski would still remember the moment as a landmark victory: Katolik, he wrote, “became a party overnight, and I myself became a party leader.”101 Over the next several years, candidates backed by this “ Katolik party” routinely won electoral face-offs with more aristocratic, German-oriented Center party candidates, underlining the newspaper’s dominant role in the shaping of local public opinion.102 But Napieralski’s willingness to pursue his electoral program not only without the blessing of Upper Silesia’s clergy but even in the teeth of their opposition had created a deep animosity toward the Polish press among the very men whom the Katolik editor had hoped to enlist as leaders of the Polish Catholic cause. In the summer of 1893, a group of leading pastors meeting in Beuthen decided that if the clergy wanted to see a reliably “Catholic” Polish-language newspaper in Upper Silesia, they had better produce it themselves. The resulting periodical, Kuryer GórnoŚląski (The Upper Silesian Courier),Page 49 → was published in Ratibor (and hence most directly as a challenge to Nowiny) and blatantly advertised itself as the direct voice of the clergy. The publishing board consisted of about a dozen local pastors, and one of them, Father Wiktor Loss—a young and

energetic priest with impeccable credentials as a defender of the Polish language—assumed the duties of editor in chief.103 Pastors as far away as the industrial region recommended the new publication in parish announcements, and donations for the Kuryer were reportedly solicited in parish rosary societies.104 It seemed an ominous challenge. But just as the 1893 elections had shattered the belief that the clergy could make or break any parliamentary candidate, so the fate of the Kuryer exposed the limits of clerical influence over lay reading habits. The newspaper attracted a very modest readership, and it was shut down after only three years.105 Following the Kuryer’s demise, Upper Silesia’s leading pastors threw their weight behind a new periodical, Gazeta Katolicka (The Catholic Gazette), which was published in the heart of the industrial region (Königshütte) and managed to survive fourteen years (1896–1910), providing regular critique of the Polish-national press. But Gazeta Katolicka’s circulation also peaked at an underwhelming level (about three thousand copies)—hardly a serious challenge to the leading position of Katolik, whose circulation fluctuated in the 1890s but nonetheless reached a new high of twenty-one thousand copies by 1898.106 But if the clergy’s forays into the newspaper business never seriously challenged Napieralski’s market share, the Katolik editor did feel compelled to answer frequent challenges to his Catholic credentials. In one instance, timed to coincide with the founding of Gazeta Katolicka, Cardinal Kopp sent a letter to Katolik demanding that the newspaper cease advertising the blessings of Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII in its masthead, remarking that “for a Catholic paper, behavior that is faithful to the church is the best advertisement.”107 Napieralski duly removed the blessings from his masthead two weeks later, but he cheekily put in its place “For Freedom, Justice, and Truth,” the slogan of “our Center party.”108 AnotherPage 50 → challenge followed a few months later, when Cardinal Kopp, at the urging of many local clergymen, issued a sharply worded rebuke to the newspaper’s editors, accusing them of involving themselves in “purely pastoral affairs” and “striving in every way to sow mistrust between the clergy and the people and undermine the influence of the clergy.” The letter concluded with a threat of further denunciation of the newspaper if it did not change its ways.109 Katolik’s lengthy response to Kopp was hardly the contrite capitulation for which the local clergy were apparently hoping. While taking pains to reaffirm the newspaper’s devotion to the church, claiming that “there is no other political paper that has supported Catholic and church interests more intensively or to a greater degree,” the letter defended the newspaper’s right—indeed, its duty—to question the conduct of individual priests. “The church,” Napieralski and his colleagues wrote: “does not germanize. But the individual priest is not the church and can err. . . . Principles always stand higher than persons, even when they are ordained persons.” In response to the charge that Katolik was meddling in “purely church affairs,” such as conduct in the pulpit and confessional or the ordering of church services, Napieralski responded defiantly: The germanization of the Polish people is something political. If individual priests are now germanizing, they do so in the political arena. Public opinion has the right to involve itself in every kind of politics, also, and so much the more, when the confessional and pulpit are being used, that is, misused, for those purposes.110 As the face-off between the Katolik camp and Upper Silesia’s clergy continued, it was, ironically, Center party politics that provided the occasion for at least a temporary truce. With a new round of Reichstag and Landtag elections looming in the summer of 1898, both Napieralski and the provincial Center party leaders were anxious to reach an understanding to restore a semblance of unity to the party’s ranks. A preliminary agreement was reached in 1897, incorporating Polish activists into electoral committees and ensuring that at least one candidate in multicandidatePage 51 → (Landtag) districts should be fully bilingual.111 This arrangement held through the election campaign, which Napieralski described as going “peacefully” compared to the fratricidal struggles of 1893.112 But if a fragile internal peace was now in place within the Catholic camp, the years of recrimination between clergy and press had clearly taken a toll in popular enthusiasm for the Center cause, and many were now prepared to look to another party altogether as the true representative of “popular” interests. Several years earlier, Aleksander Skowroński, the young priest who had refused to join the clergy’s collective denunciations of the Polish press, had vividly warned his colleagues: “Do you really think that the people, having acquired a taste for wine, will drink water at your command? No, and if you force them, they will reject both wine

and water and look for spirits.”113 His audience understood that wine, in this metaphor, stood for Katolik, water meant the clerical press, and spirits referred to the specter that always lurked on horizons of the clergy’s consciousness: Social Democracy. The socialist movement had been slow to develop in Upper Silesia, despite the obvious opportunities provided by its large working-class population, but in the mid-1890s, while the clergy and the Polish editors battled, the Social Democratic Party was making major strides in the region. An autonomous Polish section of the party was founded in 1893, a Polish-oriented miners’ union formed in 1894, and a Polishlanguage socialist newspaper relocated to Kattowitz in 1895. The number of members/subscribers won by these new socialist organizations remained minimal—only a couple thousand individuals in each case—and the same linguistic and national tensions that divided the Center remained sensitive cleavages within the socialist movement as well.114 For the moment, though, the underdog socialists were able to negotiate these issues more quietly and convincingly than the Center camp, while using an aggressive electoral campaign to appeal to the socioeconomic grievances of working-class Upper Silesians.115 The 1898 Reichstag election returns in the industrial region provide striking evidence of the success of the socialists in co-opting traditional Center voters. In the district of Oppeln as a whole, thePage 52 → SPD increased their vote total from about five thousand to over twenty-five thousand, while in the constituency of Kattowitz-Zabrze, where the Social Democratic Party had never received more than 10 percent of the vote and where the Center candidate was the respected incumbent Paul Letocha, the socialists now won one out of every three ballots and came close to a majority in some working-class suburbs.116 This sharp increase in votes for the Social Democrats in 1898—coming after the previous victories of Polishpopulist countercandidates over official, clerically backed Centrists and after the success of Katolik in ignoring repeated condemnations from the clergy and Cardinal Kopp—demonstrated a significant erosion of the monolithic political Catholicism of the 1870s and 1880s. But if some Upper Silesians were now voting as “Polish Catholics” rather than simply as “Catholics”—or were even making a more drastic move to voting socialist—did this in fact reflect deeper shifts in social identification and cultural practice? Was voting “Polish,” in other words, linked to the formation of a broader Polish sociomoral milieu, or was failing to vote “Catholic” suggestive of a steady drifting away from the Catholic milieu? The argument was frequently made that simple shifts in voting meant nothing of the sort. Such Katolik sympathizers as Emil Szramek criticized the Upper Silesian clergy for seeking to turn their parishes into “cadres of the Center party, mistakenly identifying church discipline with party discipline” and fusing “pastoral care” with “politics.”117 In practice, it seemed to be entirely possible for many Upper Silesians to treat Reichstag elections as an opportunity to voice social and economic grievances without necessarily immersing themselves in a particular sociomoral milieu. The evidence suggests, for example, that among those who voted Social Democratic in 1898, a larger proportion went to confession at Easter than were involved in a socialist labor union or read a socialist newspaper.118 DuringPage 53 → the next election cycle, Napieralski wrote that many people would vote for a Polish party simply because they thought the Center party candidate might vote for higher taxes rather than from any deep consciousness of Polishness.119 But if individual decisions about voting for a particular candidate or reading a particular newspaper were not always governed by an overriding ideology, the clergy were justified in believing that the aim of the Polish editors—like that of the clergy themselves—extended beyond a narrowly bounded sphere of “politics” into the cultivation of a comprehensive worldview and way of life. As Napieralski’s response to Cardinal Kopp explicitly stated, this definition of “politics” and “public opinion” encompassed anything essential to the nurturing of nationality and therefore extended deep into what the clergy considered the realm of pure “pastoral care.” Fostering a Polish national consciousness, in other words, required not only an effective “polonization” of the regional Center party but also the effective appropriation of Upper Silesia’s entire Catholic milieu.

Organizing Workers and Youth Existing in an uneasy zone between “public” and “private,” between the “political” and the “purely religious,” was what the nineteenth century knew as “the social question.” The social question referred broadly to the social changes wrought by industrialization, urbanization, and the generation of new social stratifications, but it tended to focus in particular on the grievances and aspirations of Europe’s burgeoning working class. For the Catholic church, the plight of industrial workers generated profoundly mixed sentiments. Disturbed by the dislocations and human costs of economic liberalism but terrified by the prospect of a socialist revolution, the Catholic hierarchy at

the end of the nineteenth century groped toward a vision that would preserve social order but offer improved prospects for social justice. The publication of the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 went a long way in striking this delicate balance, setting the tone for the initiatives of “social Catholicism” for decades to come. One of the central points of Rerum Novarum was an enthusiastic, albeit vague, endorsement of independent “working-men’s associations,” even those formed “by workers alone,” as long as these “found their laws upon religion”Page 54 → and followed Christian teachings.120 This blessing gave the green light to the rapid development of Christian trade unionism in many areas of Catholic Europe, but it also set the stage for bitter struggles over what kinds of organizations and activities and what degree of class-based militancy would be deemed legitimate for Catholic workers. During the two decades before the appearance of Rerum Novarum, it seemed doubtful that the church in Upper Silesia would accept—let alone endorse—any form of worker organization. Indeed, one of the casualties of the triumph of political Catholicism in the Kulturkampf had been the first significant attempt at unionization in the region: the liberal Hirsch-Duncker movement. An initial recruitment drive had actually registered twenty-five hundred members by 1869. But the 1871 Köngishütte strike found the Hirsch-Duncker leaders on the wrong side of the overarching confrontation between ultramontanes and liberals, and they soon lost any significant influence over local workers. By 1874, union membership had declined to only eight hundred.121 Over the next fifteen years, the Catholic camp made only slow and fitful progress in creating alternative organizations for their huge working-class constituency. A few parish-based organizations, such as the St. Barbara workers association in Königshütte, organized by Katolik editor Father Radziejewski, showed some signs of vigor, but even many of those that got off the ground did not strike a particularly activist profile. One of the meetings of a Christian workers association in Domb was described in a police report as consisting of ten to twenty workers gathered in a tavern, drinking, shooting billiards, and playing cards, making them barely distinguishable from the rest of the clientele.122 The world of Catholic workers organizations grew more lively, as well as more complex and contested, at the end of the 1880s, as the church hierarchy and clergy, on one side, and the Polish activists at Katolik, on the other side, launched competing initiatives to define and direct the movement. In 1887, Father Lukaszczyk in Königshütte organized the Mutual Aid Association (Związek Wzajemnej Pomocy, or ZWP), later renamedPage 55 → the Association of Christian Workers, which aimed at integrating and expanding the activities of local parish associations.123 But the fledgling organization proved irrelevant to the coordination and mediation of workers’ relations with employers, as demonstrated by the outbreak of a major strike in 1889. Precipitated by rising prices and resulting pressure on real wages, the labor unrest of 1889 involved multiple mines and thousands of miners, but the rate of participation was much lower than in simultaneous strikes in the Rhineland, and a unified, prompt response from mine owners and the state brought the strike to a rapid conclusion. The only tangible role that the church played in the strike was through the antistrike pronouncements of Bishop Kopp, who happened to be visiting the area administering confirmation at various parishes. Government officials reported that these made “a deep impression on the workers.”124 The failure of the strike made a deep impression on newly arrived Katolik editor Adam Napieralski. Responding to appeals sent to Katolik by workers in the strike’s aftermath, Napieralski founded a new ZWP that approximated a full-fledged labor union, though an explicitly Christian one. As the editor later noted, previous parish-based workers associations “did not concern themselves with wage issues or the legal protection of workers,” the “issues that lay at the heart of workers’ existence.”125 The ZWP swiftly established an office for collecting worker complaints—reputedly the first of its kind in Germany—and enlisted a membership of over four thousand workers in its first year.126 It was an impressive achievement, especially considering that five years later, the Christian Gewerkschaften (trade unions) based in the Rhineland counted only five thousand members.127 But the ZWP’s legitimacy as a vehicle for the mobilization of Catholic workers quickly came into question. In February and March of 1890, Bishop Kopp released a pair of circulars urging the priests of the diocese to engage themselves in the social question and establish parish workers associations. On their face, these circulars seemed to encourage exactly thePage 56 → kind of clerical activism on labor issues that Napieralski desired, and the Katolik editor gamely attempted to integrate the ZWP into the bishop’s plans. With the assistance of Father

Bończyk in Beuthen, he canvassed two hundred of Upper Silesia’s pastors for support in establishing a kind of clerical protectorate over the activities of the ZWP. The clergy, however, balked at Napieralski’s proposition, with only two pastors returning positive responses.128 An additional circular issued by Kopp in August 1890 had charged, in an apparent reference to cooperation with the ZWP, that some people were using workers associations “to promote and give advantage to Polishness, in part even in a political sense, but at least in a linguistic sense.” While granting that the use of Polish in meetings was certainly permissible among workers who were “not yet sufficiently proficient” in German, other activities by workers associations were to be strictly circumscribed. Associations that were not “purely church-oriented” were not to be provided with special church services, and those associations that were under the leadership of the clergy were to eschew any Polish-language theater performances or pilgrimages to sites outside the German Empire.129 With these clear instructions from Breslau, the parish-based network of Catholic workers associations began to develop on a separate track from the ZWP, in implicit competition with it, rather than, as Napieralski had hoped, as more or less a system of local affiliates for the new Christian trade union. Kopp’s circulars initiated a rush of new clerically led workers associations in the parishes of the industrial region. Membership in these associations, as with previous ones, fluctuated considerably, but the numbers involved in the 1890s far exceeded the figures for earlier decades and started to rival the membership of the ZWP. By 1896, in the parishes of the Myslowitz deanery (which encompassed roughly half of the most heavily industrialized region), between twenty-five hundred and three thousand men were enrolled in workers associations led by the local pastor or curate.130 A typical set of statutes for such an association described its primary activities as (1) holding common religious services, (2) sponsoring lectures and speeches on economic and social issues, and (3) encouraging thrift and mutualPage 57 → aid.131 Despite Kopp’s warnings about the promotion of Polish language and national sentiment in workers associations, Polish seems to have been the language generally used at meetings of parish workers associations.132 Kopp’s explicit ban on Polish-language theater performances does not seem to have been rigorously observed either, since even Father Schmidt—a highly trusted future dean with a reputation as a “germanizer” and the pastor of the most “germanized” parish in the region—sponsored such performances.133 Indeed, prior to the turn of the century, the link between parish workers associations and linguistic “Polishness” was so strong that they were often listed as “Polish workers associations” in church documents, while more middle-class groups—such as men’s associations, citizens’ associations, or even journeymen’s associations—were characterized as “German.”134 What separated the ZWP from the parish workers associations, then, was not so much the former’s distinctively “Polish” atmosphere as its willingness to act more like an actual trade union, representing worker grievances in an implicitly adversarial relationship with employers. It was a cautious sort of activism, to be sure, mostly consisting of venting workers’ grievances in the Katolik supplement Praca (Work), but Napieralski deemed this an essential first step in forging some sense of solidarity among Upper Silesia’s fragmented and browbeaten workforce. Praca’s editors collected complaints about long hours (or, alternately, insufficient shifts); poor wages; high social insurance contributions; Sunday work shifts; and dirty, dangerous, malodorous, and noisy working conditions. They advised workers to direct such complaints “in written form and in calm and modest tones” to mine officials, Reichstag delegates, and the newspapers.135 The ZWP and Praca also pressed workers to stop deferring to mining officials in elections for the elders of local miners associations (Knappschaften) and to unite behind their own, more assertive candidates.136Page 58 → Implementing even this relatively modest program of collective action proved an uphill struggle, however. With little encouragement from the clergy and intimidated by a harsh regimen of rules and fines in the mines and foundries, most workers were reluctant to express vocal opposition, occasionally prompting the editors of Praca to impatiently scold that employers would always have free rein as long as “there is neither education nor unity among you.”137 In the meantime, the ZWP was facing accusations from Social Democratic unions—which made a belated appearance in the region after 1894—that the union was not militant enough, was a tool of the clergy, and was afraid to lead a strike. Finally, the ZWP had to thread a delicate course in its relations to the German Christian Gewerkschaften movement based in the Rhineland. Napieralski heartily endorsed the growth of the German Christian unions and pledged to proceed “hand in hand” with them, but he insisted that the predominantly Polish-speaking ZWP remain autonomous.138

These challenges on multiple fronts certainly took their toll on the ZWP’s development. Denied clerical protection and faced with a fresh recruitment campaign by the socialist unions, the union saw its membership drop below three thousand by the mid-1890s. But following this middecade slump, the ZWP’s membership surged once again to almost ten thousand by the end of the century, confirming its status as the leading workers organization in the region.139 Socialist unions, by comparison, saw a promising initial membership of twenty-seven hundred members in 1894 atrophy to less than one thousand in the same period.140 In addition to competing effectively with socialist unions, the Katolik camp seems to have had some success in convincing Polish-speaking Catholic workers that, notwithstanding the frosty attitude of most clergymen, membership in the ZWP was not incompatible with participation in parish workers associations but simply served a different purpose than the latter organizations.141 Page 59 → An important development parallel and auxiliary to the formation of the Catholic workers’ movement in Upper Silesia was the rise and fall of a network of parish youth associations named after St. Alojzy (Aloysius). Father Bocńzyk had initiated the first St. Alojzy association for male youth in 1871, but the chilling effect of the Kulturkampf deterred any imitations of this initiative for almost two decades. With the upswing in associational activity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, pastors and curates around the industrial region founded a large number of St. Alojzy associations. By 1896, there were about two dozen different chapters, with a total membership of over two thousand.142 Since the members of these groups were mostly young workers (from age sixteen), they were sometimes defined as the chapter of the parish workers association for unmarried workers.143 The operation of the St. Alojzy associations during the early 1890s featured the kind of fluid symbiosis between Catholic parish activity and Polish national activism that Napieralski worked to cultivate throughout the 1890s. From one perspective, the associations seemed to be impeccably religious in nature and under the clear direction of local pastors. Referred to as the “best defense . . . against Social Democracy” in one visitation report,144 Alojzy associations were defended by clergy and laity alike when they came under attack by the state. One parish chapter in Siemianowitz, under the vigorous leadership of the young curate Jan Kapica, recruited over six hundred youth and gained regional renown for its performances of Polish song, including one in front of Cardinal Kopp during a visit to the parish in 1894.145 But it was clear that many of the lay leaders and members of the youth groups looked beyond the aims of their clerical protectors, seeing the Alojzy movement as an expression of a fully national Polish sentiment. During the 1893 election campaign, the Alojzy association in Father Nerlich’s home parish of Piekar openly campaigned for his polonophile opponent, Major Szmula.146 Social events and exchanges sponsored by the associations—which, disapproving police reports noted,Page 60 → often concluded with dances lasting until 2:00 a.m.—featured involvement by various Polish national activists, and the songs popularly sung at these events were explicitly Polish-patriotic.147 By 1897, Bishop Kopp was convinced that the Alojzy groups had crossed the line from promoting Catholic piety to spreading Polish agitation, and he called on the clergy of the diocese either to dissolve the associations or completely dissociate themselves from them. Perhaps more than any other decree issued by Kopp, this order had immediate and widespread repercussions, resulting in the dissolution of most of Upper Silesia’s youth groups and even of the parish workers association in at least one case (Bogutschütz). A few of the Alojzy societies defied the order, adopting lay leadership and openly embracing a national Polish agenda, but most were simply dissolved or incorporated into reconstituted workers associations.148 For the short term, at least, the legacy of Kopp’s decree was not the “germanization” of the Catholic youth movement but its evisceration. In the five years after the dissolution of the Alojzy societies, only one new parish youth association was founded in the industrial region, and the narrowly devotional Marian youth congregations that were envisioned by the hierarchy as the primary successors to the Alojzy associations were extremely slow to develop.149 Even if some of the slack was taken up by “adult” parish associations or relatively moderate Polish Catholic organizations, such as the ZWP, the collapse of Upper Silesia’s once-vigorous network of Catholic youth associations had created a weak point in the putatively all-embracing milieu envisioned by both the clergy and such Polish Catholic activists as Napieralski, a vulnerability that would be effectively exploited by both the German government and more radical Polish nationalists at the dawn of the next century.

Language and Religious Instruction Religious education might at first seem an unlikely arena for conflict among Upper Silesia’s Catholics, for on this issue, the formal demands ofPage 61 → the church, the Center party, and Polish national activists were highly convergent. All agreed that the inculcation of fundamental religious truths and moral rules in children of primary school age was of such paramount importance that it should be conducted in the child’s mother tongue. The consensus on this basic principle was so broad that Polish newspapers, such as Katolik, often made their point simply by printing extended quotations from Center party representatives’ speeches in the Reichstag and Landtag or from German Catholic newspaper articles.150 Yet the superficial unanimity on this question masked rather different understandings of how the principle of religious education in one’s mother tongue should be applied in the everyday practice of education. The bulk of an average Upper Silesian child’s religious education consisted of classes in biblical history and catechism, provided in the primary schools (Volksschulen), which were state-run but remained for the most part divided according to confession. In earlier decades and especially after the failed revolution of 1848, the control of the Catholic and Protestant churches over their respective schools was close to absolute, with clergymen generally serving as both local and district school inspectors. The primary architect of Upper Silesia’s Catholic educational system during this period was Father Josef Bogedain, who served as school inspector in the district of Oppeln from 1848 to 1858. Bogedain was convinced that since most Upper Silesians spoke a dialect of Polish as their native language, literary Polish was the proper written language to use in their children’s schooling. Under his leadership, standardized Polish was introduced as the official language of instruction in many Upper Silesian schools and became an obligatory subject at local teachers’ colleges.151 While Bogedain himself had no sympathy for the Polish national cause, his reforms provided an essential precondition for the later flourishing of the Polish movement. An entire generation of Upper Silesians learned to read and write standardized Polish, creating the potential future readership for such periodicals as Katolik.152 The Bogedain years would also become an idealized standard against which Upper Silesians negatively evaluated the “germanizing” school system of later decades. The writer Rafal Urban (born in 1893) would describe the kindly bilingual teacher of earlier years, such as his own paternal grandfather or hisPage 62 → mother’s teacher in primary school, as an “old Bogedainite” (Bogedainczyk).153 A sympathetic old Bogedainczyk also figures in some otherwise bitter memoirs written by ordinary Upper Silesians describing the harsh treatment suffered by Polishspeaking children in state schools during the 1890s.154 The Bogedain system in Upper Silesia came under pressure soon after the school inspector stepped down from his office. In 1863, new regulations by the district government in Oppeln mandated that German be taught from the first year of primary school and that all subjects, with the exception of religion, should be taught in German from the second year on, with Polish only employed in an auxiliary, transitional role. The immediate impact of this new ordinance appears to have been limited, however, since the clergy and teachers trained under Bogedain remained in direct control of the schools and since the definition of using Polish in an “auxiliary” role was notoriously elastic.155 The changes in education policy accompanying the Kulturkampf were much more difficult to finesse. Catholic priests were systemically purged from the ranks of Upper Silesia’s county and local school inspectors, radically reducing the role of the church in the operation of the schools and consequently the clergy’s ability to ameliorate new regulations restricting the use of Polish. A decree issued in the fall of 1872 made German the sole language of instruction from the first grade of primary school, with Polish allowed as an auxiliary language only in the lower grades. As before, religious instruction was granted a special status. Polish could be used as the primary language of instruction for religion classes in the lower grades and as an auxiliary language in the middle grades.156 But in any area where 25 percent or more of the students were classified as being of German mother tongue, German was to be the sole language of instruction in religious instruction as well.157 This policy, combined with thePage 63 → gradual elimination of any formal Polish-language instruction for incoming teachers in primary schools, ensured that most Upper Silesian school-children received religious instruction mostly or entirely in German, even in the lower grades.158 The exclusion of Polish from Upper Silesia’s primary schools was repeatedly condemned by Silesia’s bishops, the clergy, Center party deputies, and the Polish- and German-language press. A resolution passed at the

Katholikentag in Königshütte in 1883, subsequently submitted to the education ministry with over fifty thousand signatures attached, offered a typical critique of German-only education. Released from school, [former pupils] interact exclusively with Polish-speaking people and completely forget the snatches of German that they learned in the schools. They appear the same as illiterates, because they can, to be sure, still read German, but they do not understand what they have read. . . . Because they can not read Polish, but can not understand German, the Bible and prayer books remain closed to them.159 If, however, we turn from these official protests to parish priests’ assessments of everyday religious education, the picture is not quite so clear. Annual examinations of schoolchildren in the deanery of Myslowitz, conducted by the dean and local pastors, did sometimes produce grim assessments. In one class, the inspectors judged that “the children were almost entirely alienated from the fundamental teachings of our holy religion,” while another visit found “a considerable number of children . . . who did not know how to answer the simplest questions about God in either German or Polish, questions that children in the first years could answer.”160 In other classes, though, results were deemed “in general quite good” or “excellent,” and children were described as having “fully mastered the material in the German as well as the Polish language.”161 What distinguished teachers of these latter classes—aside from experience, diligence, and patience—was their readiness to smooth the transition to German instructionPage 64 → with Polish translations. Visiting priests noted approvingly those classes in which the teacher overcame the children’s “great difficulties” in learning German by employing their native Polish as an auxiliary language. “Without this [use of Polish],” one report read, “the results would be zero,” but with the assistance of Polish explanations, “the children that were called on could express themselves quite well in German as well as in Polish.”162 While implicitly condemning the absolutist language policies pursued by the most avid germanizers, such remarks also implicitly undermined the insistence of the Polish press that only lessons learned in the mother tongue had any moral efficacy. The gap between the clergy’s formal insistence on religious education in children’s mother tongue and their onthe-ground accommodation of German-language instruction can be traced to a number of factors. One was the general reluctance of parish priests to cast schoolteachers as the enemies of the Catholic community. Many priests were, after all, teachers’ sons, and most teachers in the Catholic primary schools were themselves Roman Catholic. In visitation reports, kind words were often found for an “honest and hardworking” teacher even in cases in which the results of the school inspection left something to be desired.163 The majority of teachers did, admittedly, stand behind the government’s germanization policy; in 1899, for example, when the minister of education rejected yet another clerically backed petition for the restoration of Polish-language religion classes, the interconfessional teachers’ organization (the Schlesische Provinzial-Lehrerverein) endorsed a resolution commending the minister’s decision.164 But at least some teachers, even among the younger generation, exhibited some traces of oppositional sentiment. In 1893, a separate Catholic teachers association (the Verein katholischer Lehrer Schlesiens), citing a threat to “Christian pedagogy” in the schools, seceded from the main teachers association. Its membership grew steadily over the next decade.165 But the clergy’s willingness to reach a modus vivendi withPage 65 → schoolteachers could also be described as a simple matter of necessity. Many parishes in the industrial area contained thousands of schoolchildren divided among multiple schools, each with multiple classes; and religion classes occupied three or four hours a week at each grade level. It was virtually impossible for a pastor and his curates, already occupied with other pastoral duties, to do more than make occasional appearances at the primary schools.166 Schoolteachers, in other words, had to be trusted to teach religion reasonably effectively; if they did not do so, who else could or would? Accommodation was also, not surprisingly, the watchword of Bishop Kopp’s top-level negotiations with state officials. Although a few members of the hierarchy, such as the Polish-speaking cathedral canon Heinrich Marx, kept pressing for a reversal of language policies and a restoration of mandatory Polish instruction in state teachers’ colleges, Kopp soon took a very different tack.167 The cardinal lobbied to make up for any transitional difficulties in young Polish children’s understanding of German instruction by introducing an extra (fifth) hour of weekly religious instruction in the primary schools.168 The minister of education eventually agreed to such an expansion at individual schools “on an experimental basis,” with the understanding that among the youngest children, this

extra hour would involve heavy use of illustrations in easing the transition to completely German instruction, with only the most limited use of Polish for explanation.169 To Polish activists, of course, this represented the quiet betrayal of a long-standing Catholic principle. But to most of the clergy of the industrial region, who had been making their own quotidian compromises with the schools for years, it properly prioritized an end over a mere means. While government jurisdiction over the primary schools severely limited clerical control over classes in biblical history and catechism, there was another area of religious education that remained indisputably the responsibility of the clergy: instruction for first confession and communion. Before children were admitted to their first confession and first communion,Page 66 → they went through one to two years of additional catechismal lessons, two hours per week, taught directly by the clergy.170 Except for a brief period at the height of the Kulturkampf, classes for first confession and communion were often held in school classrooms and required a minimal degree of cooperation from the state, but there was no direct state control over the language of instruction used. It was, as Katolik noted, a sphere in which “priests can teach according to the laws of God and the church, that is, in the mother tongue.”171 Indeed, until late in the nineteenth century, these preparatory classes were taught almost exclusively in Polish in most Upper Silesian parishes. Only in the 1870s and 1880s—with the growing impact of German education, German cultural penetration, and (to a lesser extent) German immigration—were Germanlanguage sections for instruction for first confession and communion established in many parishes, especially in urban areas.172 The routine use of Polish in instruction for first confession and communion created a difficult situation for the church. After six or seven years of almost exclusive German-language instruction, few children entering the Polish sections of classes for first confession and communion were actually literate in their mother tongue, so this instruction was a unique and, from the Polish-national perspective, invaluable opportunity for the systematic spread of Polish literacy. The Prussian government, keenly sensitive to this side effect of Polish-language instruction for first confession and communion, repeatedly warned Bishop Kopp that the classes were being “misused” for the teaching of the Polish language. Kopp’s response to such charges was another in the series of confidential circulars distributed to the deans of the diocese in August 1890, aimed at inoculating the clergy from charges of making common cause with Polish nationalists.173 In this circular, the bishop noted the frequent complaints he received that the new Polish catechism (published in 1888) was used “to conduct Polish reading instruction,” as well as charges that German children or children entirely proficient in German were being automatically put into Polish-language sections for instruction for first confession and communion. While stressing that he was sure that his clergy shared the belief that “the promotion of linguistic interests does not belong to the affairs of the church,” KoppPage 67 → warned that these complaints threatened “to cast doubts on the intentions of the leaders of the church and obscure the goals of religious instruction.” He stressed, therefore, that the clergy were to offer both German and Polish sections for instruction for first confession and communion and that “those children which in the conscientious opinion of the pastor could usefully follow German religious instruction” should be placed in the German section, adding that priests should not “too greatly generalize cases of insufficient understanding in German.” This circular has gained notoriety in Polish historiography as prime evidence of Kopp’s collaboration with stateled germanization, but the impact of the circular on local practice seems to have been rather muted. In some predominantly Polish-speaking areas, the bishop’s instructions did spur the creation of German-language sections where none had previously existed.174 But in other, almost exclusively Polish parishes, the pastor felt no need to found a German section in the wake of Kopp’s pronouncement.175 In the industrial region, where large numbers of inhabitants were widely described as genuinely proficient in German, German-language sections had been established well before Kopp’s pronouncement.176 The proportion of children attending these German sections in the late 1880s ranged from a small minority in industrial suburbs and semi-industrialized towns (11 percent in Rosdzin in 1886; 10 percent in Chorzów in 1890) to more than half in large cities (Königshütte and Beuthen in 1886).177 After the release of Kopp’s circular in 1890, the proportion of children attending German-language sections rose noticeably in some parishes. But as can be seen in table 2, the shift from Polish to German was a very gradual process, with the majority of instruction outside of major cities remaining Polish well into the

twentieth century. If there was a decisive “tipping point” beyond which German-language instruction started to become the regional norm, it can most plausibly be placed in the final years before the First World War—two decades after Kopp’s intervention. So if this linguistic shift had relatively little to do with diocesan ordersPage 68 → from Breslau, who or what was driving it? Some observers insisted that the attitudes of local pastors were decisive; indeed, pastors themselves sometimes took this line in an effort to emphasize their authority. Father Ronczek in Rosdzin, for example, told his parishioners: “Priests determine which section German or Polish children are to attend. Parents are not to give orders in this matter.”178 Given overall linguistic trends and ubiquitous charges of germanophile sentiment among the clergy, one might assume that any exercise of pastoral pressure would have been in the direction of German instruction. To be sure, a few priests no doubt subscribed to the approach that would be outlined by Father Richard Rassek in his pamphlet Why Does a Part of the Clergy Conduct Religious Instruction in German? (1902). Rassek argued for a wholesale switch to the use of German, insisting that the use of Polish to teach abstract religious concepts to schoolchildren who had only learned the German terms for such concepts was “not only an unpedagogical but a dangerous experiment.”179 But this blanket deference to state germanization policies was far more the exception than the rule. Cardinal Kopp reportedly remarked that he did not believe three priests could be found in all of Upper Silesia who shared Rassek’s opinion on German-language religious instruction.180 Indeed, it is clear that most of those who encouraged an active pastoral role in assigning children to one or the other section of instruction for first confession and communion were, in fact, urging clerical intervention to ensurePage 69 → placement in Polish sections. This certainly seemed to be the upshot of Father Ronczek’s previously cited assertion of pastoral authority, which was followed by the admonition that “Polish children will attend Polish lessons, even if they can babble ten words of German.” When Father Stanislaw Stephen surveyed local priests on this issue, both of the priests who insisted that priests should determine the language of a child’s religious instruction also reported that they taught exclusively in Polish.181 When Father Jan Kudera, a strongly polonophile curate, insisted that “everything depends on the priest” in such matters, he was not decrying excessive pastoral intervention in assigning children to German- or Polish-language classes but, rather, lamenting the failure of priests to make use of the influence that they had.182 As Kudera’s complaint suggests, the norm among local pastors was neither pro-German nor pro-Polish interventionism but, rather, a strict laissez-faire approach. The decisive voice in determining whether a child received instruction for first confession and communion in German or Polish was, according to almost every account, that of the parents. Father Emil Szramek, one of the leading interwar historians of the region, stated flatly that “church practice—not just in the Breslau diocese—always emphasized the principle of religious education in the mother tongue, while leaving the concrete decision to the parents.”183 In the Upper Silesian industrial region, such a principle was in many ways dictated by sheer logistics. Faced with total cohorts that sometimes numbed five or six hundred children, priests would necessarily have had to rely on the brief statements offered by the parents or the children themselves as to which language they understood better or spoke at home. But perhaps the best source attesting that this was, in fact, standard practice was the Polish press, where blame for the popularity of German-language religious instruction was consistently placed on the desire of parents to achieve social respectability, not on pressure from the clergy. “Every priest,” one article in Katolik informed its readers, “will gladly listen to parents asking for their child to be taught religion in the language of Polish parents.” The problem was the example set by “more refined” (fajniejsze) parents who deliberately sent their children to German sections and were compared by Katolik to Eve beingPage 70 → tempted by Satan with the prospect of becoming like a god.184 Likewise, when a correspondent wrote in to complain that over half of the children in Königshütte were in German-language sections even though 90 percent of parishioners were of Polish descent, he declared this “mainly the fault of the parents,” who do not teach their children “that God created them Poles,” who “allow them to speak German at home,” and who, in fact, “themselves use German at home.”185 This criticism was even applied to the most nationally “enlightened” middle-class Polish leaders, who were charged with hypocritically placing their own children in German-language sections of classes for first confession and communion, presumably due to considerations of social status.186

But if the role of the clergy in this linguistic shift was largely passive (a sin of omission rather than commission), this hardly mitigated Polish activists’ frustration with clerical attitudes. Numerous priests and Centrist politicians, after all, had repeatedly argued that religious education in a child’s mother tongue was a principle integral to the “Catholic cause.” Even on the eve of the war, an article in the Center-affiliated Tygodnik Katolicki insisted that germanization led to “socialism and [moral] ruin.”187 So why were there not more jeremiads from the pulpit stressing this point to parents of children about to begin instruction for first confession and communion? Whatever allowances one could make with regard to pastoral workload, this deference to parental wishes—and thus, indirectly, to social pressures driven by top-down cultural engineering—was seen by Polish activists as indicating an obvious lack of passion for the Polish tongue. Indeed, as the Polish-national Kuryer Poznaąski once wrote about Father Jan Kapica’s ambivalent attitude toward the “Polish question,” the majority of Upper Silesian priests seemed to treat the fate of the Polish language as “a subject about which one can write a political-philosophical dissertation,” not, as they had treated the Kulturkampf, as a “question of the struggle for life and death.”188 Page 71 →

Languages of Worship Polish activists looked so anxiously on trends in religious instruction because they understandably expected any shifts here to reverberate more broadly in popular religious practice. If a child became accustomed to reading and speaking about the tenets of the faith using German vocabulary, he or she could all too easily become comfortable hearing a homily, offering confession, or singing a hymn in the same language. The most obvious sign of the slippery slope leading from classroom to church sanctuary was the widespread introduction in the late nineteenth century of so-called school masses. In these religious services conducted specifically for schoolchildren once or twice during the week (and sometimes on Sunday as well), children were only allowed to sing in German. This intrusion of state germanization policy into religious worship was embodied in the figure of the senior local schoolteacher, whose office was almost everywhere combined with that of the parish organist and who thus served as a German-language choir director for the parish’s schoolchildren.189 The German-only policy was naturally condemned by the clergy as an affront to church autonomy, and in some smaller, almost exclusively Polishspeaking villages, parishioners complained that suddenly they could hear “German singing . . . conducted in the church every day except Sunday.”190 Local pastors, however, pointing out that schoolteachers could simply refuse to bring the children to church at all, argued that German school masses were certainly preferable to no school masses at all.191 A rather different dynamic governed the gradual introduction of regular German-language services on Sundays and holidays. As a rule, these were provided only in rather large urban or industrial suburban parishes and were offered in addition to one or more existing Polish service. The introduction of services with German preaching and singing has often been associated with yet another notorious circular issued by Bishop Kopp in August 1890, which encouraged the parish clergy to provide German-speaking parishioners with their own services wherever possible. Kopp suggested that this should be done wherever 25 percent or more of thePage 72 → parishioners understood German.192 This solicitous attitude toward Upper Silesia’s German-speaking minorities was, like the attitude of Kopp’s other circulars, clearly inspired by a desire to placate the German government, and it reflected a double standard in the threshold considered necessary for the introduction of minority-language preaching. In regions where German speakers predominated and Polish agricultural or industrial laborers formed an immigrant minority, worship or even confession opportunities for the Poles were provided much more unevenly and sporadically. But as with some of the other August circulars, the actual “germanizing” impact of this pronouncement on Upper Silesian religious life seems to have been slight. As revealed in the survey of parish demographics and worship schedules that Kopp requested from the ecclesiastical commissioners of the region, regular German-language services were already being provided in larger, urban parishes by 1889. In the Myslowitz deanery, the parishes of Kattowitz, Königshütte, Lipine, and Myslowitz all held weekly services with German preaching and singing, and Bogutschütz and Rosdzin held such services every other week. Of these, only in Kattowitz were 25 percent or more of parishioners deemed proficient in German, suggesting that Kopp’s suggested rule of thumb was largely irrelevant. In these large parishes, where

even a 10 percent minority could translate to over a thousand parishioners, the local demand for a German service had made such a change unavoidable well before any instructions on the matter came from Breslau. Indeed, by 1890, Sunday and holiday services in most of the larger parishes of the industrial region seem to have already settled into a strikingly uniform two-for-one pattern, roughly reflective of the local demographic situation: Polish preaching was offered at an early mass (starting between 6:00 and 7:30 a.m.) and a late morning mass (starting between 10:00 and 11:00 a.m., usually the high mass or “main service”), while a mass with German preaching was performed in between (8:00 or 8:30 a.m.).193 In subsequent years, a few parishes that had provided only irregular German services tended to move toward providing a German service everyPage 73 → Sunday, but otherwise, changes in the linguistic division of worship services were minimal over the next decade and well into the twentieth century.194 The introduction of regular German services, even if driven by genuine local pastoral needs, inevitably raised thorny issues of equity. Holding one service for 10 or 20 percent of the parish and only two services for the other 80 or 90 percent, especially given the crowded conditions of the industrial region, could be seen as an implicit favoring of the German community or even an incitement to Polish-speaking parishioners to attend the presumably less crowded German services. It was extremely difficult, however, to find an alternative to the twofor-one balance of Polish and German services. Instituting a third (or even fourth) Polish service ran up against not only the time constraints faced by all of the priests of the industrial area but also the ecclesiastical rule that prevented any single priest from celebrating more than one mass in a given day without a special dispensation from the bishop (facultas binandi). This prerogative was granted fairly routinely to the pastors and curates of Upper Silesia’s largest parishes, but even with the granting of binandi, priests were often performing the maximum number of masses allowable.195 Another practice used in some parishes with only two services and a small but significant German population was alternating one service between German and Polish, but this state of affairs generated discontent on both sides. As Father Kubis in Zalenze wearily reported to Bishop Kopp, the alternation between languages at the 7:00 a.m. service had promoted a disturbing habit among many parishioners of going to the service regularly but leaving early on those Sundays when the sermon was not in their favored language. Worse yet, he reported, “the people have gotten so used to leaving before the sermon that ‘sermon truancy’ has now become the fashion even on the other Sundays, when the preaching is in their own language.”196 A final trend in worship practices that was often incorporated into controversies about germanization was the movement to “re-latinize” the mass. The primary agents of this move were the St. Cecilia associations (Cäcilienvereine), groups of Catholic laypeople organized throughoutPage 74 → Germany in the late 1860s to rehabilitate the Latin liturgy and “traditional” Catholic German singing and to combat the perceived Josephinist and Protestant tendencies of early nineteenth-century liturgical innovations.197 One of the central goals of many Cäcilienverein supporters was the elimination of vernacular singing during the actual liturgy of the high mass; as one priest put it, “once the priest at the altar starts singing [i.e., the Latin liturgy], then the choir can no longer sing in the vernacular.”198 This agenda apparently resulted in a noticeable curtailment of Polish vernacular singing in many parishes. One reader informed Katolik in 1890 that all singing in his parish had been switched from Polish to Latin, a step that provoked much “cursing and muttering” in the church and, in a striking assertion of linkage between the religious and the political, allegedly led to a drop in local turnout for that year’s Reichstag elections.199 Katolik orchestrated a concerted resistance to the trend toward latinization, appealing to readers to report any changes in the use of Polish church songs, whether it involved a switch to German or to Latin.200 In making the case for the preservation of Polish singing during the mass, Napieralski noted that this was a longstanding practice in many regions, and he even delved into arcane definitional debates about the latest liturgical rulings of the Vatican.201 But the central argument about the unique efficacy of the mother tongue remained the same. When songs are sung in Latin, Katolik asserted, quoting the Posen-based Kuryer Poznański, “only the lips are praising God, not the heart, because it does not understand what it sings.”202 The conflation of latinization and germanization made sense to contemporary Polish activists as well as later Polish historians; both of these developments, after all, tended to crowd out the use of Polish.203 But this thinking baffled the clerical champions of Latin. Many, like Father PaulPage 75 → Krutschek, had made their original case precisely against the use of German vernacular singing.204 Only in later years did the impact of the trend on Polish

song start to dominate debate on the issue. One Upper Silesian priest argued that the Vatican would surely make an exception to its liturgical decrees “if it knew the special circumstances in the Polish areas of Upper Silesia,” in which “the Polish people have no opportunity to use their mother tongue publicly, other than in the church.” Krutschek was taken aback by the implication that his position was anti-Polish, since “it concerns a general church ordinance, which affects the Germans to the same degree.”205 The dispute served as another example of the fine line separating the cool impartiality on national issues so valued by the clergy from the cold indifference to national concerns so abhorred by Polish activists. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a kind of civil war raged within the Catholic milieu of Upper Silesia, affecting every aspect of public life, from party politics to religious worship. It was a conflict that intimately involved questions of language and nationality, but it was in no way simply a struggle of “Germans” against “Poles.” Rather, the cleavage ran between the majority of the clergy, who believed that the Catholic cause demanded the clear subordination of national loyalties to the interests of the church, and the Polish-national press, who believed that the Catholic cause intrinsically involved an active defense of Polish nationality in Upper Silesia. As we have seen, the “nationalization” of the Catholic cause in Upper Silesia meant, to a considerable degree, simply its “popularization.” Indeed, the agenda of the Polish newspapers on such issues as the platform of the Center party, the use of the press, the respective roles of clergy and laity, or the legitimacy of labor activism was largely indistinguishable from the agenda of Napieralski’s allies within the Rhenish wing of German Catholicism. Like the “populist” or “democratic” wing of the Center party elsewhere, the Katolik camp enjoyed considerable success in utilizing the new tools of mass politics and mass organization to set up a viable alternative to Social Democratic forms of political participation and associational activity. Page 76 → But Napieralski and the other Polish editors were not just interested in securing a sphere of lay social and political activism within the Catholic milieu. Their aim was ensuring that “the people” in question defined themselves as a specifically Polish people, committed to the cultivation of the Polish language and respectful of Polish history and customs. Given the hostile climate created by state-led germanization efforts, shaping Upper Silesians’ everyday linguistic behavior and cultural identification in this direction demanded not just the acquiescence but the active support of the local clergy on the cultural front. Here, the efforts of the Katolik camp were far less successful. Attempts to use parish workers organizations and youth groups as the building blocks of a nationally conscious Polish Catholic movement were firmly opposed by the church hierarchy, a stalemate that, in the case of the youth associations, led to a complete, albeit temporary, collapse of the parish network. While the majority of worship services and classes on confession and communion continued to be conducted in Polish well into the twentieth century, most priests had made it clear that they would not go out of their way to fight germanizing trends in the culture at large. At the dawn of the new century, the conviction was growing among more radical Polish nationalists, as well as among state-backed German nationalists, that there was only one solution to the clergy’s equivocation on nationality issues: the creation of political options and organizational networks that bypassed Upper Silesia’s Catholic milieu altogether. 1. Quoted in Ilse Schwidetzky, Die Polnische Wahlbewegung in Oberschlesien (Breslau: Osteuropa Institut, 1934), 42. 2. Jerzy Pabisz, “Wyniki wyborów do Parlamentu Związku Pólnocnoniemieckiego i Parlamentu Rzeszy Niemieckiej na terenie Śląska w latach 1867–1918,” Studia i Materiały z Dziejów Śląska 7 (1966): 385–433. 3. Otto von Bismarck, Gesammelte Werken (Berlin: Otto Stolberg, 1929), 11:242. Original Polish text of “Jezus, Maria, Józef! Ratujcie nas z ręki nieprzyjaciół, bo zginiemy” Katolik, no. 5 (1872), in Karol Miarka, Wybór Pism, ed. Adam Bar (Katowice: Instytut Śląski, 1939), 133. 4. Mieczysław Pater, Polskie postawy narodowe na Śląsku w XIX wieku (Wroc l aw: Uniwersytet Wroc l awski, 1993), part 2 (1871–90), 32–56. 5. Margaret L. Anderson, “Voter Junker, Landrat, Priest: The Old Authorities and the New Franchise in Imperial Germany,” American Historical Review 98, no. 5 (December 1993), 1448–74.

6. Pater, Polskie, 49. 7. M. Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 370. 8. Bogdan Snoch, ed., Górnośląski leksykon biograficzny (Katowice, Muzeum śląskie, 1997), 152. 9. “Kogoż odbierać?” Katolik, nos. 31–36 (1873), printed in Miarka, 67–171. 10. See the biography of Kamiński in Pater, Słownik, 161–64. 11. Detlev Puls, Rochaden zwischen Unterwerfung und Widerstand: Oberschlesische Bergarbeiter 1871–1914 (Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 1994), 16. 12. A detailed account of the strike can be found in ibid, 13–22. 13. Pater, Polskie, 61–62; Puls, 246–47; Stanislaw Michalkiewicz, ed., Historia Śląska, vol. 3, part 1 (Wroc l aw: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1985), 476–78. 14. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 93. 15. Pater, Polskie, 76–83. 16. Jan Kapica, Mowy—Odezwy—Kazania, ed. Emil Szramek (Katowice: Kółko Homiletyczne Kaplanów Diecezji Katowickiej, 1933), 189. 17. Trzeciakowski, Kulturkampf, 82–83. 18. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 14, 23. 19. Calculated from “Das 50 jährige Bestehen des Archipresbyterats Myslowitz: Ein Gedenkblatt von Erzpriester Joseph Kubis in Zalenze” (ca. October 1918), Convents-Berichte Myslowitz (1915–21), AAK; and Franciszek Maroń, “Dzieje i ustrój biskupstwa wroc l awskiego w ostatnim ćwierćwieczu przed oddzieleniem obszaru obecnej diecezji katowickiej (szkic),” Studia Śląskie Historyczne-Teologiczne 9 (1978):166–67. 20. Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Rout-ledge, 1989), 193–226. 21. Michalski to Kopp, 21 October 1892, AL Lipine, vol. 1, AAK. 22. Pastoral letter of 18 January 1891, in Georg Kardinal Kopp, Hirtenbriefe (Berlin: R. Nischkowsky), 5–6. 23. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between industrialization and popular piety in Upper Silesia, see James E. Bjork, “Industrial Piety: The Puzzling Resilience of Religious Practice in Upper Silesia,” in Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Transcendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland, ed. Michael Geyer and Lucian Hölscher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 144–76. 24. Bogutschütz, 6 October 1891 and 17 October 1892, AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 25. Lipine, 21 October 1895, AV Myslowitz, vol. 6, AAK. 26. Figures derived from “ Kirchliche Haltung ” section of visitation reports: AV Myslowitz, vols. 5–6, AAK; as well as Schematismus des Bisthums Breslau und seines Delegatur-Bezirks (Breslau: Fürstbischöfliche Geheime Kanzlei, 1891). 27. AV Myslowitz, vols. 5–6, AAK. 28. Lukaszczyk to Kopp, 16 January 1894, Besetzungs-Acta Schwientochlowitz, AAK. 29. Klaszka to Kopp, 25 April 1891, AL Birkenthal, AAK. 30. Winkler to Kopp, 11 March 1904, AL Dzietzkowitz, 1838–1919; Globisch to Kopp, 21 October 1903, AL Kattowitz, Peter and Paul, vol. 1, AAK. On similar attendance patterns in Britain, see Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2000), 156–61. 31. The pastor of Zalenze, for example, noted in 1912 that “participation at the evening services is so strong that the very roomy church is completely overflowing” (AV Myslowitz, vol. 10, AAK). While communion rates were fairly meticulously calculated, there seems to have been no systematic effort to measure church attendance. The closest that I have seen was an estimate of 35–40 percent in the deanery of Nicolai (adjacent to the deanery of Myslowitz). Here, as in other cases, the priest reporting this estimate blamed Sunday truancy on parishioners’ difficulties in attending mass at particular times. See Franciszek Maroń, “Tematy górnolśląkich konwentów dekanalynych w latach między Kulturkampfem a pierwszą wojną światową,” Śląskie Studia Historyczno-Teologiczne 10 (1975): 201–59 (estimate from 232–33). 32. On Kopp, see Aschoff. 33. Parishes already established in 1890 were Bogutschütz, Chorzow, Dzietzkowitz, Kattowitz (St. Mary), Königshütte (St. Barbara and St. Hedwig), Lipine, Myslowitz, and Rosdzin. The new parishes and the dates

of their establishment were Schwientochlowitz, 1894; Domb, 1895; Zalenze, 1896; Birkenthal, 1903; Bismarckshütte, 1903; Kattowitz (SS. Peter and Paul), 1910; Janow, 1912; Eichenau, 1912; and Königshütte (St. Josef), 1912. See Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 10–15; Josef Kubis, “Das 50 jährige,” Convents-Berichte, AAK. 34. Franz Wosnitza, Ludwig Skowronek (1859–1934),” in Schlesische Priesterbilder, ed. Joseph Gottschalk (Aalen, Württemberg: Verlag Dr. Konrad Theiss, 1967); Janusz Wyciso, “Rozwój sieci parafialnej ‘wielki Katowic w kontekście dziejów parafii w Bogucicach,” in Parafia Bogucicka: Tradycja i Współczesność, ed. Wojciech Świątkiewicz and Janusz Wycisło (Katowice: Instytut Górnośląski, 1994), 24–56. 35. Recke-Volmerstein (Voritzende of Representen-Collegium, Georg von Giesche’s Erben) to Skowronek, 24 February 1896, AL Zalenze, vol. 1, AAK. 36. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 16–17. 37. Skowronek to Kopp, 12 October 1899; Königliche Regierung, Abtheilung für Kirche u. Schulwesen, to Kirchenvorstand, 12 May 1899, AL Zalenze, vol. 1, AAK. 38. Skowronek to Kopp, 15 April 1896, AL Zalenze, vol. 1, AAK. 39. Skowronek to Kopp, 16 June 1898, AL Zalenze, vol. 1, AAK. 40. Skowronek to Kopp, 16 November 1896; report, copy of Kirchenvorstand, 19 December 1897; Regierungspräsident Oppeln to Kopp, 27 May 1898, AL Zalenze, vol. 1, AAK. 41. Recke-Volmerstein to Kopp, 22 March 1900; Bergwerksdirektor Besser to Recke-Volmerstein, 13 December 1899, AL Zalenze, vol. 1, AAK. 42. Hermann Voltz, ed., Handbuch des Oberschlesischen Industriebezirk (Kattowitz: Oberschlesischen Berg- und Hüttenmännischen Verein, 1913), 216. See also Pawel Rybicki, “Rozwój ludnoòci Górnego Śląska od początku XIX do pierwszej wojny światowej,” in Górny Śląsk: Prace i Materia l y Geograficzne, ed. Antoni Wrzosk (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1955), 249–303. 43. Michalkiewicz, part 2, 26. See also Schofer, 35–37. 44. A detailed breakdown of the origins of immigrants to the industrial region is extremely difficult, since migration was only calculated for larger administrative units, such as the province and district (Regierungsbezirk). 45. Quote from Mieczys l aw Pater, Centrum a Ruch Polski na Górnym Śląsku (1879–1893) (Opole: Wydawnictwo Śląsk, 1971), 129. 46. Commissarius Marx to Kopp, VIII.I.24.a.21, AAW. 47. Preussische Statistik 121, no. 2 (1893): 342. 48. Pastor Josef Zientek to Kopp, 10 December 1898, VIII.I.24.a.21, AAW, citing a 6 December 1898 Gazeta Katolicka article on Napieralski’s observations. 49. Zdzisław Surman, “Księża utrakwiści na Śląsku w drugiej połowie XIX w.,” in Ludzie Śląskiego Koòcioła Katholickiego(Wrocław: Uniwersytet Wrocławski, 1992), 73. 50. Stanisław Stephan, Der Beuthener Prozeß im Lichte der Wahrheit (Königshütte: Hyacinth Druckerei, 1904), 251. 51. Emil Szramek, “ Śląsk jako Problem Socjologiczny,” Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk na Śląsku 4 (1934): 77. 52. Many of those who were not utraquists were employed in education rather than in pastoral posts (Surman, 70). 53. Surman, 70. 54. Calculated from Schematismus des Bisthums Breslau und seines Delegatur-Bezirks for the years 1891, 1895, and 1896. 55. Surman, 71. See also Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 31–32. 56. Robert Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 239–40. 57. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 33–37; Surman, 72–73. 58. Letter from J. Jarczyk to Franciszek Szymiczek, cited in the latter’s Stowarzyszenia akademickie polskiej młodzieży górnoŚląskiej we Wrocławiu, 1863–1918 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Zakładu narodowego im. Ossolińskich, 1963), 93. 59. Den Oberschlesiern zur Aufklärung, 5. 60. Letter from parishioner in Pogrzebin to Gazeta Katolicka, 23 April 1907, 3.

61. Emil Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander Skowroński, obraz życia i pracy na tle problematyki kresów zachodnich,” Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk na Śląsku 5 (1936): 13. 62. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 22–23; Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 37. 63. Konviktsdirektor Herbig to Kopp; Canonius and Alumnats-Lehrer Flassig to Kopp, 17 January 1898, VIII.I.24.a.20, AAW. 64. Szymiczek, 89; see 58–93 for the full history of these student organizations. 65. Quoted in Marek Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 1861–1928, Biografia Polityczna (Wrocław: Prace Wrocławskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, 1974), 61. 66. See Schwidetzky; Sigmund Karski, Albert (Wojciech) Korfanty: Eine Biographie (Dülmen: Laumann Verlag, 1990). 67. Maria Wanda Wanatowicz has estimated that several thousand petty bourgeois and about two hundred members of the intelligentsia immigrated to Upper Silesia from the Posen and West Prussia before the First World War, most after 1900 (Społeczenstwo polskie wobec Górnego Śląsku (1795–1914) [Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski, 1992], 74). 68. Pater, Centrum, 74–78; Schwidetzky, 33–34. 69. Cited in Pater, Centrum, 80–81. 70. Joachim Glensk, J. K. Maćkowski jako redaktor “Nowin Raciborskich” (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1966); “Nowiny Raciborskie” w latach 1889–1904 (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Śląsk, 1970). 71. Pater, Centrum, 138–54. 72. Ibid., 168–82; Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 26–27. 73. During the first half of the 1890s, the circulation of Katolik rose from nine thousand to nineteen thousand; neither Nowiny Raciborskie nor Gazeta Opolska ever topped a circulation of five thousand in this period. See Bernhard Gröschel, Die Presse Oberschlesiens von den Anfängen bis zum Jahre 1945: Dokumention und Strukturbeschreibung (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1993), 143–45. For comparison, in the mid-1890s, the circulation of the entire Polish press in Galicia, with several times the Polish-speaking population of Silesia, was, according to Stanisaw Stojałowski, under twenty-five thousand (Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 106–7). 74. Pater, Centrum, 144; Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 68. 75. Quoted in Wanatowicz, Społeczenstwo, 77. 76. Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 17. 77. Circular issued by Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Rampolla in 1887, quoted in Salo Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 98–99. 78. “Z Czech,” Katolik, 7 February 1893, 2 79. Katolik, 5 January 1893, 1; “Duchowiestwo górnoszląskie,” Katolik, 2 February 1893, 1. 80. On Vatican politics surrounding the army bill, see Christoph Weber, Quellen und Studien zur Kurie und zur vatikanischen Politik unter Leo XIII (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1973), 515–38. 81. On the broader crisis within the Center party following the dismissal of Bismarck, the death of longtime party leader Windthorst, the repeal of anti-Socialist legislation, and the slow lifting of Kulturkampf measures directed at the church, see John K. Zeender, The German Center Party, 1890–1906 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976), 19–35. 82. “Radźmy o sobie,” Katolik, 13 May 1893, 1. 83. Of the eleven Upper Silesian districts held by the Center party, seven featured contests between rival Center party candidacies. The remaining four contests were also largely dominated by the army bill issue, with some conservative-leaning Catholics backing Conservative or Free Conservative candidates against populist Centrists. Compare Pabisz, 294–95, 354–77; Pater, Centrum, 204–7. 84. Comparison made by Gazeta Opolska editor Maćkowski, who also characterized Szmula as “not a Pole in flesh and bone.” Cited in Emil Szramek, “ Ś.P. Adam Napieralski,” Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk na Śląsku 2 (1930): 305–6n. 85. See the account of a speech by Szmula in Katolik, 12 January 1893, 1; Pater, Centrum, 104, 114–15. 86. In the Oppeln constituency, the candidacy of Father Wolny was backed by the Polish press, the local clergy, and the semiofficial organ of the Silesian Center party, the Schlesische Volkszeitung. His opponent, Count Karl von Huene, though a leader of the parliamentary Center party, was forced to rely on the support of traditionally anti-Center, German national sympathizers (Pater, Centrum, 212). In the districts of Cosel-

Groß Strehlitz and Tost-Gleiwitz, most priests were also reported to be campaigning in favor of the populist candidate (Katolik, 1 June 1893, 1; 10 June 1893, 2). 87. On Letocha, see Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 28–29 n. 21; Pater, Centrum, 102–4. 88. The meeting of the local electoral committee was effectively stacked against Szmula when the local German-language press advertised it and Katolik did not (Pater, Centrum, 207–8). 89. Pater, Centrum, 208–9. 90. Ibid., 291–93 (citing letter of Felix Porsch to Kopp, 30 September 1893). 91. Katolik, 1, 3, and 6 June 1893. 92. Letocha to Bończyk, 25 January 1893, printed in Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander.” 29–31. 93. Katolik, 30 May 1893, 1. 94. Quoted in Katolik, 8 June 1893, 1. 95. Pater, Słownik, 186. 96. The “scoundrel” quote is from Katolik, 1 June 1893, 1. On Michalski’s reputation as preacher, see Knosalla, 472; Kubis, “Das 50 jährige,” Convents-Berichte, AAK. His support for Polish-language church songs is evident from repeated references in AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 97. See Pater, S l ownik, 42–44. Interestingly, Michalski, with a rather similar combination of views, has been labeled a “germanizer” (Pater, Polskie, 120–21). 98. Pater, Centrum, 115–16, based on a disapproving report in the Posen newspaper Dziennik Poznański. 99. “Duchowieństwo górnoszląskie,” Katolik, 2 February 1893, 1. 100. Katolik, 6 June 1893, 1; 8 June 1893, 1. 101. Adam Napieralski, Der “Katolik” und das schlesische Centrum von 1889 bis 1903 (Beuthen: Verlag des “Katolik,” 1903), 16. 102. Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 55–71; Schwidetzky, 40–44. 103. Pater, Centrum, 217–18; Szramek, “Ks. Wiktor Loss,” Roczniki Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk na Śląsku 4 (1934): 241–48. 104. Og l oszenia kościelne, 22 December 1895, APB; complaints about fund-raising tactics in Katolik, 4 April 1896, supplement, 1. 105. Pater, Centrum, 220. 106. Circulation figures from Gröschel, 143–45. 107. Kopp to editors of Katolik, 10 April 1896, in Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” appendix 4, 184. 108. Katolik, 24 April 1896, 2. 109. Kopp to editors of Katolik, 1 August 1896, in Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” appendix 4, 184–85. 110. Editors of Katolik to Kopp, 1 October 1896, in Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” appendix 4, 186–90. 111. Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 65–67. 112. Napieralski, 17–18. 113. Quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 74–75. 114. Franciszek Hawranek, Polska i Niemiecka Socjaldemokracja na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1890–1914 (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1977), 43–138. 115. An eight-page bilingual socialist flier from the 1898 elections focused squarely on such economic grievances as high taxes and low wages but also pledged to fight germanization as effectively as the Katolik camp (Syg219, Zespó l RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO). 116. Pabisz, 296–97; Schwidetzky, 44–45; election returns by locality in Katolik, 18 June 1898, 3. 117. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 67–68. 118. The socialist vote in Upper Silesia in 1898 far outpaced the development of socialist organizations. Membership in socialist unions was only a tenth of the size of the Social Democratic vote (Hawranek, Polska, 57, 150). Readership of the socialist press was also far below what one might have expected: Gazeta Robotnicza’s total circulation was only about fifteen hundred throughout the 1890s (ibid., 49, 205). Voting socialist does not seem to have corresponded with any slackening in Catholic religious practice. In the parish of Lipine, for example, overwhelmingly Catholic and with a near-universal level of observance of Easter communion, almost half of the ballots cast in 1898 were for the SPD (Katolik, 18 June 1898, 3; AV Myslowitz, vol. 7, AAK). 119. Katolik, 19 March 1903, 1. 120. Quotes from translation of Rerum Novarum in Jan Goldstein and John W. Boyer, eds., Nineteenth-

Century Europe: Liberalism and Its Critics, vol. 8 of University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 392, 396. 121. Figures from Michalkiewicz, part 1, 426–40. See also Crago, 74–75. 122. Speil to Landrat Kattowitz, 12 June 1883, Syg303, Zespó l LA Kattowitz, APK. While the police report from the summer of 1883 recorded 150 members, a report from a year later listed just 19 (Amtsvorsteher Domb to Landrat Kattowitz, 21 August 1884, Syg303, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK). 123. In 1888, the new organization’s membership was a still modest three hundred (Michalkiewicz, part 1, 457). 124. Puls, 7. For accounts of the 1889 strike, see Puls, 1–11; Michalkiewicz, part 1, 455–56 125. “Związek Wzaj. Pomocy Chreściańskich robotników górnoŚląskich: jego powstanie, rozwój i czynności z pierwszych 10 lat (1889–1899)” (Bytom: Drukarnia Katolik, 1899), 3–4. 126. Ibid., 4–5. 127. Wilfried Loth, Katholiken im Kaiserreich: Der politische Katholizismus in der Krise des wilhelmischen Deutschlands, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien 75 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1984), 86–89. 128. Napieralski, 14–15. 129. Circular, Kopp to Erzpriester, August 10, 1890, VIII.I.24.a.19, AAW. 130. Estimate compiled from cross-referencing figures given in Nachweisungen in Syg299, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK, and Syg48, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO. I have counted only Arbeitervereine under clerical leadership. 131. Bilingual copy of Statuten (21 June 1896) in Syg304, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK. 132. Amtsvorsteher Michalkowitz to Landratsamt Kattowitz, 4 December 1897, Syg299, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK. 133. Schmidt was rebuked by Kopp, but he apparently continued to plan such events (Kopp to Schmidt, 8 August 1890; Regierungspräsident Oppeln to Kopp, 9 March 1891, VIII.I.24.a.21, AAW). 134. Königshütte (Barbara), 8 November 1892 and 8 November 1894; Lipine, 8 October 1894; Rosdzin, 8 November 1894; Chorzow, 17 October 1895; Bogutschutz, 15 October 1896, AV Myslowitz, vols. 5–6, AAK. 135. Praca, 23 January 1894, in Gesamtüberblick über die Polnische Presse/Tagesliteratur, 23. See also Praca, 13 February 1894 and 13 November 1894, in Gesamtüberblick, 60, 526. 136. Praca, 8 January 1895, in Gesamtüberblick, 22. 137. Praca, 14 December 1897, in Gesamtüberblick, 12. 138. “Związek,” 17–19. 139 Ibid., 11. 140. Hawranek, Polska, 47, 150. 141. The idea that Catholic workers should belong to parish groups to pursue “purely religious” ends and to the ZWP to pursue socioeconomic interests was suggested by Napieralski himself (Napieralski, 23–24), and there is some evidence that workers thought in similar terms. In his memoirs, the miner Leon Łukasczyk describes working simultaneously to found a local chapter of the later Polish miners’ union and to convince a reluctant priest to found a Polish-oriented parish club for young miners: see Pamiętniki górników , ed. Bronisław Gołę biowski (Katowice, 1973), 48–49. 142. Śląska Modzież Katolicka: Historja Organizacji Polskiej Młodzieży Katolickiej na Śląsku od roku 1871 do 1926, (Mikołów: Drukarnia Karola Miarka, 1927), 21. 143. Age given in Statuten of Aloysius Verein in Zalenze; Vorsitzender Paul Nieroba to Amtsvorsteher, 22 January 1895, Syg311, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK. In Michalkowitz, the St. Alojzy association was designated the workers association for unmarried men and the St. Josef association was designated the married men’s workers association (Syg299, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK). 144. Königshütte (Barbara), 8 November 1892, AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 145. Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 6–8. 146. Śląska Modzież, 22. 147. The Alojzy group in Zalenze was a good example of the “two faces” of such youth groups. Though founded by a layman in 1895 (later than most groups), it was initially supported by the local clergy. The next year, however, it reportedly came under the influence of “Great Polish agitators” from Kattowitz (Syg311, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK). 148. Nachweisungen in Syg299, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK; AV Myslowitz, vols. 6–7, AAK; Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 173–74.

149. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 172–76. 150. Examples include citations of a speech by Felix Porsch (Katolik, 14 March 1893, 1) and citation of an article from Niederrheinische Valkszeitung (Katolik, 18 June 1895, 1). 151. See Bogedain’s biography in Pater, Słownik, 38–40. 152. Rose, 69–72; Michalkiewicz, part 1, 257–60, 466–68. 153. Pamiętniki Opolan, ed. Ryszard Hajduk (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1954), 71–72. 154. A miner born in 1887 recalled being beaten by his teacher for not responding to a question in German. When his father came to the school to protest, the head teacher, “a Silesian and a very just person,” came to the rescue, calmly instructing the child to read from Katolik to demonstrate his literacy in Polish and then returning to the classroom to berate the other teacher for drunkenness and brutality (Pamiętniki górników , 38). 155. Michalkiewicz, part 1, 468–69. 156. Ibid., 469–75. 157. This provision played a decisive role in the industrial region, where the German-speaking proportion of the population was steadily mounting. In 1896, for example, the cities of Bismarckshütte and Königshütte were announced to be sufficiently “German” to justify the complete exclusion of Polish from religious instruction in local schools. See Katolik, 10 November 1896, in Gesamtüberblick, 560. 158. Michalkiewicz, part 1, 494. 159. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 175–77. 160. Königshütte (St. Hedwig), 13 November 1894; Lipine, 8 October 1894, AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 161. Chorzow, 6 November 1894; Myslowitz, 9 November 1891; and Dzietzkowitz, 22 September 1892, AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 162. Myslowitz, 25 October 1892; Rosdzin, 24 Oktober 1892, AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 163. See, for example, Kattowitz, 14 October 1892, AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK. 164. Dziennik Śląski noted with disapproval that 389 of the 447 local teachers belonging to the organization were Catholic (1 June 1899, in Gesamtüberblick, 383). 165. Membership in the Beuthen chapter of the Catholic association (it is unclear if this encompassed the entire industrial region) reached 109 in 1900 and grew to 215 by 1906 (Festschrift zur XI. HauptVersammlung des Vereins kathol. Lehrer Schlesiens in Beuthen OS [Beuthen: Verlag des kathol. Lehrervereins, 1906], 52–79). 166. Jerzy Myszor estimates that school visitation in Upper Silesia took place anywhere from twice a week to once a month (Duszpasterstwo, 91). Visitation was certainly less frequent in the oversized parishes of the industrial region than in smaller rural parishes. 167. Domkapitular Marx to Kopp, 18 July 1893, VIII.I.A.24.a.17, AAW. 168. Oberpräsident v. Hatzfeldt to minister of education, 19 March 1896, VIII.I.A.24.a.17, AAW. 169. Oberpräsident to Kopp, 18 May 1900, VIII.I.A.24.a.17, AAW. 170. First confession and communion had traditionally (but informally) been linked to leaving school, taking place at the age of thirteen or fourteen. In the early twentieth century, the age was lowered to nine or ten. See Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 77–78, 90–91. 171. “Rodzice polscy,” Katolik, 5 October 1892, 1. 172. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 90–91, 97–98. 173. Circular to Erzpriester, 6 August 1890, VIII.I.24.a.21, AAW. 174. An example is the more rural deanery of Pless (Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 97). 175. This assumption is based on the lack of a language breakdown in figures for first communions /confessions, which was provided for every other parish in the deanery (AV Myslowitz, vol. 5, AAK). 176. In the county of Kattowitz, an 1884 survey initiated by the Oppeln district president found that of the forty-four primary schools with predominantly Polish-speaking schools (out of forty-nine total), twenty-five already had German-language sections of confession instruction (Pater, Centrum, 39). 177. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 98; Pater, Centrum, 40. 178. Parish announcements of Rosdzin, 25 October 1896, quoted in Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 97–98. 179. Richard Rassek, Warum erteilt ein Teil der Clerus Religionsunterricht auf Deutsch? (Gleiwitz: Neumanns, 1902), 4–8. 180. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 84.

181. Stephan, 213. 182. “W sprawie nauki przygotowawczej do Spowiezi i Komunii św.,” Katolik, 9 November 1912, 1. 183. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 93. 184. “Rodzice polcsy,” Katolik, 5 October 1892, 1. 185. Katolik, 21 April 1896, 2–3. 186. Goniec Wielkopolski, 13 April 1899, in Gesamtüberblick, 260. 187. “Betrifft die moralische Unterstützung des ‘Tygodnik Katolicki,’” Tygodnik Katolicki, 21 September 1913, in Polnische Zeitungs-Rundschau, Syg128, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 188. “Pfarrer Kapitza in Verteidigung seiner selbst,” Kuryer Poznański, 2 July 1912, in Gesamtüberblick, 624–25. 189. Sygnatura Genuszettel der Lehrer, Organisten im Archipresbyterat Myslowitz, AAK. 190. Katolik, 6 February 1896, 3. 191. Stephan, 249. 192. I was unable to find the full text of this circular in the Archdiocesan Archive in Wroc l aw, so I have relied on Pater’s summary in Centrum, 128–29. 193. In the Myslowitz deanery circa 1891, this was the schedule in Lipine, Kattowitz, Königshüte (Barbara), Königshütte (Hedwig), and Myslowitz. In Bogutschütz and Rosdzin, with only two services, one service alternated between German and Polish (with German at least once a month and on holidays). This latter pattern was also followed in the parishes of Domb and Schwientochlowitz, which were founded during the 1890s. Dzietzkowitz and Chorzow had only Polish services. See AV Myslowitz, vols. 5–6, AAK. 194. In a survey of forty-four parishes of the industrial region, conducted in 1904 by Father Stephan, no pastor reported any replacement of Polish services by German services, but the survey did not ask about cases where a German service was simply added to the schedule of services (Stephan, 214–15). 195. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 52. 196. Kubis to Kopp, 22 December 1904, AL Zalenze, vol. 2, AAK. 197. “Einheit in Liturgie und Disciplin für das katholische Deutschland!” Schlesische Pastoralblatt, 15 January 1892, 10–11; “Zum 25 Jährigen Bestehen des Breslauer Diöcesan-Cäcilien-Vereins,” Schlesische Pastoralblatt, 1 October 1893, 151–52. 198. Paul Krutschek, “Der Volksgesang im einfachen Hochamte,” Schlesische Pastoral-blatt, 15 January 1907, 13–14. 199. “ Śpiew polski w kościele,” Katolik, 11 April 1890, 3. The correspondent wrote back a couple months later to report that Polish singing had been restored (Katolik, 3 June 1890, 1). 200. Katolik, 5 January 1893, 1. 201. See Katolik, 27 June 1896, 1, where Polish songs are said to be in use “since time immemorial.” 202. Katolik, 12 January 1893, 1. 203. Mieczysław Pater wrote, for example, “[I]t was correctly concluded that Latin song is simply a pretext and means of introducing German song” (Polskie, 141). 204. Father Krutschek’s initial polemic on the issue was “Der deutsche Volksgesang beim Amte,” Schlesische Pastoralblatt, 1 June 1896, 118–19. 205. T. in R., “Der Volksgesang beim Hochamt,” Schlesische Pastoralblatt, 15 February 1907, 34; Paul Krutschek, “Zur Entgegung des Artikels ‘Der Volksgesang beim Hochamt,” Schlesische Pastoralblatt, 15 April 1907, 73–74.

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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 confident 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 firebrand 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 Page 78 →Kattowitz-Zabrze. By the next election, in 1907, the bulk of Upper Silesia’s Catholic electorate was voting for the Polish party, while a significant minority of Germanspeaking 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 firmly 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 fight 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 redefine the foundational political and social realities of Upper Silesia, transforming the region from a predictable Centrist/Catholic bastion into a battleground between competing nationalisms. Page 79 →

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 century. Until the 1890s, the Polish party, the Koło Polskie (literally, “Polish Circle”), had presided over one of the most stable and clearly delineated voting constituencies in the Prussian/German political system.2 Indeed, the Koło Polskie was designed not so much as a typical political party but, rather, as “a kind of surrogate government” representing the interests of the distinct Polish society of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia, a society defined by overlapping divisions of language, confession, and historical allegiance.3 As representatives of an ostensibly unitary Polish national interest, the Polish parliamentary delegations observed a strict rule of unanimity in their voting behavior and often abstained from votes altogether if the matter was deemed an internal affair of the German nation. The imperative of national solidarity had tended to reinforce social deference in the largely agrarian and socially stratified society of Posen and West Prussia, particularly since the aristocracy (szlachta) was widely acknowledged as the carrier of Poland’s national tradition. Of the sixteen Polish members of the Reichstag in 1890, twelve were owners of large estates (three of whom enjoyed the rank of prince), giving the Koło Polskie an even more socially exclusive profile than the German Conservative party.4 Over the next decade, however, as the Posen aristocracy moved toward a policy of reconciliation with the new Caprivi government, criticism of the nobility’s stewardship over the national cause grew louder. The first round of this challenge was spearheaded in 1893 by Roman Szymański, editor of the populist, burgher-oriented newspaper Orędownik (Ther Advocate). Szymanski’s bid to replace some incumbent representatives with candidates who were more populist, bourgeois, and oppositional closelyPage 80 → paralleled the simultaneous campaign being waged by his friend and ally Adam Napieralski against the aristocratic leaders of the Silesian Center party. But due to the more traditional and agrarian social structure of the Posen region, as well as the more intensive party discipline of the Koło Polskie, Szymański’s insurgency initially proved much less successful in displacing the entrenched Polish party leadership than Napieralski’s in shaking up the leadership of the Silesian Center party.5 Several years later, a more systematic and ideologically radical movement did succeed in reshaping the world of Prussian Polish politics. The agents of this transformation were the National Democrats, often known as the “Endeks,” after the first initials in the name Narodowa Demokracja. The founders and leading theorists of National Democracy—Roman Dmowski, Zygmunt Balicki, and Jan Popławski—were all young universityeducated nationalists from the Congress Kingdom, and the Russian partition of Poland constituted their frame of reference and primary sphere of activity. In its impact, however, National Democracy was truly a pan-Polish movement, recruiting activists and eventually voters from every corner of the Polish lands and profoundly shaping how a new generation came to understand the Polish cause. The centerpiece of National Democratic ideology was a sweeping critique of the szlachta -led Polish patriotism of the nineteenth century. Since the partitions, Polish national activity had spanned a wide range of strategies, oscillating from the armed insurrectionary tradition of 1831 and 1863 to the more recent emphasis on conciliationist politics and gradualist educational and organizational “organic work.” The founders of National Democracy, however, indicted both traditions as symptomatic of a flawed and dated relationship between Poland’s gentry leadership and the national cause.6 As Roman Dmowski argued in his influential Thoughts of a Modern Pole (1903), the old Polish patriotism was essentially a backward-looking reaction to the demise of the Polish Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century. Subsequent acts of resistance by the Polish gentry represented “more a negation of foreign rule than a positive form of attachment to one’s own country or nation,” a caste-based sentiment inextricably linked to “the longing of the magnate for his old privileges.”7 ThePage 81 → Polish aristocracy’s meager sense of national solidarity was also evident in its historic reliance on assistance from foreign powers and on the economic support of non-Polish elements (especially Jews) at home.8 The net result of this legacy, Dmowski concluded, was that Poland had become a “feminine nation,” characterized by “a passive, soft type of individual character.”9 Transforming the szlachta’s decadent, anachronistic patriotism into a robust, modern patriotism required the

forging of a “new, active type of Pole” drawn from “fresh layers” of society that had “hitherto remained in the background” of national life. This enthusiasm for mass political participation meant that Dmowski, particularly early in his career, had some favorable words to say for the Polish socialist movement, since it spurred the development of the working class, a “national force of the first order.”10 Socialism, however, was ultimately an unhelpful and even dangerous current due to its “cosmopolitan” tendencies and reliance “to a significant degree on foreign Jewish elements.”11 Dmowski saw a more promising model of the “new Pole” among the small farmers, townspeople, and workers of Prussian Poland. Faced with relentless German economic competition and political oppression, Polish society in Posen and West Prussia was forced into an “everyday struggle with the enemy.” This struggle against germanization produced in the Prussian Poles a “dry realism, a hardness, even a certain degree of ruthlessness in their understanding of the affairs of life” that often struck the more genteel gentry of Galicia or the Congress Kingdom as itself a sign of the Poseners’ incipient germanization. For Dmowski, however, the “German” characteristics of Prussian Poles were actually a sign of a more mature and modern Polish national consciousness.12 This redefinition of what constituted genuine service to the nation proved highly appealing to a generation of Polish university students in Germany. All of the characteristics that had placed them at the margins of a more traditional understanding of Polish society—their lack of szlachta lineages; their secular, German-language educations; their location at the western borderlands of the old Polish Commonwealth—were now recastPage 82 → as assets enabling them to serve as the vanguard of Polish national revival. It was unsurpising, then, that when the National Democratic leaders began to recruit Prussian Polish students into the movement’s various organizations in 1898 and 1899, they won a talented cohort of activists who would go on to transform the face of the Koło Polskie over the next decade. Following a breakthrough victory in a Reichstag by-election for the city of Posen in 1901, the National Democrats rallied Szymański and his populist forces to their side. This militant national bloc went on to claim a majority of the Kolo Polskie Reichstag delegation after the general election of 1903, pushing the party to take a more oppositional stance toward the German state and gradually replacing the delegation’s great magnates with middle-class professionals.13 Against the backdrop of these profound changes in the meaning of the Polish party and the meaning of “Polishness” itself, the first full-blown Polish nationalist movement made a successful debut in Upper Silesia, a region previously deemed outside the legitimate boundaries of the Polish political community. A crucial step in the National Democrats’ “awakening” campaign in Upper Silesia was the recruitment of an educated elite that was both militantly Polish nationalist in its sentiments and convincingly “from the people”—that is, of local Upper Silesian origin and from an artisanal, proletarian, or small-farmer background. Given the link between education and germanization, this was no easy matter. Adam Napieralski complained that “one needs to travel around our counties with a lantern to find educated men who identify with Polish nationality, and with two lanterns in the midday sun to find any who would openly declare themselves Poles.”14 There were, to be sure, a few priests (mostly younger curates) who had proved willing to break ranks with their colleagues and superiors in the recurrent struggles between the clergy and the Katolik editors, and these “priest-patriots” would provide an important and oft-cited set of role models for the next generation of Polish activists. But even the most fervently Polish-patriotic priests remained subject to numerous constraints—pressure from ecclesiastical superiors or from government or aristocratic patrons, as well as their own lingering loyalties to the “cause”Page 83 → of the Center party—that made them unlikely leaders of a radical movement. So the vanguard of National Democracy in Upper Silesia, as in other regions, consisted largely of locally born university students. The premier recruiting vehicle into the movement was the Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (Union of Polish Youth), known as Zet. Originally founded at the University of Warsaw in 1887 as a catchall organization of Polish university students, including many socialists, Zet was recast in 1898 as a more explicitly National Democratic organization. At the same time, the geographical focus of its activities shifted westward to the Polish student concentrations in Berlin, Breslau, and Leipzig. Whereas an earlier generation of Polish-oriented student groups in Breslau had operated primarily among the theology faculty or in the seminary itself, Zet’s membership was drawn largely from the lay faculties. This was, it should be stressed, still a minuscule recruiting pool at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1900, Orędownik estimated that there were only seven Upper Silesian

students with Polish sympathies enrolled in the lay faculties of the University of Breslau. Most of these came from poor families and could count on little financial support from home, particularly since they had chosen to flout the “mother-ideal” of becoming a priest.15 For these men, Zet and the National Democratic movement provided both an alternative ideological home and a crucial alternative source of financial patronage. The cohort of Upper Silesians recruited into Zet between 1898 and 1900, often through personal contacts with Dmowski and Balicki, produced a number of national activists who would go on to play leading roles in Upper Silesian (and Polish) public life. But one student, Wojciech Korfanty, would soon overshadow all the rest. Born in 1873 in the small mining community of Sadzawka (near the heavy industrial center of Siemianowitz/Laurahütte), Korfanty was the son of a coal-mining pit foreman and subject to a characteristic mix of germanizing and polonizing influences during his early life. His earliest Polish biographers wrote of the “Polish spirit” that prevailed in Wojciech’s home, noting his mother’s practice of reading to him from the seventeenth-century Lives of the Saints (Żywoty świętych).16 This polonophone piety was, however, apparently detached from any sense of Polish patriotism; indeed, his uncle reportedly was fond of wearing the medals he received fighting in the Prussian armyPage 84 → during the Franco-Prussian War. While in primary school, young Wojciech was singled out as a promising student, and Father Viktor Schmidt (Kattowitz) offered to pay for his studies at the royal Gymnasium in Kattowitz. In providing financial sponsorship, Father Schmidt almost certainly envisioned Korfanty pursuing a career in the priesthood, the traditional path of social advancement for a poor Catholic boy from a Polish-speaking miner’s family.17 But according to Korfanty’s own later reminiscences, the relentless hostility registered by his Gymnasium teachers toward Polish language, literature, and culture—a contempt that he felt directed at his and his classmates’ own Slavic-inflected accents—inspired in him a defiant interest in all things Polish.18 Meeting with a small circle of like-minded students, Korfanty used a German–Polish dictionary to work his way through the classics of Polish Romanticism. His national enthusiasm was further nurtured by contact with the vocally pro-Polish curate Aleksander Skowroński, who was himself a native of Laurahütte and served in the nearby parish of Königshütte during the early 1890s. Korfanty was also involved in the St. Alojzy youth group (in the particularly vibrant Siemianowitz chapter, run by Father Jan Kapica) and took part in several excursions to Polish-national sites, such as Cracow and Częstochowa. Korfanty was neither discreet in pursuing these Polish national activities nor repentant when confronted with charges of “Polish agitation” by school officials. Only months before he was to take his final examinations, he was expelled, a move that further deepened his hostility to the German establishment. Over the next five years (1895–1900), he attended university classes in Berlin and Breslau; traveled extensively as the tutor of a young Polish count; and, during one summer vacation, even briefly returned to the Upper Silesian industrial region to work as a coal miner. While in Berlin, Korfanty flirted with the Polish-oriented socialism of Gazeta Robotnicza, but upon moving to Breslau in 1898, he joined Zet and committed himself definitively into the camp of National Democracy. This choice was, it seems, driven by Korfanty’s distaste for the socialists’ internationalism and secularism, combined with a more calculating realization that the embryonic National Democratic movement offered greater leadership opportunities—hence more scope for his personal ambition—than the already well-established Social Democratic party.19 Page 85 → The prospects for a radical alternative politics in Upper Silesia seemed brighter at the turn of the century than ever before. The gains registered by the Social Democrats in the 1898 Reichstag elections suggested that a large number of Upper Silesian workers and miners were now dissatisfied with the hegemony of the Center Party and unconvinced by Napieralski’s cautious efforts to polonize and popularize the Center in Upper Silesia. Polish publicists in all three partitions, even such erstwhile allies of Napieralski as Szymański, were coming to agree that the time had come for bolder Polish national agitation in the region, and the Polish press outside Silesia became a forum for critiques of Katolik’s cautious leadership of the national cause. In a typical letter, an Upper Silesian correspondent lamented that the local press (the Katolik press was clearly implied) was “neither warm nor cold” and that somehow it ended up counseling readers “to wait, always just to wait.”20 Emboldened by such signs of impatience, and with the support of his National Democratic colleagues throughout all three Polish partitions, Korfanty assumed the role of spearheading an anti-Center, anti- Katolik, nonsocialist Polish nationalist party in

Upper Silesia. National Democracy’s appropriately dramatic public debut in Upper Silesia came on January 13, 1901, during a meeting in Beuthen of the leaders of Upper Silesia’s Polish associations. The meeting was to have been a show of strength for Napieralski’s carefully built organizational network, but Korfanty seized the occasion to issue his own secessionist call to arms. He offered a motion of no confidence in Upper Silesia’s Center party representatives, in the process attacking the Center party organ Germania as anti-Polish and the tactics of the local, Katolik -affiliated Polish leadership as timid and ineffective. The speech drew loud applause mixed with cries of “Down with the Center” from the audience, a response only partially attributable to the presence of other National Democratic sympathizers who had traveled to the meeting with Korfanty.21 It was a remarkable show of support for a hitherto little-known student activist and a sign of the popular potential for a more militant Polish nationalism. Such meetinghouse speeches as the one in Beuthen helped to publicize the National Democratic message in the ranks of Polish Catholic activists, as well as to capitalize on Korfanty’s personal charisma, but a broader political mobilization depended on mounting a challenge to Napieralski’s effective control of Upper Silesia’s Polishlanguage print media. During thePage 86 → first year of the nationalist offensive, Korfanty relied on newspapers with National Democratic affiliation published outside the region— Dziennik Berliński (The Berlin Daily) and the Posen-based Praca (Work)—to propagate his message. Because the Upper Silesian readership of those newspapers was limited, Korfanty and Marian Seyda, editor of Dziennik Berliński, also published a trio of pamphlets whose titles alone suggest the major themes of the National Democratic campaign: Down with the Center and Attention! The Price of Bread Is Rising! by Korfanty and One Nation—One Thought by Seyda.22 These widely disseminated pamphlets prepared the ground for the establishment of a new daily newspaper, Górnoślązak (The Upper Silesian), published for a few months in Posen but produced locally in Kattowitz after March 1902. Górnoślązak quickly emerged as the flagship of a significant new political movement, the first serious rival to the Katolik press’s dominance of the Polish-language public sphere. By early 1903, Górnoślązak’s circulation of 11,500 had surpassed the readership of the Katolik -affiliated Dziennik Śląski and made the National Democratic organ the most widely read daily in much of the industrial region.23 The popularity of a pan-Polish nationalist movement in Upper Silesia confounded many contemporary observers, including Napieralski, who had imagined that promotion of the agrarian, Posen-based Koło Polskie would fly in the face of Upper Silesians’ regional particularism and more industrial profile. German officials, Center party politicians, and even some of the more conservative leaders of the Koło Polskie expressed outrage at what they saw as the imposition of a Posen model of politics on Upper Silesia.24 Such an interpretation, however, obscures the success of Korfanty and his colleagues in rhetorically reinventing the Polish party as an indigenous political movement. As the editors of Górnoślązak argued in one of the newspaper’s earliest issues, Upper Silesians should not imagine they were latecomers to a well-defined Polish national community, sincePage 87 → “modern nations, modern nationalities, are, after all, products of the most recent times.”25 There was no need, therefore, to treat Upper Silesia’s workers and small farmers like Poles in training, in need of additional “awakening” to achieve full national maturity. “In a linguistic sense,” Korfanty wrote in Praca in 1901, “Upper Silesia is just as good a part of Poland as the Duchy of Cracow or Posen. And maybe it even has a better right to the name of Poland than some other Polish provinces.”26 This strong under-current of regionalist pride, which sometimes spilled over into sneering references to the immigrant status of the editors of Katolik and Gazeta Opolska, led Napieralski to lament that the National Democrats were able to proclaim their “pan-Polonism” while at the same time indulging in Upper Silesian “parochialism.”27 The distinctively local perspective of Upper Silesia’s pan-Polish activists was also evident in the close association they drew between the Polish national cause and the economic concerns of industrial workers. These issues figured prominently in the pamphlet Down with the Center, which critiqued at length the failures of the Center’s Reichstag representatives to address such working-class concerns as improving social insurance benefits, establishing industrial adjudication courts, and achieving a more equitable tax structure.28 Górnoślązak, in a similar vein, warned Center party leaders that they could no longer “serve two masters, both rich and poor, both employers and workers.”29 A decade earlier, Adam Napieralski had highlighted similar economic grievances in his promotion of a “people’s Center” that would unite Catholic workers and peasants from the Ruhr to Upper

Silesia against the party’s aristocratic Old Guard. The National Democrats, however, flatly rejected Napieralski’s cultivation of western German Catholic allies, citing the popular saying that “as long as the world is the world, a German will never be a brother to a Pole” and warning that “searching for help among foreigners” had always proved the downfall of old-style Polish patriots.30 Even if the Center had been a “general-human” party during the Kulturkampf, in subsequent decades it hadPage 88 → become more and more “Prussian,” a “government party,” and now it was incontrovertibly “a party of German interests, different from our own.”31 In making this point, National Democratic publicists gave heavy exposure to the figure of Franz Count von Ballestrem. One of the largest employers in the industrial region, a senior statesman of the Center party, and president of the Reichstag from 1898 to 1906, Ballestrem embodied the haughty, aristocratic antithesis of the “people’s Center.”32 As long as the leaders of the Silesian Center leadership insisted on running Ballestrem as a candidate in the industrial region, Korfanty and other activists had the relatively easy task of persuading coal miners and factory workers that “Count Ballestrem can not be the defender of you or your brothers.”33 But if Korfanty and his National Democratic allies were happy to make an unambiguous break with Upper Silesia’s Catholic aristocracy, their relationship to Upper Silesia’s Catholic clergy was far more ambivalent. Their criticism of the clergy’s “germanizing” efforts was, to be sure, pressed more boldly and defiantly than the Katolik press had ever dared to do. Indeed, some early National Democratic rhetoric was reminiscent of the rhetoric of German Kulturkämpfer of the 1870s. Consider this excerpt from an article entitled “Ultramontanism” printed in Dziennik Berliński in 1901: Ultramontanism is a political international movement, which, exactly like socialism, does not recognize nationality in any way. . . . Ultra-montanism, like Jesuitism, strives to use the powers of all nations to achieve a political omnipotence for the papacy. . . . The German priests, who explain at every turn that it does not matter whether someone confesses in Polish or German, whether he hears a sermon in Polish or German, whether he lets his children be baptized in Polish or German, does not do these things to expand the power of the German Empire, but, rather to strengthen the power of Ultramontanism, which finds it easier to rule us if we are united, speak a single language, have given up our nationality and our particularities, which stand in direct opposition to Ultramontanism.34 Page 89 → It was not surprising that such rhetoric led many priests to view the Endeks as simply and incontroveribly anticlerical, a threat comparable to the outright secessionism of the “Los von Rom” (Free from Rome) movement in the Habsburg Monarchy or the Polish National Catholic church in the United States. But the locally published Górnoślązak never produced rhetoric quite as shrill as that of Dziennik Berliński. While keeping up a drumbeat of complaints about germanization by local priests, the daily also indulged in extravagant demonstrations of loyalty to the Roman Catholic church as whole.35 Indeed, the socialist press complained that Korfanty and his colleagues were “more Catholic than the pope.”36 The somewhat more devout tone of Upper Silesian National Democracy was, at least in part, a reflection of personal piety; Korfanty remained a regular churchgoer, unlike the leading Endek ideologist in Russian Poland, Roman Dmowski.37 But it likely also reflected lingering respect for the legacy of the Kulturkampf, when the whiff of apostasy translated into a social and political death sentence. In the end, Korfanty, not unlike Napieralski, continued to hope for the national conversion, rather than the national damnation, of the bulk of Upper Silesia’s parish clergy.

The New Germans The shift toward greater national militancy in the late nineteenth century was hardly peculiar to the Polish movement. This was also a time when an emerging network of mass German nationalist organizations successfully lobbied Berlin to adopt more aggressive policies overseas and in Germany’s Slavic borderlands.38 The most important such group for German-Polish relations was the Eastern Marches Society (Ostmarkenverein), founded in 1894 by a number of German landowners and state officials who were outraged by the modest

linguistic and economic concessions thatPage 90 → the Caprivi government had made to the Poles in exchange for the Polish party’s support on military and tariff legislation. The names of the three original leaders of the group—Ferdinand von Hansemann, Hermann Kennemann, and Heinrich von Tiedemann—were soon abbreviated by Polish commentators into the pejorative term “H-K-T Society” or simply “Hakata,” eventually leading to the routine designation of members of the group and those alleged to share its ideology as “Hakatists.”39 The agenda of the Eastern Marches Society focused on the promotion of “Germandom” and the combating of “Great Polonism” in two key spheres: landownership and language use. The first of these policies centered on expanding the activities of the Royal Colonization Commission, a fund originally set up at Bismarck’s instigation in 1886 to purchase financially tenuous estates from Polish aristocrats in Posen and West Prussia and parcel them among German peasant settlers. The policy proved a spectacular failure in practice. By guaranteeing a government buyer for any estate, the commission helped to drive up land prices in the East, encouraging more and more German (rather than Polish) landlords to pull up stakes and sell their properties. In the meantime, most Polish landlords who sold their land spurned the Colonization Commission and did business with independent Polish parcelization societies set up to counter the government program. Despite this dismal record, the Conservative and National Liberal majorities in the Prussian legislature continued to pour money into colonization schemes and, in an effort to block Polish counter-strategies, made ever more blatantly discriminatory distinctions between German and Polish landowners.40 This escalating campaign to “germanize” the East through the physical transfer of territory from Polish to German owners was paralleled by mounting restrictions on the use of the Polish language in the public sphere. These ranged from the germanization of place-names to demands that letters addressed in Polish not be delivered by the post office.41 But the premier site of struggle over language usage was, as always, the school system, especially religious education. During the tentative rapprochementPage 91 → between the German government and the Polish party in the early 1890s, there had been a modest reversal of the almost complete elimination of the classroom use of Polish that had begun during the Kulturkampf and continued during the 1880s. In predominantly Polish schools in the province of Posen, where religious instruction in Polish had survived, teachers were now allowed to teach Polish privately and even to use school classrooms to do so. Even this limited concession, which never extended to the provinces of West Prussia or Silesia, came under the fire of the Eastern Marches Society and like-minded government officials in the late 1890s. With the sanction of the minister of religion and education, Konrad Studt, local school inspectors began switching the language of religious instruction in many schools from Polish to German, a process that provoked dramatic popular resistance in 1901. Encouraged by the local priest, children in the middle and upper classes of the local school in the town Wreschen refused to read out of German catechism books or answer questions from their teachers in German. Local officials acted swiftly and harshly, reportedly beating some children for their recalcitrance and placing a number of the children’s parents on trial. The “Wreschen incident” won the Prussian government instant notoriety throughout Europe, and although resistance in the town died down by the following year, the government’s continued policy of slowly introducing German-language religious instruction led to a far more widespread and systematic school strike in the province of Posen by 1906. At the height of the strike, some seventy thousand schoolchildren, including about half of all of the Polish pupils in the province of Posen, were participating in the boycott of German religious instruction. Only after months of legal repression and the consistent refusal of officials to graduate participating students did the protest slowly come to an end the following year.42 These protracted, parallel confrontations over land and language decisively shaped how contemporaries and historians came to understand the German-Polish nationality conflict: as a war of attrition between two disciplined and well-defined ethnonational communities, a struggle in which German victory could only be achieved through territorial conquest rather than cultural assimilation. Even the prominence of the issue of language in the schools, which might ordinarily be interpreted as an expression of faith in the assimilability of the Polish population, became, in the actual rhetoric of the Eastern Marches Society and many Prussian/German authorities,Page 92 → an expression of political mastery by ethnic Germans rather than an attempt at linguistic integration of ethnic Poles. It is useful to keep in mind this sketch of Germany’s overall Polish policy during the first years of the twentieth

century in order to appreciate the crucial differences between this classic model of germanization in “historic Poland” and the specific character of germanization in Silesia. The rough socioeconomic symmetry that marked German-Polish competition in Posen and West Prussia stood in sharp contrast to the nationally lopsided socioeconomic profile of Upper Silesia. There was no need here for a Colonization Society to “struggle for the land”: Silesia’s great landlords were already overwhelmingly German (in cultural orientation, if not descent), and the region’s Polish-speaking peasantry, pulled toward adjacent opportunities in industrial labor, was not achieving landownership at anywhere near the rate of the peasants of Posen.43 The H-K-T Society’s secondary obsession, countering the growth of the Polish burgher class, could be translated somewhat more easily to the industrial region of Upper Silesia, which did contain an increasing number of Polish shopkeepers, artisans, and free professionals. But this embryonic Polish middle class, consisting mostly of immigrants from Posen and West Prussia, was concentrated in a few sectors and never approached the mass scale of the growth of the Polish middle classes in the province of Posen.44 As an almost exclusively “plebeian” population of workers and small farmers, Upper Silesia’s Polish-speaking inhabitants were viewed very differently than the Polish speakers of Posen and West Prussia. The divide between Polish-speaking Upper Silesians and “real” Poles was articulated by German officials and publicists in a number of ways, most commonly in the sharp delineation drawn between Upper Silesian dialect, or Wasserpolnisch, and standard literary Polish, or Hochpolnisch. The former, according to an account in the nationalist Schlesische Zeitung, was riddled with Germanisms and “rude expressions” that separated it from the “grace, dignity, courtesy, kindness, [and] decency” of standard Polish and made it unusable as a “language of culture.”45 German sources also sometimes referred to physiological differences that supposedly separated Upper Silesians, with their partial German ancestry and “strong, stocky stature and dark pigmentation,”Page 93 → from the “slimmer and fairer Poles.”46 As derogatory toward Upper Silesians as these characterizations sound, the purpose of German rhetoric distinguishing Upper Silesians from “real” Poles was not to cast the former group as racially inferior but, rather, to cast them as nationally indeterminate, raw human material susceptible to German cultural influence and even biological assimilation in a way that the Poles of Posen and West Prussia were not. This sense of confidence in the integrative power of German culture led to germanization assuming a rather different face in Upper Silesia than in other parts of the Prussian East around the turn of the century. Alongside the familiar punitive germanization of police surveillance, Eastern Marches Society rallies, and mandatory German instruction in the schools, state officials in the district of Oppeln sponsored a wide array of programs designed to engage the Polish-speaking population voluntarily in German-language activities—in short, one might say, to make germanization “fun.” The mastermind of this “cultivation of cultural welfare” (kulturelle Wohlfahrtspflege) was Rudolf Küster, who served from 1896 as director of the division of religion and education in the district of Oppeln. Küster’s strategy, firmly backed by district president Ernst Holtz (in office from 1900 to 1908), aimed at a more aggressive and comprehensive inculcation of German language and culture in Upper Silesia’s youth. Of particular concern was the period between children’s completion of primary school (generally around age fourteen) and their entry into military service or marriage, during which they faced the possibility of a “rapid regression . . . to the level of an exclusively Polish colloquial language [Umgangssprache].”47 The state, Küster made clear, could not rely on the Catholic church to exert a systematically germanizing influence during this period, since the local clergy, although “considerably more friendly to the Prussian state and to Germanness than the local clergy in Posen and West Prussia,” were also of a “contingent and changeable character” and prone to “half measures” when it came to national work. The best that could be hoped for from most parish priests was a “benevolent neutrality” as the state took the lead in systematic germanization efforts.48 The most predictable means of enhancing the nationalizing work ofPage 94 → the schools was extending the time children spent in the educational system. During the early twentieth century, systematic efforts were made both to expand the number of state-run preschools in the region and to develop continuing education programs for children who were not going on to the Gymnasium. By the First World War, thousands of girls were enrolled in schools of home economics and thousands of boys in various schools for continuing education and vocational training—all, of course, exclusively German-language schools.49 But the measures that Küster and his colleagues envisioned as truly reaching the hearts and minds of young Upper Silesians were organized outside of the formal

school system and involved various forms of recreation or entertainment. The program geared toward the youngest audience was the Upper Silesian Games Federation (Oberschlesischer Spielverband), designed to engage both male and female primary school students in extracurricular sporting activity. Beginning at the turn of the century, several thousand schoolteachers went through a special course to train them as leaders of Spielvereine (game societies), in which “the language of play [was to be] German under all circumstances and without exception.” Through this structured and supervised play, “the children of Polish-speaking parents,” particularly girls and the children of miners, were “to learn to use German colloquial speech without coercion and to adopt the self-control of German discipline.” Swimming and ice-skating were soon incorporated into the associations’ repertoire of seasonal activities. By 1909, 215 individual Spielvereine counted a total of twelve thousand members.50 Another initiative for which Küster took personal credit was the campaign to saturate the district of Oppeln with German popular libraries in order to counter the Polish popular libraries that had been formed around the region over previous decades.51 The first German popular library was founded in Kattowitz in 1897, and within the next decade, some 111 full libraries and 568 stopping points for mobile libraries were operating around the district, drawing their funding from a combination of district and municipal government coffers, heavy industry, and German nationalist associations.Page 95 → The libraries were carefully designed to encourage residents from Polish-speaking families to develop their German reading abilities. Some two-thirds of all the reading material provided was described as “leisure reading,” much of it featuring “colorful pictures,” and all party polemical or explicitly confessional material was to be strictly avoided. By cultivating a comfortable environment and eschewing any charge for their services, the libraries were to offer an attractive alternative to pubs.52 According to the libraries’ own figures, these efforts met with considerable success: by the First World War, the libraries served some ninety-three thousand readers, over half of them from Polish-speaking households.53 Veterans associations (Kriegervereine), which recruited men who had completed their military service, served as another crucial venue for promoting German-patriotic forms of sociability. By 1912, the veterans groups enrolled an impressive 82,388 members in the district of Oppeln, or one out of every five men of voting age.54 This scale of membership—far outstripping that of any other organization in the region—strongly suggests heavy participation by Polish-speaking Upper Silesians. Indeed, the Polish press frequently lamented that meetings of veterans associations were often “full of Polish people” and that “thousands of Poles are members of the veterans associations.”55 The growing involvement of ordinary Upper Silesians—overwhelmingly Catholic and predominantly Polishspeaking—in this array of German-national activities presented the local Catholic clergy with a dilemma. These programs were not only lay-led and outside of clerical supervision but also (unlike Upper Silesia’s budding Polish nationalist organizations) overtly interconfessional, giving credence to the oft-repeated saying that germanization equaled protestantization. Catholic priests also feared that youth participation in games, sporting events, and gymnastics could crowd out attendance at religious services on Sundays and that German popular libraries and entertainment evenings could expose the faithful to morallyPage 96 → questionable material.56 But while most Catholic clerics maintained a cool distance toward the German-national associational network, the high premium that the clergy placed on monarchical loyalism and their pragmatic interest in avoiding the wrath of state officials and industrial employers prevented most priests from taking the firm stand against German-national Vereine and Verbände that they did against Polish-national towarzystwa and związki. A few priests, such as Father Zientek in Rosdzin, even delivered lectures at meetings of local veterans associations, provoking criticism not only from Górnoślązak but (more mildly) from the Centrist daily Oberschlesische Volksstimme.57 Indeed, the Centeroriented press was deeply divided on the issue of whether German-national organizations—or which Germannational organizations—were compatible with fidelity to the Catholic milieu. Both the Oberschlesische Volksstimme and Gazeta Katolicka periodically criticized German veterans associations as biased against Catholics, but the former accepted ads for the equally German-patriotic gymnastics associations.58 A new German-language Catholic newspaper, the Oberschlesische Zeitung (published in Beuthen from 1904), went so far as to publish an advertisement for the Eastern Marches Society, which Gazeta Katolicka quickly condemned “as incompatible with a Catholic spirit and as un-Centrist.”59 Although this last example seems to have been a

rather rare breach of the Catholic/Center taboo against endorsement of the most strident German nationalist groups, the boundary separating the world of mainstream German “patriotic” organizations, on the one hand, from Upper Silesia’s parish-based Catholic milieu, on the other, was clearly permeable.60 Page 97 → The success of German nationalist groups in attracting Catholic Upper Silesians from Polish-speaking homes became the subject of frequent jeremiads in both the Katolik and Górnoślązak press. Sometimes the newspapers’ critiques were aimed at the heavy-handed role played by local officials, particularly in smaller villages, in orchestrating participation in germanizing events. One article complained, “[T]he gendarme and the police official, these are inseparable guests of the Vereine in the village.”61 More often, though, the Polish press placed the blame for germanization squarely on the fickleness and gullibility of the local population, particularly young people drawn to the entertainment and material advantages offered by German organizations. “The people flock to the German festivals like flies to honey,” lamented Katolik about festivities held by a local veterans association in honor of the Kaiser’s birthday. Many young men, the editors continued, returned from their military service proclaiming that they “had enough of German education” but then went on to “renounce the Polish language and gather under the broad wings of Germania.” Another article from the same day warned mothers not to allow their children to participate in “parents evenings,” since these not only were occasions for germanization but also led to “vanity” and “pleasure seeking” among their children.62 Women were also the targeted audience for an article in Górnoślązak that warned “not to permit your husbands or brothers to belong to Kriegervereine. ” If they were attracted to such organizations merely by the promise of burial insurance for members, then they should have their husbands join a parish rosary group instead: “There he will pay smaller contributions and have greater benefits while placing neither his faith nor his nationality in danger.”63 Neither the satisfaction of German officials nor the alarm of Polish journalists meant, of course, that popular involvement in German patriotic organizations and events necessarily produced a dramatic germanizing effect on the participants. Some economically dependent, working-class Upper Silesians no doubt enrolled in these government-sponsored programs under pressure, experiencing this “voluntary” germanization as little different from the mandatory germanization of the school system or the workplace. But the scolding tone employed by many Polish journalists and priests in calling on their own constituents to avoid German organizationsPage 98 → suggests that for many Upper Silesians, especially the young, the face of germanization was seductive as well as coercive. In most of the Prussian East, German language and culture was deployed as a marker of dominance by a clearly delineated national/confessional community, but in the district of Oppeln, “Germanness” was made available, albeit in highly controlled and patriarchal venues, as a means for local Polish-speaking Catholics to seek social advancement, short-term financial advantage, and novel—even transgressive—forms of amusement. Like the explicitly Polish-national associational network that was also coalescing in the first decade of the twentieth century, this constellation of German-national organizations and activities nurtured an alternative communal elite (in this case, above all, local schoolteachers) and offered an alternative social milieu outside of and in tension with—but not necessarily completely divorced from or incompatible with—the clerically supervised Catholic milieu.

The Reichstag Election of 1903 If the development of rival nationalist associational networks was an incremental and often messy process (engaging working-class Upper Silesians opportunistically in this or that German- or Polish-language activity), electoral politics seemed to provide a more decisive means of establishing clearly delineated national allegiances in the region. The watershed event in this bid to nationalize Upper Silesian politics was the campaign for the Reichstag election of June 1903. It began as an extraordinarily complex competition between various ideological actors—the “German Center,” the “Polish Center,” the Polish National Democrats, the Polish socialists, the German socialists, and a German nationalist camp that included every shading of conservative and liberal opinion—but culminated in a singular dramatic victory for the standard-bearer of the Polish national movement, Wojciech Korfanty.

It was already clear by the autumn of 1902 that the debut of the National Democrats had thrown Upper Silesia’s political landscape into turmoil. The “Down with the Center” slogan had struck a vein of discontent among the industrial region’s Catholic electorate, the readership of Górnoślązak was growing rapidly, and a veritable cult of personality was forming around Korfanty himself. The German authorities had greatly contributed to this last phenomenon by sentencing the young editor toPage 99 → four months in prison (February–May 1902) for the inflammatory anti-German content of some of his Górnoślązak articles. By the time Korfanty emerged from jail, he had been the subject of sympathetic editorializing not only in Górnoślązak but also in the socialist Gazeta Robotnicza, which expressed the hope that he might now join the Polish socialist party.64 For many Upper Silesian workers, Korfanty held the promise of a tireless populist tribune who would—in the words of a selfdescribed “Lover of the Fatherland” from Szoppinitz, writing to Górnoślązak —go to Berlin and “assail our enemies with stinging words for the wrongs that have been done to us.”65 The aura of celebrity surrounding the charismatic activist even fueled the development of a small industry in Korfanty-related products: Korfanty postcards, Korfanty cigarettes (“with an aromatic Russian mixture”), Korfanty sausage, Korfanty liqueur.66 As useful as Korfanty’s popularity was in generating enthusiasm for the Polish national movement, his militancy proved awkward to many of his colleagues interested in negotiating as broad a national front as possible. In November 1902, Upper Silesia’s National Democrats had formed the Polish Electoral Association in order to move forward with the project of electing avowedly Polish national delegates to the Reichstag, but most of the leadership, as well as many sympathizers outside the region, still hoped to bring Adam Napieralski and his press empire on board to maximize the impact of the campaign.67 Napieralski, however, continued to defend his allegiance to the Center party. Most Upper Silesians, he insisted, simply were not ready to support an openly national political platform: “[I]f Górnoślązak thinks [that they are], it is a delusion, and in politics, deception of one’s self and others is the greatest sin.”68 Perhaps a few nationalist candidates could emerge victorious in the next round of elections, but only because “the Center candidate is bad or unfit, would vote for taxes, [or] adheres to the aristocracy” or “due to many other things that have nothing to do with the national cause.”69 Rather than precipitate a dubious nationalist showdown, Napieralski counseled a continued, gradual polonization and popularization of the Upper Silesian Center party. The centerpiecePage 100 → of this strategy was the candidacy for the Reichstag of Teofil Królik, a senior miner closely affiliated with the ZWP and the Katolik camp, who was to demonstrate that the Center was as open to working-class candidates in Upper Silesia as it was in the Ruhr.70 In early February, Napieralski floated the plan of running Królik as the Center candidate for KattowitzZabrze—directly against Korfanty—and Father Jan Kapica, a highly regarded abstinence crusader and a gifted orator, in Beuthen-Tarnowitz, Upper Silesia’s other highly industrialized electoral district.71 It seemed an ideal Polish, Catholic, and populist lineup of candidates, but Napieralski’s carefully orchestrated plan ran up against the both the opposition of many German Catholics and the relentless criticism of the National Democratic press. The leadership of the Silesian Center party insisted that the longtime representative of Kattowitz-Zabrze, Paul Letocha, remain as the Center’s candidate for that district, bumping Królik to the district of Beuthen-Tarnowitz. Napieralski could not object too strongly against this move, since he had always praised Letocha as a vigorous defender of Polish rights. But he considered it an obvious tactical mistake to run the elderly civil servant directly against the Endek firebrand.72 More galling in Napieralski’s view was the leadership’s insistence on running Count Ballestrem in the neighboring, semi-industrial district of Gleiwitz-Lublinitz. Górnoślązak had a field day reminding voters of the count’s remark to a colleague that “the Upper Silesian Poles need a good punch in the mouth.”73 Napieralski flatly refused to endorse Ballestrem’s candidacy, particularly since the count was also being run as a countercandidate against Major Szmula in the Oppeln electoral district.74 Even the Silesian Center party’s official endorsement of Królik for the district of Beuthen-Tarnowitz was marred by the launching of another German nationalist countercandidacy against him, a move that the Oberschlesische Volksstimme condemned as a symptom of “hatred of Poles” but that won disturbingly widespread support among the district’s German Catholic middle classes.75 While the Silesian Center leadership and local German Catholics werePage 101 → undercutting Napieralski’s strategy from one side, Korfanty and his Górnoślązak colleagues undermined it from the other. Górnoślązak dismissed Królik as a passive stooge of Napieralski and a Prussian loyalist who would sit in the Reichstag “like a head of cabbage in a field of potatoes,” prompting Katolik to respond that Królik was at least a genuine worker,

who had labored in the mines for thirty years, unlike Korfanty, who had worked as a miner for six weeks, “because he wanted to write about it.”76 Perhaps more surprising than these polemical swipes at Królik were the criticisms that greeted the floating of the Reichstag candidacy of Father Jan Kapica, who had led the St. Alojzy parish youth group in which Korfanty had so enthusiastically participated as a teenager. An editorial in a National Democratic newspaper in Posen, while acknowledging Kapica as “a good Pole,” strongly implied that he had sold out to Bishop Kopp and the German government in order to win the comfortable pastorate of Tichau.77 The National Democratic press in Upper Silesia was less circumspect, suggesting that “generally speaking, Kapica is certainly not a Pole.”78 Within a few weeks, presumably taken aback by the reactions to his potential candidacy, Kapica declined any nomination to run for a Reichstag seat, prompting Katolik to remark that even “the most stubborn German newspaper could not have behaved worse toward him” than had the Polish press.79 The sparring between Katolik and Górnoślązak over Father Kapica pointed to the central role that defense and criticism of the Upper Silesian clergy would play in the electoral fate of the Center party. Indeed, in the final months of the 1903 election campaign, the most high-profile struggle waged by the National Democrats was not against the German government, the Social Democrats, or even Katolik but against Upper Silesia’s bilingual “priest-germanizers.” In the run-up to the election, Górnoślązak became a kind of open microphone for all manner of complaints about priests, including topics that were previously considered beyond the pale ofPage 102 → respectable Catholic journalism. In an article entitled “Priest-Germanizer,” for example, Górnoślązak condemned Father Skowronek for founding a German-language library in the parish of Bogutschütz. The editors then launched into a wide-ranging attack on the clergy of the industrial region, who were accused of building “wonderful palaces” for themselves and spending the “fabulous incomes” that they raised from poor Polish parishioners on the work of germanization.80 The original report turned out to be erroneous—the new parish library actually included both Polish and German books and had been set up as a direct response to the Eastern Marches Society’s founding of a German-only library in Bogutschütz. 81 But the article’s other, ostensibly secondary points about the clergy’s wealth, social distance from workers, and control of church funds could not have been lost on readers. The radical Polish press took particular delight in mocking the clergy’s educational pretensions and noting the deficiencies of many priests’ spoken Polish. The slightest hint of a germanism or improper pronunciation by priests during homilies or parish announcements elicited rebukes on the pages of Górnoślązak. 82 Korfanty remarked of Father Skowronek, who preached and published prolifically in Polish, that it was a pity he “did not devote even one year” of his fifteen years of education “to the study of the Polish language.”83 Such vigilance about linguistic purity was part of a broader campaign to stigmatize any mixing of German and Polish—a phenomenon that Polish activists admitted was widespread among local property owners, merchants, artisans, and even workers—as a shameful “muddle” that qualified as “neither Polish nor German.”84 The National Democrats also made liberal use of generational and gendered language to contrast the doddering, scolding leadership of the clergy with their own youthful virility. Eagerly appropriating a metaphor first used in Gazeta Katolicka, the editors of Górnoślązak regularly referred to thatPage 103 → clerical newspaper as the “respectable lady” (poważna dama) who had to endure the taunts of the “rude boys” of the radical Polish press.85 In an attempt to revitalize the “respectable lady”—which, Górnoślązak mischievously noted, had been “suffering from consumption for some time”—as well as to shore up the embattled Center party, the region’s leading pastors called on the talents of Father Stanislaw Stephan, who soon gained a reputation as “the brains of the Centrist Upper Silesian clergy.”86 Stephan was born in the province of Posen but came from the same bilingual, middleclass background as many Upper Silesian priests and attended a Gymnasium in Breslau. Only thirty-six years old in 1903, Stephan had already shown great academic ability (attaining two doctorates by the age of twenty-five) as well as wide-ranging public activism. He had been transferred out of the first parish where he had worked as a curate, for his overvigorous promotion of the Polish language. During his next tenure as a curate, in Berlin, he ran as a Center candidate in a Reichstag by-election against a Social Democrat and a Polish National Democrat. In April 1903, Father Josef Kubis of Zalenze, who was the same age as Stephan and had worked with him while they were both curates in Oppeln, persuaded Bishop Kopp to recruit Father Stephan as the new editor of the struggling Gazeta Katolicka and as an all-around troubleshooter for the clergy’s agitation on behalf of the Center.87 A fund-

raising letter for Gazeta Katolicka, signed by most of the parish pastors in the industrial region, called on all of the priests of the region to “mount the ramparts of the threatened city of God that until now has been peaceful and faithful Upper Silesia.”88 In a more subdued letter introducing himself and his mission, Father Stephan counseled his colleagues to exhibit both greater sensitivity on linguistic issues and greater activism on the political and social front. “Do not do anything,” he warned, “that could look anything like germanization, because this could spoil and complicate our work and do damage to the cause.” At the same time, however, they needed to be more aggressive in pushing Gazeta Katolicka, developing Catholic parish associations, holding electoral meetings, and distributing electoral literature. Page 104 → “The people will always read and engage in politics,” Stephan argued, “if not with us and for us, then without us and against us.”89 Over the following several weeks, the parishes of the Kattowitz-Zabrze electoral district witnessed a series of coordinated Center party rallies, each announced from the pulpit and held immediately after religious services on church property. The meetings featured speeches by Father Stephan and/or the local pastor, but the content of these appeals was often overshadowed by the heavy-handed measures taken to ensure the exclusion of National Democratic activists.90 The crowds attending the meetings were informed that “foreigners” (i.e., those who were not local parishioners) and agitators for Górnoślązak were not welcome, and police were often present to enforce the prohibition. In Bogutschütz, Father Skowronek warned parishioners not to accept fliers from these “false prophets” and praised “miners in the Ferdinandgrube who drove out of the mine democratic agents hawking their writings.”91 Activists handing out nationalist literature outside the church in Myslowitz were reportedly set upon by a priest, the organist, and an accompanying crowd of “fervent German Catholics” who ripped up the literature they were passing out.92 Priests and other Center activists also passed out their own pamphlets condemning Korfanty as an “egoist,” a “trickster,” and a “painted doll.”93 The acrimony between the clergy and the National Democratic activists reached a new height on June 3, only days before the Reichstag election, as Bishop Kopp released a special pastoral letter, “Against the press that is hostile to faith and church” (Gegen die glaubens- und kirchenfeindliche Presse), condemning Górnoślązak and several smaller National Democratic newspapers by name.94 Interestingly, the inspiration and even the authorship of the letter (as well as its “poor Polish”) were attributed by a well-informed source to Upper Silesia’s Centrist priests—in particular,Page 105 → Father Klaszka in Myslowitz—rather than to Kopp himself.95 The letter grandly dismissed the Polish activists’ exaltation of language and customs as values comparable to religious faith. Faith teaches us to look upon this earth as a stage, on which people appear in various costumes and perform their tasks. Language, mores, customs are all merely the robes in which people appear during their brief lifetimes. There comes a day for all of us when we put aside our earthly robe and go to God, before whom all differences of language, custom, and all earthly circumstances disappear.96 The pastoral letter concluded with the admonition that “you cannot boast of being Catholic if you follow the seducers who confuse you in the observance of the teachings and principles of your holy Catholic faith.”97 The letter was read aloud to congregations throughout Upper Silesia, highlighting both the bitterness and the intimacy of the ideological feud convulsing the local Catholic milieu. As one parishioner from the St. Mary church in Kattowitz recalled, Wojciech Korfanty himself stood prominently before the pulpit as the text was being read, presumably by Father Victor Schmidt, his boyhood patron. As the uncompromising content of the letter became clear, parishioners started to murmur and clear their throats, and some left the church. Outside the sanctuary, a few people passed out copies of Kopp’s letter, but others seized the copies, ripped them to shreds, and threw the pieces at the feet of the clergy.98 In print, Górnoślązak handled the bishop’s announcement with great circumspection, scarcely referring to it at all in the days before the election. A letter from a “Priest-Pole” referred obliquely to the “undeserved rebuke of our father,” which he blamed on the fact that Kopp’s unfamiliarity with Polish placed him at the mercy of translators.99 Over a week after the letter’s release, the editors pointedly noted their refusal to print the pastoral letter, instead offering the full text of a papal pronouncement from 1901 counseling clerical impartiality in Bohemia’s Czech-German nationality struggles. They explained that Kopp’s letter “might unsettle the consciences of some of our adherents” and that “in thePage 106 → face of the voice of the Head of the whole church, the voices of individual bishops and cardinals must fall silent.”100

In the meantime, however, the attention of all observers had shifted to the voice of Upper Silesia’s voters, who had cast their ballots on June 7. The results confirmed a severe attrition in the Center electorate in the industrial and semi-industrial districts, but they also suggested that Katolik’s loyalism and the vocal intervention of the local clergy might yet save the day for the Center. Whereas many commentators had spoken of the Polish party winning two or three Reichstag seats, only two Polish candidates performed well enough on election day to necessitate runoff elections.101 Editor Jan Kowalczyk won a plurality in Pless-Rybnik, while marquee candidate Wojciech Korfanty won 26 percent in Kattowitz-Zabrze, forcing a runoff with the Center’s Paul Letocha, who had won 44 percent.102 In this situation, Korfanty seized on his only apparent hope of winning the seat: an electoral agreement with the Social Democrats that would swing to his column the 22 percent of voters who had cast their ballots for the Polish socialist candidate (and Gazeta Robotnicza editor), Franciszek Morawski. Reaching an agreement on common policies was relatively easy, since Korfanty had already embraced “socialist” positions on such pocketbook issues as tariffs, taxes, and military spending.103 But cooperating with a party that he had consistently condemned as godless and antinational was nonetheless a risky strategy, one guaranteed to exacerbate already tense relations with the Katolik camp and the local clergy. Centrist pastors reacted bitterly to the results of the first round of voting. In Bogutschütz, a heavily working-class parish where Korfanty had one of his strongest showings, Father Skowronek told his parishioners that “heaven wept and we pastors have great sorrow over the number of parishioners who, believing the promises of the deceivers, let themselves be seduced and voted in an un-Catholic manner [po niekatolicku]. We are greatly disgraced in front of other parishes!” For those parishioners “who still listen to the voices of their priests,” he announced one further meeting with Father Stephan.104 A few miles away that same morning, in Korfanty’sPage 107 → home parish of Siemianowitz/Laurahütte, Father Andreas Schwider was delivering a similarly blistering message to his flock, which had voted two-to-one in favor of the Górnoślązak editor.105 In each of the morning’s services (two Polish, one German), Father Schwider railed against “the revolutionaries, Great Poles, and hidden unbelievers from Górnoślązak,” leading to “strong murmuring” in the pews. He also announced a final Center party meeting that night, featuring, of course, the ubiquitous Father Stephan.106 That night, a large crowd of Polish and socialist supporters (reportedly about three thousand strong) packed and surrounded the meeting hall where Father Stephan was to speak. As soon as Father Schwider began to introduce Stephan, the crowd erupted in cries of “Down with the Center!” and “Long live Korfanty!” The priests, unable to be heard and uneasy about the mounting tumult, retreated out a back door, while a few police officers who were present unsuccessfully attempted to arrest some of the most vocal protesters for verbal abuse. Soon the fire department and additional police were summoned to control the growing crowd, but the firemen’s decision to turn fire hoses on the demonstrators only escalated the confrontation. As the priests took refuge in the church sanctuary, the crowd launched a barrage of stones, first at the parsonage and then at the offices and home of the local mine director. When police on horseback finally arrived, they fired a volley into the crowd, killing a young worker, mortally wounding another, and injuring several more. A few dozen arrests were made before the protesters finally dispersed into the night.107 Górnoślązak swiftly placed the blame for the incident not on familiar symbols of oppression, such as the police or the mining authorities, but on Father Schwider for his insistence on hosting a Center party rally. Its first report on the Laurahütte riot carried the headline “Killed because of the Priest-Germanizers.” Later articles emphasized that the mining director’s offices were only stoned because the crowd thought Father Schwider had taken refuge there; indeed, witnesses insisted that “the entire uproar was directed against the person of Pastor Schwider.”108 The two young workers killed by the police and those who had been arrested were exalted as martyrs,Page 108 → testifying to the ongoing “suffering of the Polish people for their holy faith, for their customs, and for their language.”109 Even Katolik, though more critical of the instigating role of the National Democrats in escalating the incident, was moved to express its sympathy for the “poor unfortunate families” of the men during the riot.110 To Upper Silesia’s clergy, however, the violence in Laurahütte seemed confirmation of the wildly irresponsible, anarchic tendencies of both National and Social Democracy. The presence in the Laurahütte crowd of a Górnoślązak assistant editor, as well as Korfanty’s father and brother, was taken as evidence of deliberate National Democratic instigation. Father Stephan also highlighted the fact that thirty-two of the sixty-six defendants were under the age of twenty-five, thereby playing on the oft-repeated characterization of the thirty-

year-old Korfanty and his youthful colleagues as little better than reckless adolescents.111 In this polarized environment, a vote for or against Korfanty became a kind of referendum on radical social change versus law and order. The Social Democratic voters of the first round seemed to rally solidly behind Korfanty, while the small Freisinn (Progressive) voting bloc, made up mostly of German-speaking Protestants and Jews, seemed to shift to Letocha.112 A favorable surge in turnout tipped the balance in favor of the Polish party, propelling Korfanty to a narrow victory (51 to 49 percent) and setting off scenes of jubilation among his supporters.113 The simultaneous defeat of the favored Polish candidate Kowalczyk in Pless-Rybnik dampened the celebration slightly, and Korfanty’s critics could—and did—discount the victory as a fluke, built on celebrity, demagoguery, and socialist rhetoric rather than a thorough national “awakening.”114 But the election of Silesia’s first-ever Polish party candidate to the Reichstag was viewed by national activists throughout the Polish lands as an inspiring breakthrough, and over the next few years, it seemed more and more persuasivePage 109 → to view Korfanty’s narrow triumph as the harbinger of an inexorable nationalization of Upper Silesian politics.115

Poles Here, Germans There, 1903–7 After the 1903 Reichstag election, it was clear that Adam Napieralski’s carefully planned program of developing a “Polish Center” in Upper Silesia had been derailed. The campaign had convinced many Polish-speaking Upper Silesians that the Center and the Polish national cause were irreconcilable. German Catholic leaders had only reinforced this impression through their insistence on the candidacy of a magnate industrialist, Ballestrem, and their distaste for the candidacies of such Katolik favorites as Królik and Szmula. Napieralski’s credibility as a Polish national leader, then, seemed to necessitate an incremental, but unmistakable, distancing from the Center party. The first step in this shift by the Katolik camp was the formation at the end of July of the Polish People’s Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Ludowe, or PTL), an organization led by Father Aleksander Skowroński and open to members of both the Center and the Polish parties who were committed to the “positive work” of Polish cultural awakening and education. As Napieralski would later write, it was “an open secret that [the PTL] was conceived in order to negotiate with the [National Democratic] Polish Electoral Association,” laying the groundwork for a broader Polish national front.116 Indeed, it took only two months for the two Polish associations to come to a formal agreement. Each organization was to send a representative to the newly formed Polish Central Electoral Committee, which—in a triumph of the expansive populist/National Democratic view of the Polish nation—included delegates not only from Silesia but also from East Prussia, Brandenburg, and Westphalia.117 Napieralski signaled his own endorsement of the Polish national rapprochement by resigning from the Center’s electoral committee at the end of September. In a long article in Katolik and an even longer German-language pamphlet, The “Katolik” and the Silesian Center, Napieralski recounted the repeated failures of the Center leadership to address the Polish people’s economic, national,Page 110 → and even religious desiderata, citing as a final insult the electoral committee’s refusal to endorse Królik for the coming Landtag election in November. “To support such a Center,” he concluded, “would be an offense against the Polish people.”118 Napieralski clearly hoped that a significant number of parish clergy would follow his and Father Skowroński’s lead and break with the Center, but only a few did so. The overwhelming majority instead circled the wagons around “the cause.” At a strategy meeting held in Gleiwitz under the leadership of Father Schmidt in the fall of 1903, the clergy backed yet more aggressive agitation for Gazeta Katolicka, the development of special Polish chapters of the Catholic Volksverein, the founding of more workers associations, and the organizing of a huge pilgrimage to Rome—all as means of combating Polish radicalism.119 The point man in this ongoing campaign against the Polish party was, as before, Father Stephan, who continued to edit Gazeta Katolicka and, in 1904, published a monumental indictment of the Polish National Democratic movement, The Beuthen Trial in the Light of Truth. While much of the book was devoted to documenting the charges of defamation of the clergy that had been unsuccessfully pressed against Górnolzak, The Beuthen Trial also provided an exhaustive philosophical critique of National Democracy, drawing both on the writings of the movement’s originators and on the journalism of Górnoślązak.

Stephan surely knew he would strike a nerve when he argued that the National Democrats’ “entire nationalist system . . . is nothing more than a translation into Polish of the crassest naturalism of Germany’s modern pagan philosophers.” This “ultra-Hakatist” philosophy ran counter not only to a “general human standpoint,” which taught that “all human beings are creations and likenesses of a divine essence, with the same nature, with the same goals, and with the same laws and duties toward one another,” but even more to a “Christian standpoint,” which taught that Christ “had paid the price of salvation for all humanity with his blood.”120 Nationality, Stephan conceded, was certainly “a natural good” that merited protection, like private property. But it could not be compared to or equated with faith, which stood above all earthly goods “as the heavens tower over the earth.”121 In addition to accusing the National DemocratsPage 111 → of a perverse ordering of moral obligations, Stephan also could not resist noting the empirical absurdity of equating nationality with faith—in particular, Polishness with Catholicism. Had the editors of Górnoślązak never heard of the Polish Protestants of Masuria or the mass conversions to Protestantism of the sixteenth-century Polish nobility? It was obvious to Father Stephan “that one can be a good Pole, that one can hold to Polish nationality fully and completely, without being Catholic.”122 Stephan even disparaged as “plain nonsense” the argument, ubiquitous in the rhetoric of not only Górnoślązak but also Katolik, that “every nation receives its language from God.” As a matter of history, “languages have developed gradually” from earlier common languages. And as a matter of church doctrine, linguistic difference was not a blessing but rather “a punishment for the arrogance at Babel.” The miracle of Pentecost, far from being an affirmation of linguistic particularity, was a glimpse at how such differences could be overcome to achieve a “brotherhood of nations.”123 Father Stephan’s painstaking critique of National Democracy, published as it was in a German-language tome, surely had a very limited impact on the mass readership of the radical Polish press. But the publication of The Beuthen Trial nonetheless enraged the editors of Górnoślązak, driving a further wedge between the Polish National Democrats and the Centrist clergy. The depth of hostility toward Father Stephan was evidenced in the strategy pursued by the National Democrats during a subsequent special election to the Prussian Landtag in October 1904, in which Stephan was forwarded as the Center party candidate. The franchise in Landtag elections was income-weighted, making Polish-oriented electors a small minority of the total. Given the impossibility of electing Polish candidates in these conditions, Polish voters in the previous Landtag election (November 1903) had either voted for Center candidates or abstained. But now, after the predictable defeat in the first round of a Polish-national candidate, the more radically minded Polish electors not only did not vote for Father Stephan in the second round but, instead, ostentatiously voted for his German nationalist opponent, giving him a narrow victory. The editors of Górnoślązak celebrated this demonstration of power, writing that it proved “Father Stephan is not the savior but the grave digger of the Center party in Silesia.”124 Almost every other Polish newspaper, however, agreed with Gazeta Katolicka that backing a German nationalist candidatePage 112 → out of spite toward the clergy meant “betraying the people” and was a sign of “political immaturity.”125 Indeed, the sabotage of Stephan’s Landtag candidacy seemed to many observers a symptom of hubris and growing disorientation in the radical Polish camp.126 Personal rivalries and charges of financial mismanagement soon drove Korfanty to abandon Górnoślązak (which was later bought out by Napieralski) and found another newspaper, Polak (The Pole). Increasingly isolated even among radical Polish activists, Korfanty next faced the invalidation of his 1903 Reichstag victory due to charges that his supporters had practiced electoral “terrorism.” A new election was scheduled for October 1905, and although Katolik and Górnoślązak formally endorsed Korfanty in a demonstration of national solidarity, both Napieralski and Korfanty’s old colleague Jan Kowalczyk quietly conspired with the Center party leadership to field a polonophile candidate who could rebuild the bridge across the gap between the clergy and the Polish national camp. The candidate who was recruited, Father Jan Kapica, whom Napieralski had vainly sought as a Reichstag candidate two years earlier, seemed to fit the bill nicely. Sensing an opportunity to be rid of the hated leader of the radical Poles, sixty Centrist priests in Kattowitz endorsed a compromise with Napieralski offering the Katolik camp complete autonomy and equality within the framework of the Center party, and the clergy proceeded to agitate for Kapica “with exceptional energy.” Cardinal Kopp also reportedly gave his blessing to the conclusion of such an agreement.127

But when the ballots for the special election were counted, the “general” expectation, that Kapica would at least make a runoff against Korfanty and then probably win with the help of German voters, proved far from the mark.128 Instead, Korfanty won a decisive first-round majority (53 percent), leaving the Center and the socialists with less than half of the votes that they had won in the first round in 1903.129 Despite Napieralski’s quiet sympathy for Kapica, Katolik’s formal endorsement of Korfanty hadPage 113 → apparently shifted much of what remained of the “Polish Center” electorate behind the National Democratic standard-bearer. Many former socialist voters, in turn, seemed to be convinced of Korfanty’s radical credentials by his continued pariah status and by his passionate speeches in the Reichstag and Landtag in defense of Upper Silesians’ linguistic and economic rights.130 What made the collapse of the Center vote so spectacular, however, was not only the defection of voters to the Polish party but a significant shift of German Center voters to the National Liberal candidate Hans Voltz, the general secretary of the Upper Silesian Mining and Iron-and-Steel-Working Association. Voltz finished just behind Kapica, with 17 percent of the vote, suggesting that the National Liberals were now winning support well beyond their “natural” base—the 10 percent of the population that was Protestant or Jewish. Indeed, ever since Korfanty’s initial victory in 1903, the German national parties had demonstrated renewed unity and vigor. Old divisions between conservatives and liberals that had crippled the small German national camp since the end of the Kulturkampf were smoothed over, and a common slate of candidates were agreed on for the Landtag election of 1903.131 The catalyst for this rallying of German nationalist forces was a growing conviction, particularly evident among government officials, that the Center party was unwilling or unable to act on behalf of the German national cause. As early as 1902, Oppeln district president Ernst Holtz had written to the minister of the interior about the need for the German government (not the overly provocative Eastern Marches Society) to come forward “in defense of German interests” if the Center fell under undue Polish influence. Now, on the eve of the 1905 special election, Holtz wrote of the “national unreliability” of the “overwhelming majority” of Upper Silesian priests, as evidenced by their flirtation with Napieralski and continued opposition to state school policy. The only option in these circumstances was to oppose Kapica’s candidacy “with the greatest ruthlessness” in the hopes of ending “the domination of the Centrists in our Upper Silesian homeland.”132 Nationalist GermanPage 114 → newspapers, such as the Kattowitzer Zeitung, echoed this kind of rhetoric, warning readers that the clergy was plotting with the Poles “behind the backs of the Germans of Upper Silesia but particularly of the German Catholics.”133 Voltz’s campaign seems to have been vigorously supported by mining and industrial officials, as evidenced by the German candidate’s strong showing in many industrial settlements.134 He also performed well among the German Catholic population of the city of Kattowitz, which was predominantly mercantile, artisanal, or free professional.135 More than Korfanty’s initial narrow victory in 1903, this second and much more resounding rebuke of the Center party was interpreted by Napieralski as a sign of the inexorability of national polarization in Upper Silesia. In a starkly worded article titled “Poles Here—Germans There,” the Katolik editor noted that “both parties that relegated national affairs to a secondary concern, the Center and the socialists, suffered defeats, while the Polish party and the Hakatist party alike, which placed national affairs in the forefront of their agitation, won many votes.” Though stressing that this represented the success of “slogans” and not the existence of “conscious and convinced [national] adherents,” Napieralski concluded that the Center, as a “party of compromise,” had no future. “Very many German Catholics in Upper Silesia,” he wrote, “do not want anything to do with the Center because it is not German enough; very many Polish Catholics, however, do not want anything to do with the Center because it is too German.”136 In a follow-up article, Katolik laid out the implications of this state of affairs for Upper Silesia’s clergy. If our priests persist in the position that they do not want to adhere either to one or the other party, then in time they will be condemned to political idleness. They will have renounced political life, surrendered the field to laypeople, lost influence on not only narrowly political issues but also national and social ones. They will have become similarPage 115 → to priests in France, which as the result of their education have pulled away from society and have very little influence on the people.137

The only thing that remained for Upper Silesia’s priests to do was for “each to go to his own”—in other words, for those of Polish origin to join the Polish party and for those of German origin to stick with the Center as an explicitly German Catholic party. Napieralski soon put his own advice into practice. In March 1906, his protégé, Królik, officially switched allegiances from the Center to the Polish party and duly resigned his seat to seek a new mandate from the voters of Beuthen-Tarnowitz. Rather than run again, however, Królik deferred to his patron, who now forwarded himself for the first time as a parliamentary candidate. Napieralski ran a vigorous and well-orchestrated campaign, and the election results roughly mirrored those in Kattowitz-Zabrze a year earlier: a solid majority for the Polish national candidate, a respectable surge of support for the German national candidate, and greatly reduced support for the Center and socialist candidates.138 Immediately after his Reichstag victory, Napieralski reiterated his appeal for as many Upper Silesian priests as possible to rally to the Polish banner. “The people do not want to exclude them [the clergy] from public life, but to draw them into it,” a Katolik editorial ran. “Let the clergy and the people come together on a single path, on a single field of work!”139 More and more priests now seemed willing to heed this call. In a letter to Cardinal Kopp written shortly after Napieralski’s victory, Father Schirmeisen in Beuthen reported that Father Kapica—only a year earlier the Center candidate chosen to topple Upper Silesia’s first elected Polish representative— spent this election night as a guest at Napieralski’s headquarters. Among the younger generation of priests, Schirmeisen reported, “the number of nationally Polish-oriented clergy is constantly growing.” The Beuthen pastor ascribed these sentiments to the young men’s “embitterment by the primary schools,” where schoolteachers punished “every harmless Polish expression” and made Polish-speaking children feel inferior. At the church-run boarding school in Beuthen, which prepared local boys for the priesthood, “the most honest, pious, and hard-working students” reportedly exclaimed “Thank God!” when they heard of Napieralski’s election to the Reichstag.140 Page 116 → The first half of 1906 was, indeed, a period of extraordinary soul-searching among the Upper Silesian clergy, who debated among themselves whether priests should be engaged in politics at all and, if so, on what side. In February 1906, most of the Silesian Center’s parliamentary representatives signed a defiant declaration proclaiming it a “matter of honor” to “defend their position, first won in heated struggle, with all their strength against both sides.” It would be “a great political mistake,” the declaration continued, “to organize the Center in Upper Silesia along separate linguistic lines. The Center party must now as before fight without change under its old banner.” Father Glowatzki, a longtime Reichstag and Landtag delegate from Groß-Strehlitz-Kosel, served as lead spokesman for this position. In a speech in the Prussian legislature, he spoke nostalgically and rather melodramatically of the willingness of the Center’s “Old Guard” to “fight, suffer, and die” for the church and their Prussian fatherland.141 Father Abramski, a Center party Landtag delegate from Oppeln, dissented from this position, arguing that the next Reichstag election would be, first and foremost, “a race war between Germans and Poles, in which Catholics will be standing and fighting on both sides.” In such a “race war,” the real obligation of the clergy was to “give up to others the leading role” in political life.142 This objection triggered a running debate—first at a Center meeting in Sohrau in March, then at a meeting of Upper Silesian clergy in Kandrzin in April—over the future of clerical political activism. Father Kapica emerged as a mediating voice in these discussions. He managed to empathize with Glowatzki’s emotional invocation of the Center “cause” while simultaneously pressing home Abramski’s argument that events had passed them by. The collapse of the Center party, Kapica argued, “comes from the attempt to be half-German and half-Polish,” a strategy that placed the Center in the “cross fire” of national conflict.143 Earlier, in a series of articles in the Schlesische Volkszeitung, Kapica argued: The bilingual Center is, for the time being, not viable in Upper Silesia. The blame for the collapse of the old construction of the Center is to be sought in the national trend of the time. Modern nationalism hasPage 117 → seized not only the Poles of Upper Silesia but also the Germans. Not only the Poles—no, also the German Catholics are in part radical-minded. We can condemn this point of view, we can curse it, but we cannot thereby wish it away.144

Given these circumstances and given the Center party’s broader quest for national integration in Germany as a whole, Kapica argued that the Center had to operate as an openly “German” party but one that cooperated with the Polish party on the basis of a common confession and common principles.145 Kapica admitted that a division of the clergy along national lines was more complicated than his friend Napieralski’s “to each his own” appeal made it seem: “How should this division take place? By parishes, by electoral districts, according to the national inclination of the heart?” But the Tichau pastor expressed the hope that Upper Silesia’s priests could declare national loyalties in a way that aimed “to bring the peoples closer together and, through this rapprochement, pave the way for a reconciliation of the divided brothers.146 To reinforce a sense of underlying unity in the midst of the clergy’s nationalization, Kapica suggested the formation of a “central organization” through which the Upper Silesian priests could coordinate education on various issues and direct common initiatives in pastoral work.147 The second speaker at the meeting in Kandrzyn, Father Skowroński, presented a much more forceful and straightforward case for the clergy to divide along national lines. Whereas Kapica assumed a magisterial distance from his subject and followed the usual practice of using German when speaking to an internal meeting of the clergy, Skowroński pointedly addressed his audience in Polish, thereby underlining his own personal loyalties.148 He cited as a model the biblical story of Abraham and Lot, who parted company in order to preserve peace between them. “Whoever feels himself to be a Pole and has the civil courage to do so, let him go into the Polish national camp,” Skowroński counseled; “whoever is a German, let him continue to remain in the Center party.”149 A final contribution to thePage 118 → discussion, written by the strongly German nationalist Father Richard Rassek but delivered by a surrogate, seemed to arouse the least sympathy and attention in the clerical gathering, though it undoubtedly served to underline the pressure on the clergy to declare one national allegiance or another.150 Although Kapica’s judicious and finely balanced remarks seemed to come closest to the mood of the average Upper Silesian priest, it was Fathers Glowatzki and Skowroński who subsequently took the lead in mobilizing the clergy’s effective division into Centrist and Polish camps. Glowatzki, seizing on Kapica’s suggestion about founding a “central association” for Upper Silesia’s clergy, created what was essentially a Center party headquarters, coordinating ever greater agitation on behalf of the “cause.”151 As a new Reichstag election loomed at the beginning of 1907, most of Upper Silesia’s priests, as always, rallied to the Center banner; the party’s electoral appeal listed the signatures of 245 priests, or over half of all of those serving in the region. By contrast, only thirteen priests signed the Polish appeal, far fewer than the ninety that Skowroński had cited as being, in principle, “people’s priests”—that is, sympathetic to the Polish national cause.152 Undoubtedly, many of these priests, particularly junior curates, were deterred from declaring an open alignment with the Polish party by fear of provoking intensified government scrutiny and displeasure from clerical superiors. Nonetheless, the Polish party had registered some impressive recruits, including Father Kapica and a number of other senior pastors, who were quickly recruited by the Katolik camp to run as Reichstag candidates and thereby testify to the rapprochement between clericalism and Polish nationalism. The Reichstag election of January 1907 was, indeed, a strikingly “clerical” affair. No less than six of the Center party’s eight candidates in the linguistically mixed areas of Upper Silesia were priests, including such prominent and generally polonophile pastors as Ludwik Skowronek in the district of Kattowitz-Zabrze and Viktor Loss in Pless-Rybnik. The Polish party, in turn, fielded four priests among its eight candidates, including Aleksander Skowroński.153 There was even a Catholic priest, Father Richard Rassek, running as a German nationalist (technically, a “patriotic”Page 119 → Center countercandidate). In three districts, a Centrist priest and a Polish priest were running against one another. Katolik’s coverage of the election revealed Napieralski’s frustration with the Center’s tactic of running such nationally ambiguous clerical candidates against the Polish party. It was all well and good that the Center fielded priests who came “from the people—Father Loss, Father Skowronek, Father Chrząszcz, Father Wolny”; but their representation of the Center as a kind of “international Catholic party” was disingenuous, disguising the Center’s true German nature.154 In a revealing attack on Father Glowatzki, a Katolik article demanded to know “what he himself is with regard to nationality”: “What are you? A Pole or a German? —here is the slogan of the hour.”155 If the candidate profiles of the Center and the Polish party remained disconcertingly close, the results of the 1907

Reichstag election could not have been more lopsided. Precisely those clerical Center candidates that seemed most likely to capture Polish Catholic votes were uniformly crushed by their Polish party opponents, whether clerical or lay. Wojciech Korfanty, for example, beat Father Skowronek by four-to-one in Kattowitz-Zabrze and by an even greater margin in Skowronek’s own parish of Bogutschütz. 156 Following the pattern established in Korfanty’s 1905 reelection, the socialist camp continued to lose voters to the Polish party, while the German-national camp, this time energized by the vigorous campaign of the Bülow Bloc across Germany, surged into the position of second strongest party in most of the industrial region. Once the results were registered, they assumed a certain air of inevitability; indeed, an article in Górnoślązak over two years earlier had predicted the drop in the Center electorate between 1903 and 1907 with uncanny precision, suggesting that the rise of Polish and German nationalist voting in the region represented a simple “sorting out” of national groups.157 In their inability or unwillingness to sort themselves out in the same way, the majority of Upper Silesia’s priests, along with the Center party they continued to champion, seemed to have become a hopeless anachronism in the looming Age of Nationalism. Page 120 →

National Agitation and Pastoral Power The Upper Silesian clergy’s stunning inability to dictate either the reading habits or the voting behavior of their parishioners ran counter to everything that contemporary observers thought they knew about the relationship between Roman Catholic clergy and laity. With the power to deny absolution (and, by extension, eternal salvation) to penitent parishioners, the parish priest was often assumed to exercise an irresistable influence over the typical Catholic voter. As one anticlerical English writer grimly concluded after chronicling horror stories of heavy-handed (and generally successful) clerical electoral intervention in Quebec, the United States, Belgium, and Ireland, democratization provided “boundless possibilities . . . to those who can control the confessional.”158 It was not that Upper Silesian priests were especially shy in attempting to deploy what the Polish socialist Adolf Warski darkly described as the church’s “rich arsenal of ecclesiastical penalties” against their recalcitrant flock.159 Indeed, a concerted attempt to crack down on readership of the National Democratic press was already evident at the beginning of January 1903, a liturgically fortuitous time for a campaign of moral suasion. This was the season of the kolęda, the pastor’s annual tour of selected homes in the parish. At each stop in this round of visitations, the priest blessed the home and often presented residents with devotional objects, while the residents, in turn, presented the visiting priest with a small sum of money. Particularly in the populous parishes of Upper Silesia’s industrial district, this was one of the few opportunities for the pastoral gaze to be turned on individual households, and pastors used the occasion to draw a distinction between “honorable parishioners,” on the one hand, and “drunks, the excommunicated, [and] lechers,” on the other.160 During the kolęda of 1903, however, the pastoral opprobrium cast on these traditional vices often took a backseat to alarm over the more novel, but also more brazen, threat of the National Democratic press. Father Skowronek told the faithful that it was obvious from his round of home visitation thatPage 121 → (with few exceptions) “you care about the Lord God and serve him faithfully.” But not all was well in the parish of Bogutschutz. On New Year’s Eve it seemed that Bogutschutz was full of wolves. Democrats from Kattowitz, from Bogutschutz and from Zawodzie gathered here—and many parishioners were among these atheists. That is not fitting for a Catholic [nie po katolicku]! A vile newspaper, known as “Górnoślązak” has taken the local clergy between its teeth in recent days. We have neither the time nor the inclination to quarrel with this font of lies [szczekaczem], which lives off provocations. Our wish, for which we work everyday, is that concord, peace, and love should prevail in our parish. There has never been any injury done by our clergy either to Poles or to Germans. Whoever says or writes otherwise slanders his own pastors and ruins their reputation.161 Skowronek concluded his exhortation with a stern warning not “to allow the lying, troublemaking Górnoślązak into your homes or take it into your hands.”

The clerical campaign against the radical Polish press only intensified with the onset of the Lenten season, as parishioners flocked to the confessional to make their obligatory annual Easter confession. Many priests used this more intimate and individualized setting to press home the evils of reading Górnoślązak. In Rosdzin, a worker was refused absolution and access to communion when he allegedly exclaimed that he would rather give up religion than Górnoślązak. 162 In Siemianowitz, a miner from Sadawka accused the irascible Father Schwider of calling him a “pig” during his confession. When the miner threatened to leave if he was to be abused in these way, the pastor reportedly urged him to do so (Proszę! Proszę!) and called out after him, “Look at him! That is a Social Democrat!” The parishioner complained to the bishop about this treatment, protesting that he was “a true Catholic and no Social Democrat.”163 In his response, Father Schwider claimed that his verbal abuse—which, he emphasized,Page 122 → was done outside the confessional and not with such crude language—was inspired by the miner’s scraping his heals noisily on the floor of the sanctuary, but he drew a close association between such disrespectful behavior and National Democratic agitation. He and his curates, he complained, had been “greatly persecuted” in recent months, and one young curate was recently treated so “roughly” by a parishioner coming to confess that he was “downcast the entire day.”164 The polarizing events of June 1903—Kopp’s pastoral letter, the riot in Siemianowitz/Laurahütte, Korfanty’s electoral victory—only further hardened the clergy’s stance against adherents of Górnoślązak and other radical Polish newspapers. In Bogutschütz, volunteer guards were posted outside the parsonage for several nights in fear of a repetition of the assault on the parsonage in Siemianowitz, and instruction for first confession and communion was suspended until passions died down.165 In his announcements the Sunday following Korfanty’s election, Father Skowronek warned that “from July 1, whoever continues to subscribe to or read Górnoślązak or similar incendiary newspapers will no longer be counted among faithful parishioners.”166 But the National Democratic press, doubtless emboldened by their electoral success, were conceding nothing to the clergy. In a long and detailed article, Górnoślązak argued that under canon law, the withholding of the sacraments was only legitimate following excommunication, which could in turn only result from either a physical assault on a member of the clergy or, in the case of other charges, through a formal church trial.167 It would take a very public and very messy confrontation, the editors made clear, to force them either to submit to clerical demands or to leave the church. Just such a confrontation loomed by the end of the year. Two libel suits—one by Cardinal Kopp, the other by thirty-three Upper Silesian priests—were filed in response to articles in Górnoślązak that accused the clergy and hierarchy of mixing party politics with pastoral work and of toadying to the German government.168 The two cases came to be known collectively as “the Beuthen Trial.” Factual lapses in the Polish press reportsPage 123 → gave the clerical plaintiffs a legal edge, but a provision that allowed the defendants to summon (at their own expense) a nearly limitless parade of witnesses gave the Polish editors a golden opportunity to showcase their grievances against the clergy. In the first trial, following brief testimony from several priests and (via written deposition) from Cardinal Kopp, the spotlight turned on over sixty defense witnesses, each recounting an instance of a priest using the pulpit, confessional, kolęda visitation, or other pastoral venue to rail against Polish radicalism.169 On March 26, after only a few days of testimony, a surprise telegram from Cardinal Kopp, withdrawing his complaint, brought the proceedings to a halt. Probably fearing a draconian ruling, Górnoślązak’s chief editors, Korfanty and Kowalczyk, had written to Kopp, pledging to print a public apology for any misinformation and declaring, “[W]e are Catholics and as such promise always to follow the ordinances of the church authorities in religious affairs.” A parallel letter from the National Democrats’ lawyer, Marian Seyda, pledged to refund the costs Kopp had incurred from the trial.170 The second complaint against Górnoślązak was only withdrawn several months later. Revealingly, Upper Silesia’s Centrist pastors, with Father Skowronek in the lead, proved much more militant than Kopp in their attitude toward their “perfidious adversary” and only very reluctantly agreed to settle with the National Democrats.171 Strictly speaking, the cardinal and the clergy could claim to have “won” this confrontation. Górnoślązak had been compelled to back down from its most damning charges, and priests had been spared the dilemma of trying to respond to witnesses without violating the confidentiality of the confessional.172 But the sudden withdrawal of the complaints was nonetheless almost universally interpreted as a debacle for the Silesian clergy. The liberal Berliner Tageblatt, for example, wrote of “the defeat of the Upper Silesian clergy” and the public exposure of “the

terrorism of the priests.”173 The trials had conveyed to the world an image of an Upper SilesianPage 124 → Catholic community deeply divided against itself, where Polish-oriented parishioners were regularly harangued and browbeaten by Centrist priests and where the clergy were in turn regularly defied by the faithful. Indeed, if one were to generalize from the stories related during the trials and reported in the Polish press, one might have expected this ideological confrontation to produce a paralyzing rift in parochial life. Rigorously followed, the principle of denying absolution to all of those reading National Democratic newspapers would have resulted in the exclusion of tens of thousands of Upper Silesians from the sacraments, thousands in the deanery of Myslowitz alone.174 Yet parish-level records do not reveal anything like either a systematic interdict on or a self-imposed exile by Polish radical sympathizers. Reports from the deanery of Myslowitz on parishioners’ “religious behavior” (kirchliche Haltung) during the 1903–4 period duly noted a disturbing growth in National Democratic and Social Democratic sentiment but added that, despite these anticlerical “countercurrents,” it was difficult to discern a difference in overall religious practice. In their report on the parish of Zalenze, Fathers Kubis and Schmidt emphasized that although traces of “antireligious life” had been introduced into the community, “it is all the more to be appreciated that the religious behavior of the community has by and large not suffered thereby.”175 A similar story is suggested by statistics on Easter communions and total annual communions, which should have registered significant declines if thousands of National Democratic sympathizers were being denied absolution. Instead, communion figures in most of the parishes of the Myslowitz deanery, including those with some of the greatest nationality controversies, either remained constant or rose.176 It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what was being said (and not said) in thousands of encounters between confessor and penitent, but there are hints available suggesting how these tensions were being negotiatedPage 125 → and mitigated in daily confessional practice. While absolution could technically be denied to anyone reading the National Democratic press, the most detailed reports of priests who actually did so tended to involve parishioners who were described as “public sinners” or “agitators”—in other words, people who expressed some kind of public defiance toward the local clergy.177 Parishioners who did not offer such a provocation would likely not have been specifically grilled about their reading habits. Another factor blurring the definition of who counted as a reader of the National Democratic press was the pattern of newspaper distribution that prevailed in the industrial region. Regular, readily attributable subscriptions through the postal service were the exception rather the rule.178 Most newspapers were marketed through the medium of agent-activists, making readership of these newspapers a relatively fluid, opportunistic, and anonymous practice. Readers with such loose connections to the National Democratic press may have either avoided bringing up the topic to their parish priest altogether or felt justified in registering a grudging, pro forma renunciation of the “bad press” while quietly resuming their previous reading habits. In one amusing—and revealing—exchange during the Beuthen Trial, a witness testified that he had promised his confessor that he would stop subscribing to the Polish radical press. When the judge asked him if he nonetheless still subscribed to such newspapers, he responded, “No, my wife does.”179 Such artful evasions in confessionals across Upper Silesia foreshadowed the ad hoc truce negotiated between Cardinal Kopp and the National Democratic journalists to end the Beuthen Trial. As Father Kapica wrote to Kopp regarding those negotiations, there was no question of “a true, lasting peace,” but “a modus vivendi is achievable and desired by both sides.”180 While the National Democrats did not abandon their ultimatePage 126 → goals of curtailing the influence of the Centrist clergy and making the church in Upper Silesia responsive to lay Polish national activists, the sharp anticlerical tone that characterized Górnoślązak during its first two and a half years ebbed noticeably after the Beuthen compromise.181 Most of the clergy, in turn, remained irreconcilably hostile to Polish nationalism but turned away from the systematic use of the pulpit and the confessional to suppress the Polish radical movement. This subtle but important shift was apparent in the remarks that Father Skowronek made from the pulpit immediately before the 1905 special election in the district of Kattowitz-Zabrze. The pastor restricted his commentary to urging the faithful to “vote according to your own consciences, because to choose a representative means to confess one’s own faith.”182 The Sunday after the vote, which resulted in the overwhelming reelection of Korfanty, Skowronek had no comment whatsoever. Much of the story told in this chapter, focusing as it does on the rise of incipient German and Polish nationalist milieus, would seem to offer a ringing confirmation of argument that the processes of nationalization and

secularization are mutually reinforcing. As we have seen, the rise of more overt and radical forms of Polish as well as German nationalism were predicated on the emergence of lay elites whose ideological commitment to the national cause and pragmatic freedom of action were not complicated by loyalty to a supranational church. On the level of electoral politics, the triumphs of the Polish and German national movements came first and foremost at the expense of the Center party and against a backdrop of bitter conflict between parish priests, on the one hand, and German and Polish national activists, on the other. Indeed, the whole process seemed to fit rather closely the model of nationalism enunciated by Ernest Gellner, in which the authority of a religious clerisy is displaced by autonomous vernacular high cultures. What Gellner saw as a central imperative of modern nationalism, that “the Church must surrender and dissolve itself if it is to capture the entire society,” was precisely the demand Center loyalists anticipated and feared.183 But party-political trends in the first years of the twentieth century also hint at some difficulties with interpreting the period as one of eitherPage 127 → unambiguous secularization or unambiguous nationalization. Although the Center and the Catholic clergy often figured as the marquee targets of surging nationalism in this period, German and Polish nationalists knew that they faced another, arguably more fundamental struggle—with one another. In this latter contest, Catholic parish priests were not enemies but potential allies to be won over, and the daily practices of Catholic religious life were not vestigial superstitions to be overcome but, rather, a malleable prize to be shaped as either German or Polish. The result, as the socialist activist Adolf Warski had observed about National Democracy, was a highly ambivalent anticlericalism that morphed easily into de facto clericalism, as national activists rushed to recruit priests as parliamentary candidates and sought the cooperation of the bishop and/or parish priests in promoting national organizations and the progress of the national language. Most priests, to be sure, continued to view such immersion in one or the other national movement as a betrayal of the Catholic cause, but an increasing number argued that it was, in fact, an opportunity, not to mention a necessity. In the daily rhythms of religious life, discontent with the Center party and rising nationalist tensions were manifested in frequent, sometimes violent confrontations between priests and parishioners, a pattern that seemed at times to amount to a wholesale repudiation of clerical leadership. Yet, as we have seen, the spectacular fracturing of the Catholic electorate and the embarrassing airing of intraparochial disputes did not coincide with any significant slackening of sacramental observance or estrangement from parish life. At the grassroots, as among nationalizing elites, escalating national competition seemed to be steeling each side’s determination to stake its claim to the Catholic milieu, thus spurring (rather than undermining) interest in religious activity. But how long could such a situation last? With German activists convinced that the church could and should be a partner in the work of cultural germanization, with Polish activists insisting that the clergy unambiguously declare their solidarity with the Polish national cause, and with Centrist activists clinging to the belief that the old bilingual, supranational “phalanx” could yet be resurrected, how could the future evolution of Upper Silesia’s Catholic milieu fail to be a terrible disappointment to much of its erstwhile constituency? 1. Kapica, Mowy—Odezwy—Kazania, 189. 2. In Posen, the percentage of the vote won by the party fluctuated in a narrow range from 56.7 percent to 64.6 percent between 1871 and 1912. See Gerhard Ritter, Wahlgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch: Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918 (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1980), 72. 3. Hagen, 13. 4. Amtliches Reichstags-Handbuch: Achte Legislaturperiode 1890/5 (Berlin: Verlag von Trowitsch und Sohn, 1895). 5. Hagen, 227–29. 6. For a provocative analysis of the National Democrats’ impact on Polish understandings of the nation, see Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 7. Roman Dmowski, “Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka,” in Roman Dmowski: Wybór Pism, ed. Roman Wapiski (Warsaw: Państwowy Institut Wydawnictwy, 1990), 94–95. 8. Ibid., 81–82. 9. Ibid., 80–81.

10. “Nasz patriotyzm,” in Dmowski, 57–58. 11. “Myśli nowocześnego Polaka,” in Dmowski, 100–101. 12. Ibid., 86–87. 13. By 1903, after the first National Democratic breakthrough in the selection of Koło Polskie delegates, only six of the sixteen Polish Reichstag delegates were large landowners. By the elections of 1912, none of the eighteen Polish delegates fell into this category. See Jürgen Bertram, Die Wahlen zum Deutschen Reichstag vom Jahre 1912: Parteien und Verbände in der Innenpolitik des Wilhelminischen Reiches (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1964), 158–59. 14. Katolik, 20 January 1903, 2. 15. Orędownik, 11 February 1900, in Gesamtüberblick, 140. 16. Marian Orzechowski, Wojciech Korfanty: Biografia polityczny (Wrocław: Zakad Narodowy im. Ossolińskich Wydawnictwo, 1975) 24. 17. Ibid., 25. 18. Ibid., 26–27. 19. Ibid., 27–36. 20. Goniec Wielkopolski, 2 December 1898, in Gesamtüberblick, 738–39. 21. Report of the Oppeln district president to the minister of the interior, cited in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 36 n. 47. 22. The authorship of Precz z Centrum has been disputed, but Orzechowski (Wojciech,39 n. 59) has argued that it is primarily Korfanty’s work. 23. Circulation figure from Marian Orzechowski, Narodowa Demokracja Na Górnym Śląsku (Do 1918 Roku) (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1965), 139–41. By comparison, Dziennik Śląski had a circulation of only a few thousand (Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 35). 24. Father Ludwik Jażdżewski, one of the most conservative members of the Koło, dismissed the Polish movement in Silesia as exclusively the work of a few editors, “who did not find work in the Grand Duchy [of Posen] and so went to Silesia and became agitators” (Wanatowicz, Społeczenstwo, 84). 25. “Sprawa Polska na Górnym Śląsku,” Górnoślązak, 4 January 1902, 1. 26. Cited in Mieczysław Tobiasz, Wojciech Korfanty: Odrodzenie narodowe i polityczne Śląska (Katowice: “Ognisko” Spółdzielnia Księgarska, 1947), 58–59. 27. Katolik, 17 January 1903, 2. 28. Precz z Centrum (Berlin: Nakład i druk Dziennika Berlińskiego, 1901), 9–14. 29. “Centrum a robotnik polski,” Katolik, 16 April 1902, 1. 30. The popular saying rhymes in Polish: “Jak świat światem, nie będzie Niemiec Polakowi bratem.” (Precz, 5). 31. “Centrum a sprawa polska na Górnym Śląsku,” Górnoślązak, 16 January 1902, 1; Precz, 5. 32. Ballestrem bashing in Górnoślązak, 12 February 1902, 1; 18 March 1902, 2; 31 May 1903, 1; as well as Precz, 10. 33. Precz, 10. 34. “Der Ultramontanismus,” Dziennik Berliński, 26 July 1901, in Gesamtüberblick, 668–69. 35. In an early statement of “our program,” Górnoślązak pointedly listed its adherence to the Catholic church as its first principle, proclaiming that it would “defend our Mother with all our strength” (“Nasz program,” 2 April 1902, 1). 36. Orzechowski, Wojciech, 80. 37. Alvin Marcus Fountain, Roman Dmowski: Party, Tactics, Ideology, 1895–1907 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1980), 106, 201 n. 68. 38. Geoff Eley, “Reshaping the Right: Radical Nationalism and the German Navy League, 1898–1908,” Historical Journal 21 (1978): 29–63; Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1984). 39. An old but still invaluable study of the Ostmarkenverein is Richard W. Tims’s Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society and the Struggle for the Eastern Marches in the German Empire, 1894–1919 (New York: Columbia University, 1941). But see also Sabine Grabowski’s more recent, comparative monograph on the Eastern Marches Society and the Polish Straż, Deutscher und polnischer Nationalismus: Der deutsche Ostmarken-Verein und die polnische Straż 1894–1914 (Marburg: Herder Institut, 1998).

40. Tims, 104–32; Hagen, 176–94. 41. Tims, 138–41. 42. Kulczycki, School Strikes; Tims, 76–103; Hagen, 182–83. 43. Michalkiewicz, part 2, 311–12; Hagen,185. 44. For example, the number of Polish doctors in Upper Silesia (fifty-one in 1905) was comparable to the number in the city of Posen alone (fifty-eight in 1912). See Michalkiewicz, part 2, 311–12; Hagen, 208–24. 45. “Wasserpolnisch and Hochpolnisch,” Schlesische Zeitung, 11 December 1896. 46. Voltz, 216. 47. Rudolf Küster, Kulturelle Wohlfahrtspflege in Oberschlesien: Denkschrift der Königl. Regierung zu Oppeln (Kattowitz: Verlag v. Gebrüder Böhm, 1907), 1–2. 48. Rudolf Küster, Die polnische Irridenta in West-Oberschlesien (Berlin: Hallig-Verlag G.m.b.H., 1931), 14–19. 49. Michalkiewicz, part 2, 297–99. 50. Rudolf Küster, Die oberschlesische Spielbewegung (Kattowitz: Gebrüder Böhm, Buch und Steindruckerei, 1909). 51. The creation of popular libraries in Upper Silesia was loosely coordinated by the Popular Library Society (Towarzystwo Czytelni Ludowych), founded in Posen in 1880, as well as by the local Polish press. By 1906, the society had founded 296 libraries in the region. See Anna Tokarska, Biblioteki polskie na Górnym Śląsku w XIX wieku (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1997), 37–38. 52. Küster, Kulturelle, 5–31. 53. According to Küster’s interwar publication, sixty thousand of the ninety-three thousand readers in the popular libraries were of Polish origin, though his discussion on the library program in 1907 reported only one-third to one-half of the readership as Polish (Die polnische, 34–35; Kulturelle, 7). 54. Michalkiewicz, part 2, 301. This was roughly the same rate of membership as in Prussia as a whole. See Thomas Rohkrämer, Der Militarismus der “kleinen Leute”: Die Kriegervereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871–1914 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), 271–73. 55. “Kriegerferajny,” Katolik, 9 July 1908, 1. 56. “Father X” complained that in one “parents evening” in Zawodzie (in which he estimated that 90 percent of the audience was of Polish background), schoolgirls performed a morally objectionable play involving love affairs (“Elternabenty bez ko n ca” Katolik, 24 December 1908, 1). 57. Górnoślązak, 29 January 1902, 1–2. 58. Górnoślązak (22 January 1902, 1) echoed criticism originally printed in Oberschlesische Volksstimme of Kriegerverein members attending a Protestant service on the occasion of the Kaiser’s birthday. Katolik (17 October 1905) applauded criticism of Catholic participation in Kriegervereine that was printed in Gazeta Katolicka. An ad for Turnverein appeared in Oberschlesische Volksstimme (10 February 1906, 4). 59. Gazeta Katolicka, 24 April 1906, 2. 60. Although the Eastern Marches Society continued to be viewed negatively by the clergy and most German Catholic publicists (see Matthias Erzberger’s Der Kampf gegen den Katholizismus in der Ostmark [Berlin: Druck und Verlag der Germania, 1908]), the organization attracted a significant membership among Upper Silesian Catholics. Die Ostmark estimated in 1904 that half of the H-K-T Society’s seventyfive hundred members in Silesia were Catholic (Tims, 253 n. 45). 61. “Wie entstehen in den Dörfern Kriegervereine,” Dziennik Śląski, 5 February 1901, in Gesamtüberblick, 149. 62. Katolik, 7 February 1903, in Gesamtüberblick, 101. 63. Górnoślązak, 26 April 1903, in Gesamtüberblick, 328. 64. Orzechowski, Wojciech, 54–55. 65. Ibid., 70–71. 66. Ibid., 73; Stephan, 71. 67. Advocates of rapprochement with Napieralski included Jan Kowalczyk, Korfanty’s coeditor at Górnoślązak, and populist leaders Bernhard Chrzanowski and Roman Szymański in Posen (Orzechowski, Wojciech, 62–69). 68. Katolik, 7 March 1903, 2–3. 69. Katolik, 19 March 1903, 1.

70. “Die Wahlen im Bezirke Kattowitz-Zabrze,” Dziennik Śląski, 24 February 1903, in Gesamtüberblick, 157. 71. Katolik, 7 February 1903, 2; 10 February 1903, 1. 72. Napieralski, 32–33. 73. “Ostatnie podrygi polskiego ‘Katolika,’” Górnoślązak, 9 May 1903, 1; “Ballestrem a Polacy,” Górnoślązak, 31 May 1903, 1. 74. Katolik, 7 April 1903, 2. 75. Napieralski, 36. 76. Katolik, 17 February 1903, 1; 21 February 1903, 2; Górnoślązak, 17 May 1903, 1. 77. “Pfarrer Kapica,” Goniec Wielkopolski, 25 February 1903, in Gesamtüberblick, 155–57. Kapica did, in fact, benefit from high-level connections in his quest for a parish. When he was stationed as a curate in Berlin, he had conducted a service for the deceased wife of Prince Hohenlohe, then the Reich chancellor, and the prince’s family subsequently put in a good word for Kapica with the Prince of Pless, the patron of the Tichau parish. This old-fashioned aristocratic patronage, backed by an endorsement from Cardinal Kopp, trumped the misgivings of local state officials. See Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 8–9. 78. Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 91–92. 79. Katolik, 3 March 1903, 2. 80. “Ksiądz-germanizator,” Górnoślązak, 6 May 1902, 1. 81. “O ks. Skowronku,” Górnoślązak, 11 May 1902, 1. 82. One article complained that the Polish used by the pastor in Königshütte “makes a good Pole . . . shudder” (“Poważna dama,” Górnoślązak, 15 May 1902, 1–2). 83. “Komedye centrowe w Bogucicach,” Górnoślązak, 4 June 1903, 1. 84. For example, such dialect is parodied in a “Walke i Jan” dialogue from Górnoślązak (2 May 1902, 3), in which one Silesian “everyman” responds to criticism of the germanisms in his speech: “Nie beleidiguj mnie, bo bym ci e aufforderował na duel” (Do not insult me, or I will challenge you to a duel). 85. “Poważna dama,” Górnoślązak, 15 May 1902, 1–2. The gendered language here plays on the fact that the Polish word gazeta is feminine. 86. “Consumption” comment from “Poważna Dama z Król. Huta,” Górnoślązak, 30 May 1903, 1; characterization of Stephan from Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 76–77 n. 40. 87. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 76–77; Pater, Slownik, 397–98. 88. Quoted in “Wojna się zbliża,” Górnoślązak, 23 May 1903, 1. 89. “Walka księży-centrowców o panowanie Niemców na ziemi polskiej,” Górnoślązak, 23 May 1903, 1. 90. Meetings featuring Stephan were held in Chorzow, Zalenze, Schwientochlowitz, Zabrze, and Königshütte, while meetings in Myslowitz and Bogutschutz were apparently led by the local pastor: see Antoni Plutyński, Walka na Górnym Śląsku (Lwów: Skład Główny w Tow. Wydawniczem we Lwowie, 1905), 30; Górnoślązak, 24 May 1903, 1; 4 June 1903, 1; 10 June 1903, 1–2; 14 June 1903, 2. 91. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 26 April 1903, APB. 92. Górnoślązak, 28 May 1903, 3. For a similar account, see Plutyski, 20, 24. 93. Cited in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 75. 94. Full text printed in Georg Kardinal Kopp, Hirtenbriefe des Fürstbischofes von Breslau Georg Kardinal Kopp, 1887–1912 (Berlin: Verlag und Druck “Germania,” 1912), 185–91. 95. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 113. 96. Kopp, Hirtenbriefe des Fürstbischofes, 186–87. 97. Ibid., 190. 98. Based on an eyewitness account in a 1928 issue of Górnoślązak, cited in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 85 n. 117. 99. “List księdza Polaka o ruchu polsko-katolickim na Śląsku,” Górnoślązak, 11 June 1903, 1–2. 100. Górnoślązak, 14 June 1903, 1. 101. Plutyński, 9. One despondent Polish activist, initially believing that Korfanty had not even made it to a runoff, commented,”See how benighted the people remain in Silesia, that they are choosing a Centrist” (ibid., 21). 102. Complete results in Pabisz, 298–99. 103. Schwidetzky, 64; Orzechowski, Wojciech, 83–84.

104. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 21 June 1903, APB. Election results by local community are in Syg231, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 105. Schwider was by all accounts a difficult personality, described by his own dean as “a very morose, easily irritable man” (Erzpriester Korus to Fb. G.V.A., 5 September 1905, AP Andreas Schwider, APD, AAW). 106. Plutyński, 25. 107. Narrative based on Plutyński, 25–26; Tobiasz, 84–91; Katolik, 25 June 1903, supplement. 108. Stephan, 86–87. 109. “Zabity z powodu księży-germanizatorów,” Górnoślązak, 23 June 1903, 3. 110. Katolik, 30 June 1903, 3. 111. Ibid.; Stephan, 87–88. 112. The inference that voters largely followed their leaders’ instructions is based on the correspondence at the municipal level between the actual results of the second round and the results one would get simply from adding the socialist vote to the Polish column and the Freisinn vote to the Center column. The results were printed in Górnoślązak (18 June 1903, 3; 27 June 1903, 3) and Katolik (18 June 1903, 3; 27 June 1903, 3). 113. Orzechowski, Wojciech, 86–87; Tobiasz, 87–88. 114. Katolik, 30 June 1903, 1. 115. One young National Democrat traveled to Kattowitz from Kiev to witness “something so miraculous, so great, and so clear” (Orzechowski, Wojciech, 88). 116. Napieralski, 40. 117. Schwidetzky, 66–67; Orzechowski, Narodowa, 174–76. 118. Napieralski, 35. A Polish version of the apologia appeared in Katolik, 3 October 1903, 1. 119. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 116–18. 120. Stephan, 52–55. 121. Ibid., 163. 122. Ibid., 164–65. 123. Ibid., 168–69; Pentecost reference from 55. 124. “Wybory w okręgu pszczynsko-rybnickim,” Górnoślązak, 9 October 1904, 1. 125. “Z czego chcą być dumni?” Gazeta Katolicka, 15 October 1904, 1. 126. Ironically, Korfanty himself appears to have had little to do with this strategy. His fellow editors Kowalczyk and Piechulek were apparently the initiators of the move. See Orzechowski, Narodowa, 194–97; Wojciech, 105. 127. Regierungspräsident Oppeln to Minister des Innern (Berlin), 20 September 1905; Regierungspräsident Holtz to Oberpräsident Schlesien, 23 September 1905; Regierungspräsi-dent Holtz to Oberpräsident Schlesien, 28 September 1905, Syg352, Zespół Oberpräsidium der Provinz Schlesien, APW. 128. “Die Reichstagswahl in Kattowitz-Zabrze,” Germania, 14 October 1905. 129. Schwidetzky, 73 n. 1. 130. Korfanty had been elected to the Landtag in 1904 as the representative of a rural district in the province of Posen. On speech making, see Orzechowski, Wojciech, 97–102; Schwidetzky, 73–77. 131. Schwidetzky, 70. 132. Regierungspräsident Holtz to Minister des Innern (Berlin), 27 December 1902; Regierungspräsident Holtz to Oberpräsident Schlesien, 23 September 1905; Regierungspräsident Holtz to Oberpräsident Schlesien, 28 September 1905, Syg352, Zespół Oberpräsidium der Provinz Schlesien, APW. 133. “Zur Reichstagswahl,” Kattowitzer Zeitung, 20 September 1905. 134. In strongly patriarchal environs, such as Hohenlohehütte and Schloß Kattowitz, for example, Voltz received lopsided majorities, suggesting considerable orchestration from above (Syg26, Zespół LA Kattowitz, APK). 135. Between 1903 and 1905, the National Liberals picked up almost six hundred votes—most presumably from the Center—in the city of Kattowitz alone (Kattowitzer Zeitung, 14 October 1905). 136. katolik, 19 October 1905, 1. 137. “Położenie księży wobec stanu rzeczy na Śląsku,” Katolik, 21 October 1905, 1. 138. Schwidetzky, 73.

139. Quoted in Gazeta Katolicka, 16 June 1906. 140. Schirmeisen to Kopp, 18 June 1906, VIII.I.A.24.a.18, AAW. 141. Center parliamentarians’ statement printed in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 34–35; Glowatzky quoted on 36. 142. Ibid., 36–37. 143. Kapica’s Kandrzin address, 2 May 1906, VIII.I.24.a.20, AAW. 144. Schlesische Volkszeitung, nos. 36 and 38, quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 31–34. 145. Where the priest said that the Center “does not want to be a confessional party but a party of ‘parity,’” Kopp penciled in a number of question marks on his copy of Kapica’s speech. 146. Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 34. 147. Kapica’s Kandrzin address, 2 May 1906, VIII.I.24.a.20, AAW. 148. Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 127. 149. Cited in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 40. 150. Ibid. 151. Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 115–21; Orzechowski, Wojciech, 218. 152. Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 43; “Ks. Aleksander,” 127, 133–35. 153. Kapica had also been initially slated as a Polish party candidate, but he deferred to Father Teodor Jankowski due to health problems (Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 43). 154. Katolik, 19 January 1907, 1–2; 15 January 1907, 1. 155. “Z wyborów,” Katolik, 7 February 1907, 1. 156. Schwidetzky, 110–11; parish-by-parish electoral results in VIII.I.24.a.19, AAW. 157. The editors spoke of the Center’s total vote falling from 120,000 in 1903 to 55,000 in the next election. The Center’s actual vote total in the linguistically mixed areas of Upper Silesia in 1907 was about 57,000. See “Centrowcy a nasz ruch narodowy na Górnym Śląsku,” Górnoślązak, 27 October 1904, 1; Schwidetzky, 81–82. 158. Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, vol. 2, Confession and Absolution (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1896), 446. 159. Adolf Warski, “Klerykalizm na Górnym Śląsku,” in Wybór pism i przemówień (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1958), 176–78. 160. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 31 December 1899, APB. For a general description of Silesian kolęda practices, see Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 109–10. 161. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 11 January 1903, APB. 162. This is one of the most complete (i.e., specifying parish and priest) of the several dozen complaints listed in Stephan (269–87) that deal with refusal of absolution for the reading of Górnoślązak. 163. Peter Maszczyk (Sadzawka, Laurahütte) to G.V.A., 29 April 1903, AP Andreas Schwider, APD, AAW. 164. Schwider to G.V.A., 11 May 1903, AP Andreas Schwider, APD, AAW. 165. Stephan, 286–87. 166. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 28 June 1902, APB. 167. “Haben die Geistlichen ein Recht den Lesern des Gornoslonzak die Absolution zu verweigern?” Górnoślązak, 26 July 1903, in Gesamtüberblick, 588–90. 168. The two charges are summarized in Erste Staatsanwalt to Kopp, 16 February 1904, I.A.25.k.130, AAW. See also Stephan, 9–13; Glensk, “Walna rozprawa kleru z prasą śląskiej endecji,” StudiaŚląskie 47 (1989), 223–25; Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 119–20. 169. Glensk, “Walna,” (229–33) provides the most detailed narrative of the trial, based largely on Polish press sources. Summaries of each witness’s testimony are in Stephan, 269–74. 170. Seyda to G.V.A., statement by Korfanty et al., 24 March 1904, I.A.25.k.130, AAW. 171. Report of “confidential consultations” in Beuthen, 11 April 1904; Skowronek to Kopp, 13 June 1904, I.A.25.k.130, AAW; Glensk, “Walna,” 236. 172. There was considerable discussion about whether parishioners were committing a sin by revealing the contents of their own confessions (Glensk, 230–31). 173. “Die Niederlage des oberschlesischen Klerus,” Berliner Tageblatt, 28 March 1904; Stephan, 302–5. 174. By early 1903, some fifteen thousand copies of Górnoślązak and Głos Śląski were circulating (Orzechowski, Narodowa, 139–41). Although there were isolated reports of parishioners responding to

clerical exhortation by ceasing to read Górnoślązak —for example, the editors reported some fifty subscription cancellations in the parish of Rosdzin following a condemnation by Father Abramski (Glensk, 203)—there was no overall decline in the readership of the National Democratic press in this period. 175. Zalenze, 1 October 1903, AV Myslowitz, vol. 8, AAK. The visitation reports from 1903 and 1904 for the other parishes of the deanery offer very similar judgments. 176. AV Myslowitz, vol. 8, AAK. Stephan reported an increase of thirty-two hundred Easter communions from 1902 to 1903 in Siemianowitz, Korfanty’s hometown and the scene of some of the strongest antiCenter agitation (306). 177. Complaints about Father Wojtok (Rosdzin) refusing to offer absolution involved parishioners that he referred to as, respectively, “a public sinner” (who had defended Górnoślązak loudly in the church office) and “a dogged agitator” for Górnoślązak (Stephan, 277– 78). 178. According to a police report from late 1902, there were only sixteen postal subscriptions for Górnoślązak and only forty-two other subscriptions for Polish-language publications in the city of Köngishütte. In the more rural county of Pless, by contrast, there were one hundred subscriptions for Górnoślązak and some thirteen hundred subscriptions for other Polish-language publications. See Michalkiewicz, part 2, 325–26. 179. Quoted in Warski, 176–78. See also Bjork’s “Puzzle.” 180. Kapica to Kopp, 27 March 1904, I.A.25.k.130, AAW. 181. Glensk referred to this change as “undoubtedly a regression,” which “deprived Górnoślązak of one of its essential characteristics: anticlericalism,” “Walna,” (240). 182. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 8 October 1905, APB. 183. Gellner, Nations, 78.

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CHAPTER THREE The Retreat from Nationalist Politics Between the Reichstag elections of 1898 and 1907, Upper Silesia had experienced a stunning political realignment. At the beginning of this period, the region’s politics were broadly comparable to Catholic areas of western Germany: the Center party enjoyed overwhelming support but was beginning to face some inroads by the Social Democrats in working-class constituencies.1 Over the next two election cycles, however, this incipient rivalry between “black” and “red” ideological camps was overshadowed by a very different kind of dichotomy: the antagonism between the German and Polish national movements. The Center party constituency collapsed, as a majority of its voters defected to the Polish party while many others turned to the German national parties. Many workers who had voted for the Social Democrats in 1898 also now threw their support to the Polish party. By 1907, in the nine linguistically mixed electoral districts of Upper Silesia, 70 percent of voters were casting “national” votes (46 percent for the Polish party, 24 percent for the German national parties), pushing the nationally mixed Center and Social Democratic parties into the position of also-rans.2 As had long been the case in other German-Polish borderlands, elections in Upper Silesia now seemed destined to become a kind of second census, a test of turnout and demographic strength between well-defined German and Polish populations.3 Page 129 → In the remaining years before the outbreak of the First World War, however, the trend toward clearly delineated national camps in Upper Silesia did not play out as many had anticipated. In the subsequent Reichstag election of 1912, the total “national” vote in the region fell from 70 percent to 55 percent (with the German parties slipping from 24 percent to 20 percent and the Polish party from 46 percent to 35 percent). The two parties that struck a more nationally ambiguous profile, in the meantime, enjoyed an unmistakable renaissance. The Center rebounded from 23 percent to 30 percent, while the Social Democrats surged from 7 percent to 15 percent.4 This sharp decline in support for national parties turned on its head the conventional wisdom of just a few years earlier. Father Jan Kapica, the moderate polonophile clergyman who had defected to the Polish party just before the 1907 election, now wrote to Cardinal Kopp that after seeing the most recent electoral returns, the leaders of the Polish party had “lost their heads.” Katolik editor Adam Napieralski, he reported, “admits the defeat of his politics” and “feels that he is out of his depth.”5 A few months later, Kapica left the Polish faction and reembraced the Center party as a “masterpiece of political wisdom” that promised to reconcile various social interests as well as various nationalities within the German constitutional system.6 Why were appeals to national solidarity, which had seemed the irresistible wave of the future in 1907, being greeted with indifference by many Upper Silesians only a few years later? I will be arguing in this chapter that the decline in the resonance of nationalist programs over this period was linked to the mounting difficulties that Upper Silesian Catholics were facing in trying to use mutually exclusive national categories to make sense of their lived experiences. At the beginning of the century, Polish activists had been extraordinarily successful in defining the Polish cause as synonymous with the defense of a wide range of local interests and values: the use of their mother tongue; better wages, healthier working conditions, and lower prices; freedom of religious association and devotional practice. For a smaller constituency of bilingual, middle-class Upper Silesians, German nationality was associated with a similarly broad constellation of positivePage 130 → connotations: educational and professional advancement; social respectability; modern forms of entertainment and recreation. These expansive meanings of “Polishness” and “Germandom” were, however, highly fragile constructs, and the missteps and contradictions of national activism during the final years before the outbreak of the First World War did much to discredit the sense of promise that had been linked to each of the rival national causes. The tone of radical opposition to the status quo that had characterized the Polish national movement in the heady days of 1903 diminished over the next decade, as most of Upper Silesia’s Polish Reichstag representatives socialized into the still rather conservative world of the Polish parliamentary club and as the network of Polish associations assumed an ever more familiar

and institutionalized form. Many working-class Upper Silesians now looked once again to Social Democracy as a more plausible expression of their interests. Simultaneously, the new bout of anti-Catholic rhetoric and anti-Polish exceptional legislation unleashed from Berlin in these years (particularly under the Bülow Bloc of 1906–9) convinced many bilingual middle-class Catholics that the nationally ambiguous Center party, rather than the German nationalist parties, would most reliably protect their ability to integrate into and participate fully in the Wilhelmine Rechtstaat. While the usefulness of the national parties as vehicles of broad social and economic interests was coming under growing doubt, the core issue of each nationalist program—language—was proving perhaps the greatest stumbling block to winning or maintaining the support of many Upper Silesians. During these years, the linguistic policy of the German government was becoming ever more punitive and restrictive, aiming at a complete elimination of the Polish language from public life in territories that were deemed to have become irreversibly “German.” The Polish national press, in the meantime, continued to denounce any use of the German language by people of Polish background, particularly in the religious sphere, as a sordid betrayal of their nationality. The mounting stridency of each position revealed how far out of step these visions of linguistic absolutism were from the day-to-day practice of most Upper Silesians, particularly those of the younger generation, who could at least passively understand and often actively use both standard German and standard Polish in addition to local Polish dialects laden with German-derived vocabulary. This complex pattern of linguistic practice, paradoxically the result of the simultaneous successes of both germanizing and polonizing nationalization efforts, created a growing potential constituency for a supranational politicsPage 131 → in what had so recently seemed like a no-man’sland between nationalist camps.

The Whole Great Catholic Family: The Center-Polish Compromise of 1908 Within Upper Silesia, the Reichstag election in January 1907 had been dominated by a bitter intra-Catholic feud, as Centrist priests and Polish priests faced off in almost every linguistically mixed district. In the rest of the German Empire, however, the dynamics of the campaign had been rather different. The new election had been precipitated when Chancellor Bernhard Bülow, facing growing outrage from German nationalist circles about Centrist criticism of Germany’s colonial policy, renounced the government’s long-standing cooperation with the Center and dissolved the Reichstag. The ensuing campaign pitted a nationalist coalition of conservative and liberal parties, the so-called Bülow Bloc, against an array of “enemies of the Reich,” including the Social Democrats, the Center, and the Poles. The Bülow Bloc proved highly successful in mobilizing Protestant voters (particularly leftleaning liberal swing voters) against the “red” and “black” threats, but the employment of sharply anti-Catholic rhetoric during the campaign only inspired the Center’s core electorate to rally around the confessional banner.7 Indeed, recent research suggests that a slightly higher percentage of eligible Catholics voted for the Center in 1907 than in 1874, at the height of the Kulturkampf.8 Among Upper Silesian Catholics, as we have seen, this unifying effect was conspicuously absent during the election campaign itself, as national divisions resulted in the Center’s worst regional showing since 1871. Nonetheless, the sharp exacerbation of confessional tensions throughout the empire and the reversion of the Center to an oppositional role had an important, albeit delayed, impact on the strategy of local Center party leaders in the aftermath of the party’s abysmal performance. It was now painfully obvious to even the most diehard Centrists that some kind of accommodation with either the Polish party or the German national parties was necessary if the party was going to escape from the withering “crossPage 132 → fire” of recent election cycles. Many of the Center’s aristocratic leaders would no doubt have preferred reaching an agreement with the German Conservatives, but the Conservatives remained committed to the new alliance with the National Liberals and Progressives, making any cooperation with the Center, at least for the moment, unthinkable.9 The sudden exclusion of the Center from its accustomed position as power broker led the editors of the clerical organ Gazeta Katolicka to take a break from polemics with the Polish national press and print a series of articles asking, “Are we being threatened by a new Kulturkampf ?” Although they cautioned that “one must not play around” with such loaded terms, the editors strongly suggested that the answer was yes. They ascribed divisions in the ranks of

Upper Silesian Catholics to “manipulations” by the reigning Protestant majority and called on readers to “just look at how war is prepared against us in the Protestant camp.”10 This “new Kulturkampf” did not involve anything like the systematic legal restrictions on the Catholic church that had been instituted in the 1870s, but the Bülow Bloc’s vigorous pursuit of exceptional legislation against the Poles struck most German Catholics, including some of the most conservative, as a reckless expansion of state power reminiscent of the May Laws. The two measures that aroused the broadest outrage were the Association Law and the Expropriation Act, each passed (by the Reichstag and the Prussian Landtag, respectively) in the spring of 1908. The Association Law, though quite liberal in many respects, contained draconian restrictions on the use of the Polish language at public meetings. With the exception of meetings preceding a Reichstag or Landtag election (which were governed by a separate imperial law) and with a twenty-year grace period for counties in which more than 60 percent of the inhabitants spoke Polish as their mother tongue, the new law stipulated that public meetings had to be conducted exclusively in German. The Expropriation Act empowered the Royal Colonization Commission, which previously had been authorized only to make voluntary land purchases, to expropriate up to seventy thousand hectares from Polish landowners if necessary to achieve the goal of accumulating more land in German hands. Even CardinalPage 133 → Kopp felt obliged to condemn the Expropriation Act in the Prussian House of Lords as an expression of “the principle of state omnipotence.”11 Deep distrust of the Bülow Bloc’s agenda played a decisive role in facilitating a rapprochement between the Center and the Polish camp. New elections for the Prussian Landtag were approaching, and the income-weighted franchise and use of open balloting in these elections gave liberal-affiliated industrial employers a disproportionate advantage. If the Catholic opposition remained divided and demoralized, the bloc had an opportunity to win seats that would have been well beyond its reach under a one man, one vote system. Despite such an obvious incentive for both the Center and the Poles to conclude a compromise, negotiations between the two sides were stormy and protracted. While Napieralski, Father Kapica, and the polonophile Catholic integralist Count Hans von Oppersdorff strongly backed an agreement, many prominent parish priests remained suspicious of any accommodation with Polish “radicalism”; and beyond Upper Silesia, there were thorny issues to be worked out on the matter of Polish candidacies in the Ruhr.12 Nonetheless, in mid-April, Katolik announced the conclusion of a formal electoral agreement between the Center and the Polish party, according to which the Center would defer to the Polish party in three Upper Silesian electoral districts (the same number that the Center had lost to German-national candidates in the previous election cycle). The Polish candidates chosen reflected the full range of Polish national sentiment in the region, from the conciliatory, Napieralski-allied Father Kapica to the National Democratic lawyer and activist Marian Seyda, who a few years earlier had served as Górnoślązak’s legal counsel during its courtroom struggles with Cardinal Kopp and the Upper Silesian clergy.13 Given the history of nasty polemical exchange between the two sides and the difficulty of negotiating the agreement, the Center-Polish compromise of 1908 might have been expected to be a rather frosty and formal strategic arrangement. But the ensuing electoral campaign produced an unexpected display of both elite and popular passion for the revival of a unified “Catholic cause.” Wojciech Korfanty, for years the nemesis of thePage 134 → local clergy, enthusiastically embraced the compromise with the Center.14 Even before the conclusion of a systematic electoral agreement, Korfanty told a Polish electoral rally in Kattowitz that the Center was “our friend” in religious matters and that the battle cry of the upcoming elections had to be “For the Center and with it, hand in hand.” “Wherever there is no Pole in contention,” he continued, “one must choose a Centrist; I will personally vote for one—that I promise here publicly.”15 Over the next month and a half, Korfanty repeatedly appeared at joint Polish-Center rallies, often paired with prominent Centrist priests.16 At one Center rally in Kattowitz attended by Korfanty, most of the speeches seemed to have been in German, but Max Giemsa, an architect running as the Center candidate in the urban district of Beuthen-Königshütte-Kattowitz, pointedly stressed the importance of linguistic parity. If before now there has been an opposition between German and Polish Catholics, it was only the result of Hakatist machinations. . . . A certain Hakatist newspaper wrote about me that now, with the Center concluding an alliance with the Poles, I will have to learn Polish. That, thank God, I do not need to do. I speak Polish, since I attended a Polish elementary school and was born on Upper

Silesian soil. Gentlemen, I am not ashamed of that at all. I speak Polish with Poles and German with Germans.17

Upper Silesia’s clergy, after so many years of vainly scolding recalcitrant parishioners about the dangers of national radicalism, now warmed to the opportunity to strike a more populist profile. Gazeta Katolicka interrupted its criticism of the Polish national press to call on workers to resist any electoral pressure being placed on them from liberal employers. In this vein, the editors reprinted a stylized dialogue, first run in Katolik, featuring an everyman miner, Jan Rzymala, defying the appeals of his overseer (Stajger) to vote for the bloc.18 A similar message was being conveyed in public meetings and from the pulpit. At a Center rally in which FatherPage 135 → Skowronek attacked the National Liberal candidate Hans Voltz as “an enemy of Catholics and a Pole-baiter,” officials of Counts Schaffgotsch and Ballestrem, both Catholics and Center supporters, told the crowd that they would employ up to three hundred additional workers if these were punished by liberal employers for voting for the Center-Polish compromise.19 In his Sunday announcements before the voting, Father Skowronek reminded his parishioners again that employers “do not have the right to violate a human conscience!”20 Voter turnout for the Landtag elections was exceptionally high in Upper Silesia that year (almost twice the normal rate), and the Center-Polish compromise won decisively in every race, in most cases garnering a majority of the vote in each of the three voting classes.21 At a victory rally in Kattowitz, Father Victor Schmidt effusively thanked Korfanty and Napieralski for their “effective support of our cause.” Given the stormy history between Father Schmidt and Korfanty, their present cooperation offered a particularly poignant symbol of familial reconciliation. Older priests gushed that they had never seen such enthusiasm and internal concord among Catholics, even at the height of the Kulturkampf.22 This sense of euphoria was still evident a month later at the dedication of a new Franciscan monastery at Panewnik, just south of Kattowitz. Although the radical Polish press had earlier denounced the planned monastery as a “fortress of germanization,” designed to draw Upper Silesian pilgrims away from more Polish-national destinations, such as Częstochowa or Cracow, both the Polish and German Catholic press now celebrated the dedication as a reunion of “the whole great Catholic family.”23 An estimated eighty to one hundred thousand local Catholics gathered for the event, which featured a dedication ceremony, a mass, a Polish sermon by one of the Franciscan fathers, and a German sermon by Cardinal Kopp. Reflecting his growing displeasure with the agenda of the Bülow Bloc, Kopp lauded his audience’s skepticism toward “worldly culture.” Page 136 → One boasts of doing much for the cultural uplift of Upper Silesia and of spreading enlightenment and civilization among the Upper Silesian people. One shows off the work in the schools and founds popular libraries and popular theaters. The Upper Silesian people do not reject these efforts. They take advantage of them, in so far as they are worthwhile. But the Upper Silesian people wish that their worldly conditions of life would be improved in other areas and in other ways. . . . [They] have the right to hope for and expect this. The sweat of their brows and the calluses of their hands give them that right. . . . The Upper Silesian people will gladly join in cultural progress, but they demand that they be permitted to do so in their own way [in seiner Eigenart].24 Katolik quoted Kopp with relish.25 Napieralski had no illusions that the bishop of Breslau was suddenly becoming a Polish nationalist, but Kopp did seem to be demonstrating a growing appreciation for the argument— repeatedly advanced in Upper Silesia’s Polish press and by many local priests—that the Polish language provided a valuable prophylactic against the onslaught of liberalism and modernism. In German nationalist circles, the rapprochement between the Center and the Polish party was greeted with alarm. One publicist, describing the 1908 Landtag elections, wrote, “[W]e saw the Centrists busily operating everywhere in the Eastern Marches . . . as the publicity officers for the Polish colors.”26 Nationalist outrage about the CenterPolish compromise was soon translated into punitive actions against voters by German patriotic organizations and

industrial employers. Within days after the balloting, reports began to appear in the Catholic press of employers laying off or docking the wages of workers who were known to have supported the compromise. When Father Skowronek sent a complaint about such actions to the management of the nearby Ferdinand mine, the mine director responded that “foreign persons” should not interfere in the enterprise’s employment decisions. The Bogutschütz pastor fired off another letter to the director. “You seem to forget,” he wrote, “that only the hands of your workers belong to you—their consciences belong to me, in so far as theyPage 137 → are my parishioners. Here am I not some ‘foreigner’ but their pastor.”27 In another case of “electoral terrorism,” a factory worker in Laurahütte was reportedly fired for attending a meeting of representatives of Catholic workers associations in Berlin and for agitating for the Center during the Landtag campaign.28 Perhaps the best-publicized instance of postelection retribution involved the expulsion of ten officials from the veterans association in the town of Rybnik because they had voted for Polish candidate Marian Seyda. The Prussian governing council of the veterans associations backed the local group’s decision, arguing that since Seyda was a leader of the Sokol, the militant Polish-national gymnastics organization, anyone who voted for him must be a “promoter of the Great Polish movement.”29 The expelled veterans were vigorously defended in the German Catholic press, which insisted that Seyda—unlike the Social Democrats, it was stressed—had provided an “impeccable declaration of loyalty” to the state.30 Emboldened by success in the Landtag elections and embittered by subsequent harassment, the Center-Polish compromise persisted more or less intact over the next two years. The focus of the alliance during this period was on the field of municipal politics, traditionally the weak link in the hegemony of political Catholicism within Upper Silesia. As in elections for the Landtag, an income-weighted franchise and open balloting severely handicapped worker-oriented oppositional movements, resulting in virtually uncontested control of many smaller municipalities by industrial employers and their officials. In larger cities, however, electoral demographics were more complicated and, for political Catholicism, more promising. Many voters in the second class, as well as the vast majority of voters in the third class, were Catholic and potentially receptive to a politics based on confessional solidarity. In the city of Beuthen, for example, a Center-Polish compromise, remarkably maintained even during the divisivePage 138 → years between 1903 and 1907, almost managed to win control of the municipal government from the anticlerical parties.31 Liberal control of the city council in Kattowitz was never in such doubt, since Catholics constituted only a small minority in the first and second classes, but the city nonetheless witnessed fierce partisan battles over the largely symbolic prize of winning the third class.32 The contest in November 1909 pitted a unified Catholic slate of Center and Polish candidates against a German liberal slate supported by Progressives and National Liberals. Voters in the third class, who were both overwhelmingly German-speaking and overwhelmingly Catholic, faced two very different framings of what the election was all about. German- and Polish-language Catholic newspapers called on “all of us Catholics, of German as well as Polish tongue, to rise up unanimously” against liberal hegemony. Focusing particularly on the defense of confessional schools, Catholic publicists emphasized that the campaign was a choice not between “Polishness or Germanness” but, rather, between “Christianity and unChristianity, justice and injustice.”33 The campaign spearheaded by the Progressives and National Liberals, by contrast, highlighted their candidates’ experience in municipal government as well as their impeccable German patriotism. “Whatever Kattowitz is,” one liberal electoral appeal stated, “it has become as a German city.”34 Playing on unease among Jewish voters, liberal publicists also highlighted the potential threat posed by (Catholic) confessional politics to peaceful relations among the city’s religious communities. Page 139 → This contest divided the third class of Kattowitz voters nearly evenly. The Center-Polish compromise won a narrow plurality in the first round of elections, forcing a second round of balloting in which the small Social Democratic electorate and previous nonvoters would prove decisive. In a runoff that featured extraordinarily high turnout for a municipal election (75 percent), liberal candidates registered narrow victories in districts where they faced Center opponents and more substantial margins where their rivals were Poles.35 This discrepancy between the performance of Center and Polish candidates was due, at least in part, to the warnings that superiors had issued to civil servants who had voted for Polish candidates in the first round. Such threats of disciplinary action were

sufficient to persuade most civil servants to switch their votes in the second round, but when fifteen of the eightyfour employees of the imperial post office (as well as one employee of the imperial state bank) who had originally voted for the Polish candidates defiantly continued to back the Poles, they were promptly transferred to another region.36 Several schoolteachers and railroad employees were also reported to have been transferred for voting for Polish or even for Centrist candidates.37 The crackdown on civil servants provoked a storm of protests in Catholic circles. The city’s senior Catholic priest, Father Schmidt, who had been accused in the liberal press of consorting with Polish “traitors,” took up collections among the faithful for “victims of terrorism” who faced punishment for their votes.38 In neighboring Bogutschütz, Father Skowronek told parishioners of the “outrageous injustice” of liberal newspapers calling for government action against “Catholic teachers true to their convictions and of great merit.”39 The Oberschlesische Volksstimme referred to teachers who faced disciplinary action as “martyrs for their convictions” and asked why the liberal press was not standing up for their rights.40 In the Reichstag, the Center and Polish parties jointly submitted an interpellation protesting the measures taken against the Catholic civil servants, with Center delegate Count Hans von Oppersdorff and Polish delegate Wojciech Korfanty delivering the main parliamentary speeches inPage 140 → support of the protest. Oppersdorff mocked the idea that a few postal workers voting for a Polish city councilman represented a threat to the Reich. Korfanty argued that the “ultimate cause” of the hostility toward the Polish candidates was the fact that “we Poles are Catholic.” The confessional motif was further underlined as he described the plight of one of the postal employees in question, who used to go to mass daily at 6:00 a.m. in his hometown of Kattowitz but was now being transferred to a distant location that did not even have a Catholic church.41 While the Bülow Bloc was serving as an effective foil for the (re)creation of a cohesive Catholic confessional politics, it was not always clear which of the heterogeneous political forces within the bloc was being highlighted as the primary threat. An unwieldy string of epithets was employed, in various contexts and combinations, to describe the bloc: “Hakatist,” “liberal,” “conservative,” “Jewish,” “Protestant,” “Lutheran,” “pagan,” “masonic.” Of these discursive options, characterizations of the bloc as primarily a confessional-Protestant vehicle were rare in the Center press and more common, but still muted, in the Polish press. Both the Center and Polish parties still looked to the overwhelmingly Protestant and agrarian Conservative party as a potential parliamentary ally on such issues as school policy and taxation. Besides, the Conservatives represented an insignificant political force in the industrialized counties and urban centers that constituted Upper Silesia’s most hotly contested political territory. A stronger current of rhetoric against the Bülow Bloc focused on the Left Liberals or Progressives. With their secular outlook and support for nonconfessional schools, they were considered the antithesis of the “Christian worldview” and the most insidious force within the bloc. In the run-up to the Kattowitz city council elections, for example, Catholic leaders took great umbrage at a meeting organized by the Free-Thinkers League to protest the recent execution of the Spanish anticlerical activist Ferrer. Catholic publicists complained that at the meeting, several Progressive city council candidates had shared the stage with a Social Democratic speaker who railed against the Catholic church and called for a mass exodus of laity from its ranks. It was, they argued, vivid proof of the Progressives’ contempt for Catholicism.42 In parliamentary discussions and in somePage 141 → Catholic newspapers, it was stressed that this threat to the “Christian worldview” was posed by a “liberal worldview” rather than by another religious community, but in everyday Catholic discourse, criticism of liberalism was often closely intertwined with attacks on the urban Jewish community that formed the Progressive party’s most reliable constituency.43 The Oberschlesische Zeitung referred to the majority on the Beuthen city council as “Jewishliberal,” and both the Polish Catholic press and some parish priests also routinely referred to German liberal newspapers as “Jewish.”44 In addition, the intermittent campaign to “buy from your own” (kupuj u swoich), conducted by the Polish Catholic press and supported by some parish priests, had an anti-Semitic, as well as an anti-German, edge to it.45 These strands of cultural and economic anti-Semitism had been a feature of Catholic discourse in the region for many years, but there is some evidence that the frequency and boldness of anti-Semitic rhetoric increased during this period of renewed Catholic solidarity and reduced German-Polish tension. In 1908, for example, a Jewish correspondent from Kattowitz wrote to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums to note that after many years of religious peace in the city, “some anti-Semitic swamp gas” had surfaced during the municipal

election campaign of the previous year.46 It remained more the exception than the rule, however, for Upper Silesian Catholic publicists to cast either the Jews or the Progressive party as the driving force within the Bülow Bloc. That role was reserved for the administrativePage 142 → elite of the industrial region, which was overwhelmingly National Liberal or Free Conservative in political affiliation but often described in the Catholic press simply as “liberal” or—especially, but not exclusively, in Polish-language publications—as “Hakatist.” In the Reichstag, Korfanty pointed to this group as the dominant voice of liberalism in the region, dismissing the “Upper Silesian variety of Progressives” as the “water carriers” of the “pseudo liberal, Hakatist, great-capitalist” party, which “day after day cried for the help of the government.”47 These state and industrial cadres were not all “Hakatists” in a literal sense (i.e., members of the Eastern Marches Society), but unlike at least some urban Progressives, they consistently supported state-led germanization efforts, and most also shared a common sociological profile that marked them as “alien” in the eyes of Catholic Upper Silesians. High-ranking state officials and managers of heavy industrial concerns in Upper Silesia were overwhelmingly Protestant and usually came from outside of the region.48 The general directors of mining and metallurgy companies, who often stood as the joint candidates of the German national parties for Reichstag and Landtag elections, provided particularly potent and recognizable symbols of the convergence of linguistic, confessional, and regional discrimination with economic exploitation by what was commonly known as the “industrialist party” (Hüttenpartei).49 The prominence of state officials and directors of mining and metallurgy concerns in the Catholic Feindbild was, to a considerable extent, a reinvigoration of a long-standing tradition. It will be recalled that during the Kulturkampf, miners had interpreted the “K.G.” (standing for Königsgrube) that had been stamped on new worksite documentation as standing for the initials of two local villains: the Old Catholic priest Pawel Kamiński and the general director Friedrich Wilhelm Grundmann. But if the enemies newly united under the rubric of the Bülow Bloc were relatively familiar, the heroes of the Center-Polish compromise in these yearsPage 143 → represented a subtle but significant departure from previous patterns. During the 1870s, Catholic priests stood as the marquee symbols of opposition, often facing fines, imprisonment, or exile for defying government regulations. After the turn of the century, radical Polish editors emerged in a similar role, enduring draconian legal penalties that were, ironically, often due to impertinence toward the Catholic clergy. The intra-Catholic rapprochement of 1908–10 allowed both priests and editors to reclaim or maintain (respectively) this oppositional status, but the confrontations with the Bülow Bloc highlighted an additional sort of martyr. The people who faced the most highprofile sanctions for supporting the Center-Polish compromise were laymen of the lower middle class—officials of veterans organizations, postal and bank employees, schoolteachers, senior miners— who demonstrated a strong attachment to the “Catholic cause” and a certain sense of regional particularism but who, whatever their linguistic background, were now ensconced in a German-language milieu and (in most cases) in careers of service to the German state. These men, in other words, had been punished for voting for “Great Polish agitators” but were, in fact, much more suitable models of the ideal Centrist than of the ideal national Pole. While the Center party press and the Catholic clergy looked on membership in a veterans association or a career as a schoolteacher as entirely compatible with being a good Catholic—indeed, had repeatedly demanded “confessional parity” in such pursuits—Polish national activists had made it abundantly clear that neither was compatible with being a good Pole.50 Assuming that at least some of the veterans and civil servants who were disciplined for voting for the Center-Polish compromise were “germanized” Upper Silesians of Polish descent, they were highly awkward heroes for the Polish cause, scarcely more suitable as Polish national role models than they were as German national role models. Indeed, whereas the Polish national press tended to treat these stories as generalized examples of “Hakatist” abuse, the German-language Center press elaborated sympathetically and at length on the dilemmas of Catholic civil servants. In 1909, for example, the Oberschlesische Volksstimme printed a number of articles by or about Catholic teachers in primary schools, describing their difficulties in teaching children German when the use of Polish was so restricted, the official hostilityPage 144 → they encountered when they tried to organize along confessional lines, and the disrespect they received from hard-line German nationalists.51 The prominence of German and germanized Catholic laymen on the front lines of the Center-Polish compromise

was far from the only sign that the reconciliation of the “whole great Catholic family” might be benefiting the interests of the Center more than those of the Polish party. Although, as we have seen, Korfanty and the radical wing of the Polish party heartily endorsed the necessity of an agreement with the Center, the radical press nonetheless kept up a steady drumbeat of warnings that the new spirit of cooperation was providing opportunities for parish priests and other Center activists to, as one Polish editor put it, “blur the boundary between the Poles and the Center.”52 Already a few weeks after the Landtag elections of 1908, the editors of Polak complained that Center organizers were inviting all of the electors who had voted for the party to subsequent Center meetings, even though many of them were Polish electors who had only cast ballots for the Center as party of the compromise agreement.53 Also worrying to Polish radicals was the growing coordination between the Center press and the Polish press, institutionalized in a “committee of understanding” formed in November 1908 by the German Catholic Augustine Association (Augustinusverein) and the Association of Polish Publishers and Editors. The committee brought together Centrist and Polish editors from throughout the empire, but over the next year, the relationship between Adam Napieralski and the Center press became suspiciously intimate. By November 1909, the Katolik editor was not just cooperating with the Augustinusverein but also attending their meetings in Breslau, feeding speculation that Napieralski was laying the groundwork for defection from the Polish party back to the Center.54 The erosion of the line demarcating where the Upper Silesian Center party ended and the Polish party began could not help but exacerbate the latent divisions that ran through the region’s Polish national movement. Although the Polish party in Upper Silesia had been more or less unified inPage 145 → its support for cooperation with the Center under the pressure of a hostile Bülow Bloc government, it was always clear that the moderate Napieralskiled wing of the movement approached this cooperation with more conviction than the more radical (mostly National Democratic) wing led by Korfanty. By the summer of 1909, as a reconfiguration of parliamentary forces in Berlin was leading to the collapse of the Bülow Bloc, a new round of political maneuvering cast these internal Polish divisions in stark relief, underlining not only the tenuousness of the unity of Upper Silesia’s Polish activist elite but also the fragility of the mass constituency that had coalesced under the banner of Polish nationalism in the Reichstag election of 1907.

Conflict, Consolidation, and Crisis in the Polish National Movement In their earlier polemical battles with the Katolik camp, National Democratic activists had pilloried Adam Napieralski for his reluctance to abandon the Center party and join the parliamentary club of Polish delegates from Posen and West Prussia. It was more than a little ironic, then, that Napieralski, the skeptical latecomer to the Polish party, would emerge in subsequent years as one of the parliamentary caucus’s defining strategists, while Korfanty, who had led the charge for incorporating Upper Silesians into the Polish national movement, became increasingly alienated and isolated from his Polish colleagues. The occasion for Korfanty’s marginalization within the Polish party was the prolonged, byzantine parliamentary maneuvering during the first half of 1909 that precipitated the collapse of the Bülow Bloc and the emergence of the so-called Black-Blue Bloc, based on the Conservative party and the Center. During Reichstag deliberations over imperial tax reform, the latter two parties had joined forces to back increases in consumption taxes rather than inheritance taxes, signaling the defection of the Conservatives from the Bülow Bloc and effectively breaking Bülow’s parliamentary majority. 55 The Polish party played a supporting role in this change of government, consistently voting with the Center and the Conservatives on tax issues. Such a policy might seem to suggest the lingering influence of Posen’s landed gentry, who had an economic interest in diverting any tax increases from property owners to consumers.Page 146 → But one of architects of the Polish Circle’s new “constructive” policy was, in fact, Napieralski. Soon after his election to the Reichstag, the Katolik editor had established himself as a skillful, albeit quiet, parliamentarian, serving for a time as the Polish Club secretary and later as one of two Polish representatives on the crucial finance committee. Napieralski’s largely working-class constituents obviously had little to gain directly from the conservative tax reform, but the overriding priority for him, as for a majority of his colleagues, was reestablishing close ties with the Center and driving from power a coalition that had spearheaded anti-Polish legislation of unprecedented severity.56 The Polish party’s cooperation with the Center and the Conservatives provoked a backlash among National

Democratic activists, who, in May 1909, organized themselves for the first time as a formal political faction, the Polish Democratic Society. Korfanty was among the founding members of the organization, and the two newspapers he now edited, Polak and Kurjer Śląski, reflected the National Democrats’ discontent with the conciliationist turn of Polish parliamentary activity.57 But such an oppositional stance was exceptionally difficult in the world of Prussian Polish politics, which placed a premium on the preservation of national solidarity. Indeed, the Polish party enforced an unusually severe form of party discipline, forbidding active dissent on any policy that had been determined by a majority of members. For Korfanty in particular, who, more than anyone else, had fused championship of the Polish cause with working-class economic interests, it was an uncomfortable dilemma. He attempted to finesse the issue by abstaining on many of the votes on tax policy, thus technically not breaking the unanimity of the Polish party but making clear his disagreement with Napieralski and the other three Upper Silesian Polish delegates (all Catholic priests) who were “blindly following him.”58 Instead, this approach only succeeded in confirming his reputation for recklessness among moderate Poles and Centrists while simultaneously undermining his populist credentials among his working-class constituency. Napieralski allies were keen to play up the image of a “radical” but isolatedPage 147 → Korfanty, to make the point to potential Center-party allies that “the peaceful elements” in the Polish Circle “fortunately form the majority in the Polish camp.”59 In an article in Katolik, for example, Father Kapica described Korfanty as someone “who talks and showers abuse—and the Hakatists laugh and forge new exceptional laws.” Napieralski, by contrast, “keeps quiet and works,” while “the Hakatists get angry and the Bloc collapses.”60 But at the same time that Korfanty was being criticized for rhetorical bomb throwing, critics in his home constituency—disillusioned by his failure to oppose tax hikes on consumer products and by his newspapers’ continued pessimism about strike action by workers—were denouncing him as a sellout to the establishment.61 At a rally in the working-class suburb of Paulsdorf, Korfanty was greeted with cries of “Away with you, traitor,” “Lay down your mandate,” and “Give us bread.”62 Over the next year, similar heckling was reported in other nearby communities, all of them areas that had given strong support to Korfanty in his three previous election campaigns. Some Polish organizers felt compelled to start issuing prohibitions of hostile agitators at their rallies, an embarrassing defensive measure for a movement that had built its initial populist momentum by disrupting Center party gatherings.63 Korfanty and his colleagues also resorted to increasingly xenophobic attacks on the “German comrades” and “Jews” who were accused of orchestrating the socialist offensive.64 The portrayal of the socialists as nationally and confessionally alien seems to have impeded their ability to translate disgruntlement with the Polish national party into any immediate demonstrable gains for their own cause. Both the German SPD and the Polish PPS remained organizationally weak in the region, with party and union membership and newspaper circulation all remaining stuck at the level of a few thousand.65 It was also,Page 148 → of course, inherently difficult for the Social Democrats to make much of a show of electoral strength between Reichstag elections, given the income-weighted nature of the franchise in Landtag and municipal voting. Nonetheless, many German government and Centrist observers foresaw the socialists as the ultimate beneficiaries of working-class defections from the Polish national camp. One government report argued in the summer of 1910, “Social Democracy has already assumed the inheritance of Korfanty.”66 Korfanty’s uncharacteristic difficulties in rallying his core constituents in the industrial region exacerbated his more chronic difficulties in keeping his newspaper enterprises afloat. A few years earlier, financial problems had forced Korfanty to sell off Górnoślązak to his competitor Napieralski, and now his latest newspapers, Polak and Kurjer Śląski, were also teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. After reviewing the various vain attempts to finance these publications through increased subscription, fund-raising among supporters, or launching other business enterprises, one Posen-based newspaper commented that although Korfanty may have had many talents, “on a commercial level he only knows fiascoes.”67 National Democratic leaders in Posen offered to purchase Polak and Kurjer Śląski, but the implicit condition was the removal of Korfanty from his position as chief editor. Instead, in mid-November 1910, Korfanty solved his financial dilemma in a way that caused a stir throughout the region and beyond: he sold his newspapers to Napieralski’s publishing empire. The sale was initially presented to the public as an act of reconciliation within the Polish camp and was followed up by a reassuring unity rally in Kattowitz featuring both Korfanty and Napieralski, but it soon became clear that

the merger was hardly an equal partnership. Polak and Kurjer Śląski were incorporated into the Katolik publishing concern based inPage 149 → Beuthen, while Korfanty himself, while maintaining his position as editor of his old newspapers, now essentially became a paid employee of Napieralski. Korfanty disavowed his National Democratic allies and committed himself to forming a unified Polish movement in Upper Silesia and to pursuing “positive work.”68 In January 1911, the two former rivals jointly launched a new political party, the Polish Party in Silesia, which closely approximated Napieralski’s old ideal of a “Polish Center”—explicitly Polish yet distinct from the Polish party in Posen and West Prussia.69 It was a remarkable strategic and ideological triumph for Napieralski, now hailed more than ever as the “newspaper king” of Upper Silesia. There were, to be sure, still a few gaps in Napieralski’s near-monopoly on Polish-language publications in the region; in addition to the ongoing operations of the socialist Gazeta Robotnicza, the remaining National Democratic activists in the region founded a new National Democratic newspaper, Gazeta Ludowa (The People’s Newspaper), in early 1911, to oppose the “provincialism” of the Napieralski-Korfanty accord.70 But with a combined circulation of over fifty thousand, the expanded Katolik -affiliated press not only was now by far the dominant force in Polish-language public opinion in Upper Silesia but also ranked among the most widely read and influential newspaper groups in the Polishspeaking world.71 The consolidation of the region’s Polish national movement under Napieralski’s leadership, however, did little to relieve the pessimism and defensiveness that prevailed in the Polish camp, the pervasive sense that the Polish national constituency was being chipped away by state-led germanization efforts and especially by the proselytizing of the Center and Social Democrats. Although the Center press had expressed modest satisfaction at the “dethroning” of Korfanty by Napieralski, there was no indication that local or provincial Center leaders were now ready to curtail their own vigorous organizational efforts and recognize Napieralski’s new PolishPage 150 → Party in Silesia as the rightful home of the region’s Polish-speaking Catholic voters.72 The Katolik press and, even more so, the new National Democratic daily Gazeta Ludowa were full of complaints about the Center’s efforts to woo Polish-speaking voters. While calling on the Centrist clergy to “give up once and for all the illusion that they can win back Upper Silesia,” Polish national activists readily admitted that Center agitation techniques were “exemplary,” citing the clergy’s vigorous distribution of brochures and leaflets, recruitment to Center-affiliated associations, and the promotion of Center party newspapers among Polish-speaking parishioners.73 Polish journalists also wrote with alarm about the prospect of mass defections to socialism among their dispirited electorate. The editors of Głos Śląski (at the time not yet part of the Katolik press empire) warned of the “dissatisfaction and deep embitterment among the broad masses of the people” following Korfanty’s apparent sellout of his political program, a disillusionment that was leading some to “turn their backs on the national movement, go over to the Social Democrats, and look with distrust on the Polish intelligentsia in Upper Silesia.”74 Either despite or because of this sense of foreboding about their external rivals, Upper Silesia’s Polish national activists entered the campaign for the Reichstag election of 1912 more or less united under the direction of Napieralski. The Katolik editor himself declined to run again for the district of Beuthen-Tarnowitz, but his closest deputy, Pawel Dombek was handpicked to succeed him. Korfanty, now thoroughly isolated and distrusted even by his previous National Democratic allies, was forced to stand down as the Polish candidate for Kattowitz-Zabrze, in favor of union leader Wojciech Sosiński; in the following year, Napieralski dispatched Korfanty to a new post at the Polish telegraph agency in Berlin, temporarily banishing him altogether from the Upper Silesian political scene.75 The remaining candidates announced by the Polish electoral committee in December 1911 were also more or less associated with Napieralski’s moderate wing of the Polish camp, including the three priests who currently served as Polish Reichstag representatives (Brandys, Jankowski, and Wajda), twoPage 151 → additional priests (Banas and Kutschka), and Count Mielżyński. Given his aristocratic credentials, the count was admittedly an awkward choice for Upper Silesia, but he was a useful ally of Napieralski in his struggle to tip the balance against the National Democrats in the Polish Circle as a whole.76 In the month leading up to the election, the Polish press mounted a vigorous campaign against the Center, the Social Democrats, and, of course, the “ Mischmasch ” of German conservative and liberal parties united under the German national electoral association. The rhetoric directed against the Center was particularly fierce: it resurrected every complaint leveled against the Centrist clergy over the previous decade (germanization through

the church, electioneering from the pulpit, etc.), and it alleged that in some districts the Center was cooperating with “Lutherans, conservatives, liberals, and all manner of Hakatists.”77 As Napieralski explained to Father Kapica, the anti-Center edge of Polish campaigning stemmed, at least in part, from a strategic calculation that he would “only fully defeat the National Democrats if his [own] press assumes a sharper language.”78 But the combative tone of Polish electoral propaganda failed to produce the desired effect. Instead, the 1912 Reichstag election proved to be a debacle for the Polish party. After winning absolute majorities in four electoral districts in 1907, the Poles now registered only one narrow victory in the first round, and their total first-round vote in the linguistically mixed part of Upper Silesia plummeted from 115,000 to less than 95,000. The district of Kattowitz-Zabrze, the scene of Korfanty’s breakthrough victory in 1903, witnessed the most spectacular losses for the Polish nationalists. Sosiski managed to win only 30 percent of the vote in the first round, a precipitous decline from the 53 percent that Korfanty had captured five years earlier. In some of the most populous working-class settlements, the Polish party’s support was cut in half.79 The results of the second round of voting followed certain familiar patterns. German nationalist voters voted for Center candidates wherePage 152 → they were in runoffs against Polish nationalist candidates, while socialist voters generally threw their support to the Poles. With these swings partially canceling each other out, the CenterPolish runoffs tended to be extremely close, with the Center winning two (including the Lublinitz-Tost-Gleiwitz seat previously held by the Polish party) and the Poles prevailing in the other two. The dynamics of the KattowitzZabzre runoff, the first ever between a Polish-national candidate and a (polonophile) socialist, were less predictable. Although much of the Center-oriented clergy and press ultimately called on their voters to support Sosinski, most Centrists and almost all German nationalist voters apparently stayed home in the runoff, and Sosinski’s initial modest edge in the first round was translated into an anticlimactic victory in the runoff.80 In the end, then, the Polish party lost one of its five seats in Upper Silesia and saw its margins in the remaining seats sharply reduced. It would have been a disappointing result for any political party, but for many Polish national activists, who had viewed the rise of the nationalist vote in Upper Silesia as the unfolding of an inexorable natural progression, it seemed little short of catastrophic. The National Democratic commentator Karol Rzepecki marveled: “[O]nly half of our brothers in flesh and bone feel connected to Polishness! How many years will pass before they all convert? Are not the current election results the beginning of a dissolution, are not the fruits of the work of two generations scattering?”81 Even allowing for Rzepecki’s interest in discrediting the leadership of Napieralski and other conciliationist leaders, his portrayal of the tenuousness of the Polish constituency, of its capacity to “dissolve” or “scatter” to the benefit of other political programs, reflected the genuine anxieties of the Polish camp during these years. These anxieties were amplified in the autumn of 1912, when the results of the 1910 census were publicized. Statistics on mother tongue suggested a precipitous decline in the percentage of Poles in the population of Upper Silesia’s industrial triangle. In the county of Kattowitz, the Polish population slipped from 71 percent in 1905 to 65 percent in 1910, while in the county of Zabrze, it plummeted from 70 percent to 51 percent.82 Polish historians have generally claimed a “high degree of falsification” in this finalPage 153 → census of the Kaiserreich, and one should, of course, take all such figures with a grain of salt.83 Self-reporting of mother tongue (or reporting by parents in the case of minors) could not exclude the potential for pressure from census takers (predominantly schoolteachers). Furthermore, the possibility of reporting both German and Polish as mother tongues gave rise to a highly elastic bilingual category, which expanded and contracted improbably across various censuses.84 But when the alarming census data were made public, contemporary Polish activists, such as Adam Napieralski, made only cursory complaints about “tendentious” elements in the statistics and the possibility of crude abuses by schoolteachers. What really disturbed the Katolik editor was the possibility that the census results were capturing “the result of effective germanization by the government.” This “effective” germanization, he made clear, involved not simple statistical manipulation but, rather, a very real transformation in popular linguistic habits and linguistic aspiration—the incitement of people, especially young people, to start “germanizing themselves voluntarily.”85 Yet another sign of pessimism and demoralization in the Katolik camp had come a few months earlier. In the

summer of 1912, Father Kapica, a Landtag representative for the Polish party since 1908, announced his return to the Center party. Noting that the rapprochement between the Center and the Polish party had always been “the foundation of my political program,” Kapica explained that the recent intensification of anti-Center and anticlerical rhetoric in Upper Silesia’s Polish press had made it impossible to remain in the Polish ranks.86 A few weeks later, in response to charges in the National Democratic press that the bellwether priest simply did not know what he wanted, Kapica published an article in the Centrist Schlesische Volkszeitung entitled “I Know What I Want,” elaborating on his previously noted normative critique of “national systems” and “racial theories” that departed from “an objective and universallyPage 154 → valid Christian law.” Perhaps even more grating to Napieralski and other Polish leaders than this sweeping condemnation of the “nationality principle” by Kapica as moralist was the hardheaded strategic calculation being made by Kapica as politician. The same priest who a few years earlier had urged his colleagues to come to terms with the advent of nationalist politics was now arguing that “the downward movement” of the Polish party in the last election “can no longer be halted.” “To be sure,” Kapica wrote, “Upper Silesian fathers are still reading Polish newspapers and balling their fists over the germanization of the Center clergy, but their sons are reading the Wanderer and happily playing ball in Jungdeutschland. ”87 While Kapica’s defection demonstrated the Polish party’s ongoing difficulties in gaining the trust of the local clergy, national activists were also struggling to maintain their credibility as defenders of working-class economic interests. The ZWP, the Polish mutual aid society that Adam Napieralski had built into a formidable proto-labor union in the 1890s, had stagnated during the early years of the twentieth century, as both internal dissension between the National Democrats and the Katolik camp and competition from Catholic-clerical and socialist rivals took their toll.88 By 1908, the ZWP’s membership had reportedly dwindled to a few thousand, and many of its leaders were looking to attach the struggling regional group to a larger organization. Rumors were rife that this would involve some kind of (re)integration into the German Catholic labor movement. Jan Matheja, a leading ZWP activist who had been attending meetings of the Christian trade unions (Gewerkschaften) in MünchenGladbach, sought just such a merger and openly defected to the Gewerkschaften when prospects for it dimmed.89 Instead, in 1909, the ZWP turned to a more nationally minded form of consolidation, merging with the Polish Trade Union (Związek Zawodowy Polski, or ZZP), based in the Ruhr. This organizational shake-up did seem to give the Polish labor movement a beneficial jolt. Membership in the new, expanded ZZP surged; among minersPage 155 → alone, the number rose from less than four thousand in 1909 to more than fifteen thousand in 1912.90 But this institutional success only increased the pressure on the ZZP to take the lead in pressing for such tangible worker demands as the eight-hour day, increased wages, and better working conditions. The spring of 1912 was a time of growing labor militancy throughout Europe, most notably in the Ruhr, where a “Triple Alliance” of the socialist Alter Verband, the ZZP, and the liberal Hirsch-Duncker union was leading a major (though ultimately unsuccessful) strike action among miners.91 Within Upper Silesia, however, ZZP leaders resisted intermittent calls from socialist activists to launch a similar action, concentrating instead on further organizational work and petitions to the Landtag. When wildcat strikes nonetheless broke out, Polish labor leaders expressed sympathy but gave no official endorsement. Only the following year, in April 1913, did the ZZP feel compelled, by the growing discontent of its rank-and-file members, to organize a strike. It soon became the largest labor action ever seen in the region, involving some sixty thousand miners and other workers by its second week. Thereafter, however, the strike quickly began to lose steam. Aside from the expected countermeasures taken by employers (blacklisting, hiring of strikebreakers), the effectiveness of the strike was severely handicapped by the ZZP’s limited strike fund, the tepid support offered by socialist union leaders, and the opposition of the Catholic labor organizations. By mid-May, the ZZP had called off the strike, and workers grudgingly began to return to their jobs.92 In the wake of the failed action, much of the dramatic increase in membership that the ZZP had experienced in anticipation of a major showdown with employers now just as quickly evaporated. From a high point of thirty thousand on the eve of the strike, membership fell to eighteen thousand by the next year, with most of the exiting workers either eschewing any labor organization or turning to the socialist unions.93 The disappointing results of the ZZP-led strike of 1913, coming on thePage 156 → heals of the Polish party’s poor showing in the 1912 Reichstag election, reinforced the sober mood of Upper Silesia’s Polish national activists on

the eve of the First World War. The Polish national movement was, to be sure, still a very formidable political and social force in the region—its program of faith, mother tongue, and popular economic interests still resonant among broad segments of the population. But some twenty-five years after Adam Napieralski first arrived in Upper Silesia to devote himself to the Polish national cause, there was little sense of having achieved the architectural permanence or solidity suggested by the oft-used metaphor of “nation building.” Indeed, in the final years before the First World War, the Katolik press was talking about the necessity of “going to the foundations” of educational work in the region to combat the onslaught of germanization, about the need for more cultural “small work” (mała praca) among a population that “in large part is still not politically experienced or educated, even in large part not yet [nationally] developed or conscious.”94 Polishness in Upper Silesia, while certainly not yet lost, now seemed destined to be locked for the foreseeable future in a tight and open-ended competition with other ideological options, including not only the opposing national cause of “Germandom” but also a resurgent socialism and a Center-party Catholicism that had only recently seemed an obsolete predecessor, rather than a serious competitor, to modern nationalism.

The Center Revival: Between “National Poles” and “Super-Germans” “Today,” Adam Napieralski wrote in a 1912 editorial, “the Center in Upper Silesia is like a person whose soul has already departed long ago. But what to do with the body? Let us give it a decent burial and let it rest in peace, commend its soul to God, and return to the living.”95 But as Napieralski and other observers well knew, Upper Silesia’s Center party, after sustaining apparently fatal wounds in the nationalist cross fire between 1903 and 1907, subsequently experienced an improbable revival. The Center’s comeback in the Reichstag election of 1912 was all the more remarkable considering that this was a grim year for the party in the German Empire as a whole. In almost every region, the Center’s unpopular cooperation withPage 157 → the Conservatives in the Black-Blue Bloc contributed to significant voter defections, primarily to the Social Democrats, who wrested away longtime Center strongholds in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Würzburg. 96 Upper Silesia’s Center, however, managed to buck this trend, improving significantly on its 1907 showing and reemerging as the leading party in the region. While some of this increase in votes was due to tactical alliances with the Conservatives, the Center’s gains in the industrial district were achieved in the teeth of opposition from all of its ideological rivals: German-national, Polish-national, and Social Democratic. The turnaround in the metal-working center of Köngishütte, the most populous city in Upper Silesia, was suggestive of the party’s progress. In 1907, the Center had been an also-ran, winning only 15 percent and badly trailing the other three parties; in 1912, it doubled its absolute vote and, with 25 percent of the total, came in at a close second behind the Social Democrats.97 What was animating the revival of a party that had, only a few years earlier, been dismissed as a hopeless anachronism, destined to be carved up into discrete national blocs and/or overwhelmed by working-class militancy? One answer was that the local parish clergy, who continued to provide the Center’s most reliable and enthusiastic cadres, finally got serious about milieu building. Local parish priests had been supporting the Center for thirty years, of course, and had been sponsoring various parish associations for even longer. But as we have seen, by the end of the nineteenth century, the clergy had adopted a deeply conflicted and at times openly hostile stance toward the most vibrant elements of the region’s developing Catholic milieu. The St. Alojzy youth groups, the ZWP, and the Katolik press all were suspected of being Trojan horses, designed to infiltrate the Catholic church with Polishnational ideas. So most priests acquiesced in the neglect or outright condemnation of these institutions while making only halfhearted and largely ineffective attempts to offer alternatives. Only in the months before and after Wojciech Korfanty’s watershed victory did this complacency start to give way to frenzied electoral agitation and organization building, spearheaded by Father Stephan. This burst of effort did little to stem the National Democratic tide in the short term, but as the Center’s fortunes hit bottom during the next few years, many younger activist priests came to the conclusion that the only way to revive the party— and rescue the moral and social influence of the clergy—was for them to commit to a more patient, systematic cultivation of parish-based devotionalPage 158 → and associational life. In an article in the Schlesische Pastoralblatt, Josef Kubis, pastor in Zalenze, urged his colleagues “to learn from [their] opponents, learn from the mistakes that have been made, and intervene in the organizations of workers before it is too late!”98 Father Siegfried Nozon, a curate in

Eintrachtshütte, struck similar themes in his own series of articles. “Catholic associational life,” he wrote, “is becoming more and more important by the day.” If priests were to have any hope of winning back young people from the radical Poles and Social Democrats, they had to learn that “the blooming and flourishing of an association [is] the measure of smart and successful pastoral work.”99 The next decade did, indeed, witness a marked upswing in associational activity. At the beginning of the century, even the parish of Bogutschütz, with an impeccably Centrist and activist pastor in Father Skowronek, had no associations categorized as “social.” By 1909, it had four, including a larger chapter of the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, the umbrella Centrist organization most active in western Germany. In neighboring Zalenze, Father Kubis founded twelve “social” associations in roughly the same period.100 If priests were coming to see the nurturing of associations as the measure of successful pastoral work, laypeople were getting the message that belonging to an association was a prerequisite for good standing within the parish community. In the 1909 Corpus Christi Day procession in the St. Mary parish of Kattowitz, participants were organized not only along lines of gender and occupation but also by formal associational membership, with each group carrying distinctive flags; those who belonged to no association at all conspicuously brought up the rear.101 Associations ran the gamut from Marian congregations to charitable societies, but the focus, as always in Upper Silesia’s industrial district, was on workers. In addition to founding new workers associations, priests and lay activists aggressively encouraged the members of existing groups to affiliate with the Verband der katholischen Arbeitervereine Nordund Ostdeutschland (the Union of Catholic Workers Associations of Northern and Eastern Germany), generally known as thePage 159 → “Berlin Verband” or simply the “Verband.” Initially, some workers associations balked at the proposition, but most eventually voted to join the umbrella group.102 In the district of Oppeln as a whole, the number of male workers affiliated with the Verband rose from about ten thousand in 1905 to over twenty-five thousand by 1909, and over the same period, forty-four hundred members were enrolled in a new, parallel organization for working women.103 Though widely disparaged as a “yellow” union that did little to challenge employers, the Berlin Verband did serve to foster intra-parochial and interparochial sociability and confessional solidarity. In 1909, a festive gathering in Zalenze sponsored by the Verband reportedly drew six thousand participants from the surrounding region. It was hailed in a sympathetic newspaper account as a “great military review of those confessing a Catholic worldview.”104 The quickening of associational activity generally went hand in hand with an intensification of devotional activity. When a series of popular missions, led by the Franciscans, Redemptorists, and Jesuits, was held in various parishes of the industrial region between 1908 and 1911, success was measured not only in the large crowds attending the preaching, the thronging of confessionals, or the thousands of confessions offered but also by the hundreds of people inspired by the revival atmosphere to join parish associations.105 New recruits to associations, in turn, often became early adopters of new devotional norms. In order to popularize the practice of frequent communion, which Pope Pius X strongly endorsed in 1905 in the decree Sacra Tridentina Synodus, many pastors promoted so-called St. Alojzy Sundays, when all the members of particular associations were expected to take communion together.106 The overall impact on devotional habits was striking (see table 3). In 1904, the number of annual communions per parishioner in Upper Silesian parishes had hovered between onePage 160 → and two; by 1915, it had risen to between six and seven in the deaneries of Myslowitz and Königshütte and almost nine in the deanery of Beuthen. This was not far below the average for Catholic Germany (9.4) and was markedly above the average in other predominantly Polish-speaking (and far less urban and industrialized) areas (4.1 in Posen-Gnesen, 4.6 in Kulm).107 If, as historians of Germany’s Catholic milieu have recently argued, frequency of communion provides us with a shorthand index of milieu “density,” Upper Silesia might be seen as following a broadly “Rhenish” model in the years immediately before the First World War.108 But although milieu-building efforts in Upper Silesia were in many ways similar to those in the archetypal regional Catholic milieus of western Germany, the political crisis that inspired them was different. The accelerated development of parish Vereine in such areas as the Ruhr was essentially prophylactic, aimed at warding off potential defections andPage 161 → ensuring that parishioners who had been reliably voting for the Center continued to do so.109 In Upper Silesia, by contrast, the enemy was already well within the walls of the Catholic milieu. Pastors knew that most of their parishioners were reading liberal, Polish-national, or socialist newspapers;

attending liberal, Polish-national, or socialist meetings; voting for liberal, Polish, or socialist candidates. Upper Silesians, in other words, were no longer a self-evidently cohesive “Catholic people” but had, rather, begun to drift into divergent milieus. In making a bid to rebuild the Center party, parish priests and their lay allies had to do more than reassert the primacy of confession of the other modes of identification on offer. They had to engage and accommodate these centrifugal tendencies and make the case that the Center offered the most plausible solutions to Upper Silesians’ linguistic, cultural, and economic—as well as religious—grievances and aspirations.

This tactical flexibility—what the Center’s opponents described as shameless opportunism—was evident in the regional growth of the Berlin Verband. Established as an exclusively Catholic alternative to the interconfessional Christian trade unions (Gewerkschaften) based in the Rhineland, the Verband had generally been seen as a moribund institution, whose leaders were preoccupied with winning the favor of such prelates as Cardinal Kopp and jockeying for position at the Vatican rather than organizing workers on the ground.110 Yet, as already noted, the robust growth of the Verband in Upper Silesia between 1905 and 1909 could not be ascribed merely to curial intrigue; majorities in local workers associations were voting to affiliate with the Verband. Why? Overt appeals to confessional solidarity certainly played a role. At a meeting of the Beuthen chapter of the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, a group that was, at the national level, strongly supportive of the Christian Gewerkschaften, the relative merits of interconfessional and strictly Catholic trade unions were debated at length. One participant even made a pitch for the Hirsch-Duncker unions. But Verband activist Josef Musiol, a bilingual former miner, won the warmest applause when he argued that just as there was a distinctivePage 162 → black stripe in the German flag, so the black (i.e., Catholic) part of the working class needed to organize separately.111 Such rhetoric sometimes took on a more threatening, xenophobic edge. When the Christian Gewerkschaften launched a recruitment drive in the region in 1909, Verband activists urged members of the audience to leave in order to attend a Polish Way of the Cross service, and speakers were heckled with cries of “Away with the Jewmerchants, Gewerkschaflter out of Upper Silesia!”112 But appeals to nativism and confessional identity were coupled with remarkably blunt appeals to individual material interest. One side of a flier promoting the Verband piously invoked the teachings of Pope Leo XIII, while the other side offered a hardheaded tally sheet of “what you get for your money in the Berlin Verband.” Similar cost-benefit analyses showing that the Verband provided good value (e.g., a regular newspaper, legal counsel, death benefits, all for modest annual dues) were also publicized in the nonpartisan press.113 Joining the Verband, workers were effectively being told, was not simply an expression of faithfulness to the church; it was also a prudent way for individual members to secure their material interests while steering clear of any risky confrontation with Upper Silesia’s employers. In addition to providing a means of finessing class conflicts, organizations like the Verband also offered members opportunities to steer through Upper Silesia’s treacherous national landscape. Whereas earlier associations tended to have implicit linguistic orientations based on the correlation between language and social status (e.g., workers associations were understood to be “Polish”), Verband-affiliated workers groups, like most of the newer parish associations, were more often formally divided into German and Polish chapters.114 This might seem to have required members to commit themselves to one or the other national camp, but in most parishes, the maintenance of both German and Polish sections of the same organization actually preserved a zone of potential national fluctuation. German government officials complained that allowing workers who had gone through Germanlanguage primary schools and German-language military service—and were thus presumably fluent in German—to join explicitlyPage 163 → Polish-language workers associations represented a step backward in the march toward germanization.115 But even as Verband activists insisted on providing special venues for Polish speakers, they also made clear that the sorting of members into German and Polish chapters was purely pragmatic, for “better ordering” of meetings among constituents who were “not yet” fluent in German.116 Changes in linguistic orientation were treated as natural and unobjectionable. New, explicitly “German” chapters were allowed to secede from existing, implicitly “Polish” associations; and individual members also moved between chapters—almost always, it seems, from Polish to German.117 In the eyes of nationalists, then, the development of Catholic associational life had a milieu-destroying as well as a milieu-building function, since it opened up a sphere of sociability that obscured, rather than sharpened, participants’ national affiliations. The Center-party revival was perhaps most closely—and most controversially—intertwined with linguistic

boundary crossing in developments in the periodical press. Ever since the early 1890s, when the clergy lost confidence in the Katolik press, Center activists had been struggling to establish an alternative vehicle for communicating with their Polish-speaking constituents. Their intuitive response was to offer a one-for-one replacement for Katolik —that is, a Polish-language newspaper that would be more reliably loyal to the “Catholic cause.” But, as we have seen, this was an ill-fated project. Kuryer Górnośląski folded after only a couple years, and Gazeta Katolicka, while limping along until 1910, never enjoyed a broad readership. In the meantime, however, the party’s German-language press was expanding at a prodigious rate. The circulation of the Kulturkampf-era Oberschlesische Volksstimme, published in Gleiwitz, rose from three thousand in 1894 to twelve thousand in 1912; the Oberschlesische Zeitung, founded in Beuthen in 1904, reached a circulation of eight thousand by 1911; and the Oberschlesische Kurier, established in Köngishütte in 1908, surged to a circulation of twenty thousand by 1911,Page 164 → larger than any single Polish-language publication in Upper Silesia and among the largest runs of any of the region’s German-language newspapers.118 If it was true, as Father Skowronek told his parishioners in Bogutschütz, that “a person thinks, speaks, and feels like the newspaper that he reads,” this rapid expansion of the German-language Center-party press ought to offer important insights into the origins and meaning of the Center’s recovery.119 At first glance, this trend might seem to suggest that the Center party had given up on its old Polish-speaking constituency in order to concentrate on courting a German-speaking one. One of the new publications, the Oberschlesische Zeitung, did, indeed, soon adopt a decidedly German-national—even chauvinistic—tone. In 1906, the Polish national press cited this newspaper as evidence of the Center party’s “new German face.”120 But the Oberschlesische Kurier, the other Centrist newspaper to make its debut in this period, took a rather different approach to carving out a loyal readership. Founded as the Königshütter Zeitung in 1907, the newspaper was rechristened the Oberschlesische Kurier a year later and provided with additional financial capital from the Upper Silesian clergy and from the pro-Center Schaffgotsch company.121 The Kurier’s publisher, Fritz Wenske, was not an intuitive choice to emerge as a savior of the Center party in Upper Silesia. Though a Catholic himself, he was a recent immigrant from western Germany, was married to a Protestant, and had earlier worked for a year and a half at the liberal Oberschlesische Wanderer.122 Within a few years, however, Wenske, working with his brother Alfred and a like-minded editorial staff, had won numerous fans among the Upper Silesian clergy with the Kurier’s consistent proclericalism, while its feisty Catholic populism had garnered a broad lay readership. Among Wenske’s staunchest supporters was Father Skowronek, who appreciated the Kurier’s vigorous defense of the clergy (and him personally) against attacks in the liberal German press. Already in the spring of 1909, Skowronek was recommendingPage 165 → the Kurier at German-language services as an alternative to “hostile German newspapers,” which he claimed had one thousand subscriptions in Bogutschütz alone. The new Catholic daily, he reported, “has a good content and offers a lot of paper for your money”—a pragmatic recognition of the fact that many people, particularly among the working class, valued the newspaper as a physical resource (e.g., for wrapping one’s lunch) as well as an intellectual one.123 A few months later, Skowronek concluded that the same illness that he had diagnosed among German-speaking parishioners was also epidemic among Polish-speaking parishioners in Bogutschütz, and so the same cure was in order. “A large number of our Polish parishioners subscribe to and read liberal German newspapers,” he told the faithful at a Polish-language service in November 1909. “It is a shame and an embarrassment that Catholics thus support the enemies of our holy faith and of the Polish language. Whoever wants to read German newspapers should arrange through the post or one of our agents [to receive] the Oberschlesische Kurier for 80 Pf. a month.”124 Skowronek’s recommendation of a German-language “Centrist rag” in a Polish-language religious service was promptly reported to the Polish radical press, provoking vigorous protests.125 In subsequent years, Polish journalists would continue to blast the Kurier for wooing crossover Polish-speaking readers, but none of them could deny Skowronek’s observation that readership of German newspapers among Polish Upper Silesians was already ubiquitous well before the advent of the Kurier. If one went door-to-door in Polish neighborhoods, a writer for Polak admitted, “one would find more German than Polish newspapers in the homes of our people.”126 One could, of course, continue to urge people to improve their Polish reading skills and to remain loyal to Polish newspapers, a policy that Father Skowronek himself had hitherto tried to follow.127 As years passed, however, more and more Upper Silesian priests came to see such a blanket resistance to linguistic germanization as a lost

battle, and even many of the more polonophile among them, such as Skowronek, became resigned to the fact that many Polish parishioners could and would read German newspapers. It was now a matter of ensuring that they read the “right” ones. Page 166 → What made the Kurier the “right” German newspaper for Upper Silesian Catholics and enabled it to “conquer the trust of the Catholic people by storm” was a profile that managed to balance selective endorsement of and selective resistance to integration into German society, skillfully drawing out the elements of national ambiguity in Upper Silesians’ lived experiences.128 The layout of the Kurier was that of a general-interest, mass-circulation German daily, its first few pages devoted to breaking domestic and international news stories—a far cry, in other words, from the clerically edited, somewhat amateurish Gazeta Katolicka, which, despite its “political” character, relied heavily on devotional stories, editorials, and local news. Confidently boasting of its “modern” production methods and up-to-date information, the Kurier was certainly not aimed at sheltering readers from the broader world.129 The paper’s features and advertising policy also reflected an implicit endorsement of participation by Upper Silesian Catholics in a broad range of secular German associational life. Events sponsored by German veterans associations, sports and ice-skating associations, and popular libraries—though not the Eastern Marches Society—were advertised alongside events sponsored by parish groups.130 But if the Kurier facilitated some forms of “gentle germanization,” tacitly giving its blessing to German-language activities that the Polish national press still roundly condemned, the editors were passionate in their defense of Upper Silesian Catholics’ confessional, regional, and even linguistic particularism. The Kurier referred derisively to the editors of its most frequent sparring partner, the German nationalist Kattowitzer Zeitung, as “superGermans” (überdeutschen) for their stridently anti-Polish rhetoric.131 When German-national newspapers accused the Franciscan fathers of promoting a Polish atmosphere at the pilgrimage site of Panewnik, the Kurier mocked “the true ‘German’ men of the Hakatist associations and the National Liberal Stammtisch, ” who found it “uncomfortable to go for a walk among so many Poles.”132 Their own ideal of what it meant to be “German,” the editors of the Kurier stressed, had nothing toPage 167 → do with Hakatism—an “insidious monster” entirely inconsistent with Christianity—nor did it demand that one “treat the Poles as if they were all ‘Great Poles.’”133 “To be German,” they argued, “does not mean despising your neighbor because he was born of a Polish mother; to be German does not mean to take your neighbor’s native soil from him.”134 It also did not necessarily require the use of the German language. The Kurier noted approvingly the motto of Center party Reichstag candidate Joseph Bitta that Upper Silesians could have “a Polish tongue but a German heart.”135 The editors strongly endorsed the teaching of Polish to aspiring communal and police officials, and they rejected as “fully and truly Hakatist” calls for instructing Polish-speaking children in German sections of classes for first confession and communion, noting that “all priests who stand squarely on the principles of the Center” rejected such a policy.136 While the Kurier welcomed a Polish-speaking readership, it also readily admitted the desirability of founding a Polish-language Center newspaper that could serve the needs of the Polish-speaking population.137 Quick to skewer German nationalists and defend Polish linguistic rights, the Kurier could also be sharply critical of Polish leaders, sometimes referred to pejoratively as the “Posen intelligentsia.”138 The Polish national editors, Kurier readers were informed, aimed “to keep their heads above water with your money and live a good life with your hard-earned pennies.”139 But as fiercely as the Kurier competed with the Polish camp for readers and voters, the editors also made it clear that cooperation with the Polish party remained possible and was even desirable in the right circumstances. In the second round of voting for the 1912 Reichstag election, for example, even as Center and Polish candidates faced off in four Upper Silesian electoral districts, the Kurier nonetheless urged readers to vote for the Polish candidate Sosiński against his Social Democratic opponent inPage 168 → the runoff in Kattowitz-Zabrze. “The Pole is certainly the lesser evil,” the editors argued, “and stands infinitely closer to us than the faithless and fatherland-less Social Democrat”140 This unilateral decision to back Sosinski incensed some of the Silesian Center party leadership.141 Most of the parish clergy, however, also backed Sosinski in the runoff, a backhanded recognition that the “radical” national Poles remained Catholic coreligionists and potential political partners in a way that the Social Democrats and even the National Liberals could never be.142

Catholic confessional solidarity and the defense of the Catholic worldview were, indeed, regularly invoked by the Kurier in its assaults on liberalism and socialism. In rallying voters for a special election in the district of PlessRybnik, the Kurier declared that Germany was divided into “two great armies” that “stand against each other like light and darkness”: “The one has as its banner the terrible inscription ‘Against Christ,’ the other ‘For Christ.’”143 The editors were, however, careful to stress that their warnings against “anti-Christian” forces referred to liberal anticlericalism and did not imply hostility to other religious communities. To underline the distinction and stave off charges of anti-Semitism, the Kurier regularly quoted articles by Jewish authors that testified to the Center party’s record on supporting Jewish civil rights, and it also distinguished between Jewish Social Democrats or liberals, on the one hand, and religiously practicing Jews, on the other. In at least one instance, the Kurier even printed a listing of services for the synagogue in Königshütte alongside a listing of local Catholic services.144 This stance did not, to be sure, preclude anti-Jewish swipes in Wenske’s private correspondence.145 But the refusal to resort to Jew baiting on the pages of the Kurier was suggestive of an effort to balance confessional populism, geared toward Upper Silesia’s overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population, and a respect for pluralism, cognizant of Catholicism’s minority position in the Reich as a whole. Striking such a balance required an artful navigation of the controversiesPage 169 → that were convulsing Catholic Germany during the final peacetime years of the Kaiserreich: the Gewerkschaftsstreit over the legitimacy of interdenominational Christian trade unions and the Zentrumsstreit over the nondenominational status of the Center party. These conflicts have often been portrayed as a rather straightforward struggle between the party’s progressive “Cologne wing,” which championed interconfessionalism and lay autonomy, and a clericalreactionary “Berlin wing” that demanded subordination to the church hierarchy.146 In such a contest, one would expect the populist-minded Kurier to line up with the Cologners, and in many respects, it did. The newspaper gave consistently favorable coverage to the Christian Gewerkschaften,147 and the Gewerkschaften’s Polish-language newspaper was printed in the Kurier press. This might seem a risky stance to take in a diocese headed by Cardinal Kopp, the spiritual leader of the Berlin orientation. But much of the Silesian clergy, while loyally supporting the Berlin Verband as the best available means of binding together parish associations, actually shared Wenske’s admiration and envy of the more activist organizations being developed in the Rhineland and Westphalia. On the eve of a major recruitment drive, Gewerkschaft activists claimed to have the sympathy of many of the industrial region’s most prominent pastors, from the germanophile Father Schmidt to the polonophile Father Kapica.148 When supporters of the Berlin Verband complained to their patron, Cardinal Kopp, about the Kurier’s support for the Gewerkschaften and the paper’s alleged fomenting of worker unrest, Father Skowronek leapt to Wenske’s defense. “It cannot be considered a capital crime,” the Bogutschütz pastor wrote to Kopp, “for a people’s paper [Volksblatt] to forcefully emphasize the people’s rights when they are provoked by the power holders [Machthaber] and their press.” Although the workers associations in his own parish were affiliated with the Berlin Verband, Skowronek complained that the organization’s leaders “rely too much on their high protection and abuse it—while their work leaves much to be desired.” It was hardly surprising, he concluded, that “our workersPage 170 → prefer the Polish organization [the ZZP]” as a vehicle for pressing their more militant grievances.149 But while both the Kurier and its clerical boosters bemoaned the rigid patriarchalism and fondness for intrigue common to many in the Berlin camp, they realized that embracing the Cologne agenda held its own dangers. As Margaret Anderson has persuasively argued, the Cologners’ discomfort with the Center’s “Catholic” label was driven not only by desire for emancipation from the church hierarchy but also by longing for acceptance by Germany’s Protestant establishment and by a corresponding embarrassment over the particularist and unfashionable grievances of “the Catholic people.”150 The possibility that a program of integrating into the national mainstream might be antidemocratic, in so far as it privileged cultural conformity over minority rights, was immediately apparent to such populist-minded politicians as Matthias Erzberger, who initially aligned himself with the Berliners and criticized moves to define the Center as nondenominational. It was even more obvious in the nationally uncertain region of Upper Silesia, where redefining the Center as a “German” (rather than “Catholic”) party would do more to narrow the party’s potential constituency than to expand it.151 Indeed, the Polish-national press had a field day publicizing the Cologners’ insistence that the Center “is not and does not want to be a Catholic party” and their determination to expel anyone who claimed that it was.152 The Kurier tried to finesse this dilemma by limiting its own criticism to those “integralists” who relied on top-down patronage and curial intrigue, such as Father Paul Nieborowski, the editor of the short-lived, Breslau-based Das Katholische

Deutschland, who was expelled from the Center as a “troublemaker” in 1914. When Nieborowski tried to invoke the authority of Cardinal Kopp and Pope Pius X against various Center party leaders and publicists, the Kurier denounced such attempts by “super-Catholics” (Überkatholiken ) “to play off the Mother of God against the German Center party.”153 But Nieborowski’s fellow SilesianPage 171 → integralist, the polonophile Count Hans von Oppersdorff, who was expelled from the Center at an even earlier date, never seems to have received such rebukes. The difference, it seems, was that the acerbically polonophobe Nieborowski had virtually no popular constituency in Upper Silesia. Oppersdorff, by contrast, had become something of a populist hero after teaming up with Wojciech Korfanty to denounce “electoral terrorism” in 1909, and when he made a bid to be put up as the Center’s Reichstag candidate in the district of Ratibor, he found considerable support in local Catholic circles, especially among the clergy. Even after his expulsion from the Center, he continued to speak to local Catholic gatherings about the evils of exceptional laws and the need for German and Polish Catholics to remain true to their common confession—comments that the Kurier reported with the utmost respect.154 This was a species of “integralism” that a paper such as the Kurier could ill afford to renounce. The bid to be all things to all men, so vividly exemplified by the Kurier’s multiple balancing acts, obviously did not lure all or even most of the Center’s targeted constituency into the party fold. Both the Center’s overall share of the vote and its gains in the 1912 election were modest in the working-class suburbs of the industrial region, more impressive in larger commercial and administrative centers. This urban success could be partly explained in class terms, as the result of appealing more plausibly to the economic interests of various Mittelstand occupational groups: artisans, schoolteachers, railway and postal employees.155 But such cities as Königshütte, Beuthen, and Gleiwitz were not only distinguished by having a large population occupying the middle range of the socioeconomic scale. They were also home to a disproportionate share of Upper Silesia’s bilingual population, the partially germanized inhabitants of Polish-speaking background to whom the Kurier so clearly addressed much of its message.156 If, as national activists argued, such nationally ambiguous types were a transitional phenomenon, then targeting them as a core constituency offered little more than a holding action for a party still destined for long-run extinction. But if, as the wild fluctuations in Upper Silesia’sPage 172 → early twentieth-century voting behavior suggested, the simultaneous progress of germanization and polonization was maintaining or even increasing the ranks of the nationally uncertain, then the playful national boundary crossing pursued by the Oberschlesische Kurier perhaps provided a more promising means of reviving the Center’s fortunes in the region than could blunter forms of clerically directed milieu “fortification.” Histories of Upper Silesian electoral politics under the German Empire, particularly the few accounts written in English, have tended to focus squarely on a narrative of national awakening and nationalist polarization. To be sure, few transformations in voting behavior during the Wilhelmine period were as stunning as the collapse of the Center’s hegemony and the rise of nationalist parties in Upper Silesia between 1902 and 1907. So it is certainly understandable, for example, that Helmut Walser Smith, in one of the more important English-language works to touch on this subject, has described the relationship between political Catholicism and nationalism in Upper Silesia as a steady retreat of the former in favor of the latter, culminating in the Reichstag election of 1907. Looked at from this perspective and within this periodization, it is difficult to avoid Smith’s conclusion that “the Center, to cite Yeats, could not hold.”157 Yet, as I have argued in this chapter, close examination of the final years before the outbreak of the First World War suggests that this narrative is at least incomplete, if not seriously misleading. Within a year of the Center’s catastrophic losses and the nationalist party’s spectacular gains in the 1907 Reichstag election, the incipient political boundary placing “Poles here” and “Germans there” was thoroughly blurred by the Center-Polish compromise, which thrust to the fore slogans and martyrs whose confessional profile was clear but whose national coloration was highly ambiguous. After 1909, as the Center and Poles slowly drifted apart again, the Center was generally perceived as the party with the brighter future. The Polish camp was split for several years by the Napieralski-Korfanty feud, and even after Napieralski engineered an institutional consolidation of Polish forces in the region, national activists remained anxious about the movement’s future. As the results of the 1912 Reichstag election vividly confirmed, the electoral constituency that the Polish party had forged in the previous decade remained soft, susceptible to major inroads by both the Center and the Social Democrats. The Center, in the

meantime, was aggressivelyPage 173 → expanding its organizational and agitational activities. Exemplifying the party’s renewed confidence in navigating the region’s competing nationalizing currents was the new party daily, the Oberschlesische Kurier, which poached readers from both the Polish national and the German liberal press and took the lead in turning a mediating position on nationality controversies into an asset rather than a liability for the Center. The pessimism of Upper Silesia’s leading nationalist party and the optimism of the region’s leading supranational party on the eve of the First World War should not, of course, obscure the profound impact that nationalism had had on the region’s political landscape since the turn of the century or the continued salience of linguistic and national disputes. Roughly half of all voters in the 1912 elections, after all, had still cast their ballots as “Poles” or “Germans” first and foremost, and certainly neither the Center party nor Social Democracy was immune to internal nationalist controversies. But now, the widespread perception of a few years earlier that the cleavage between “German” and “Pole” would inexorably assert its priority over confessional or class ideologies looked increasingly dubious. The basis for political solidarity and mobilization in Upper Silesia, particularly in its hotly contested industrial area, was more open-ended in 1914 than ever before. 1. Raymond Chien Sun, Before the Enemy Is within Our Walls : Catholic Workers in Cologne, 1885–1912; A Social, Cultural, and Political Histor y (Boston: Humanities, 1999). 2. Calculated from figures in Schwidetzky, 82. The “linguistically mixed” area was composed of the electoral districts of Kreuzberg-Rosenberg, Oppeln, Gr. Strehlitz-Kosel, Lublinitz-Tost-Gleiwitz, BeuthenTarnowitz, Kattowitz-Zabrze, Pleß-Rybnik, Ratibor, and Neustadt. 3. This dynamic was most powerful in the province of Posen, where 96 percent of the vote in the 1907 elections went to national parties—63 percent for the Polish party, 33 percent for the three avowedly German nationalist parties. These percentages were almost identical to the 1910 census statistics for “mother tongue” in the province: 65 percent Polish, 34 percent German. Calculated from Ritter, 72; and Hagen, 324. 4. Figures from Schwidetzky, 96, 110–11. I have relied on district-by-district calculations rather than Schwidetzky’s totals. 5. Kapica to Kopp, 3 February 1912, VIII.I.A.24.a.18, AAW. 6. Schlesische Volkszeitung, 17 July 1912. 7. George Dunlap Crothers, “The German Elections of 1907” (PhD diss., Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University, 1941). 8. Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 82. 9. In Silesia, however, Center leaders did support Bloc candidates against Social Democrats in runoff elections. Elsewhere in Germany, the Center leadership called on its supporters either to abstain or to vote for the Social Democrats. See Crothers, 168–72. 10. “Czy grozi nam nowa walka kulturna?” 12 March 1907, 1; 14 March 1907, 1. 11. Tims, 163. 12. August Hermann Leugers-Scherzberg, Felix Porsch 1853–1930: Politik für Katholische Interessen in Kaiserreich und Republik (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald Verlag, 1990), 130–39. 13. Katolik, 16 April 1908, 1; Schwidetzky, 82–83. 14. Orzechowski. Wojciech, 116–17. 15. Gazeta Katolicka, 2 April 1908, supplement, 1; Grenzkommissar Mädler to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 30 March 1908, Syg221, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 16. Katolik, 4 June 1908, 1. 17. Gazeta Katolicka, 21 May 1908, supplement, 3. 18. Katolik, 28 May 1908, supplement, 1; Gazeta Katolicka, “Nic z tego, panie stajger!” 2 June 1908, 3. 19. Amtsvorsteher Zawodzie to Regierungspräsident Oppeln (report by Kriminal-Sargeant Wenzlawiak, 21 May 1908), Syg221, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 20. Ogłoszenia kościelne, 24 and 31 March 1908, APB.

21. Voter turnout in the industrial region jumped from 26.7 percent in 1903 to 44.7 percent in 1908. See Thomas Kühne, Handbuch der Wahlen zum Preussischen Abgeordnetenhaus, 1867–1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1994), 354–58. 22. Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 46. 23. Latter phrase from “Nowy klasztor Franciszkański na G. Śląsku,” Katolik, 23 July 1908, 1–2; earlier characterization from “Festung der Germanisation” Polak, 18 September 1906, translated in Auszüge aus oberschlesischen polnischen Zeitungen, 17 and 18 September 1906, Syg252, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO. 24. Quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 44–45. 25. “Biskup w obronie swojego ludu,” 25 July 1908, 1. 26. Cardinal v. Widdern, Oberst a.D., Die Unterwergung Oberschlesiens durch die Posener Polen (Berlin: Wilhelm Issleib, 1909), 26–27. 27. “Zemstwa blokowców,” Gazeta Katolicka, 18 June 1908, 1–2. Skowronek also used the pulpit to tell parishioners to “come to the pastor” if they faced harassment at work (Ogłoszenia kościelne, 8 June 1908, APB). 28. “Laurahuta (Terroryzm wyborczy),” Katolik, 2 July 1908, 2; “Ein neuer Fall von Wahlterrorismus auf der Laurahütte,” Oberschlesische Zeitung, 1 July 1908, supplement. 29. Vorstand des preussischen Landes-Kriegerverbandes (Berlin) to Vorstand des ProvincialKriegerverbandes für Schlesien (Breslau), 8 August 1908, Syg222, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO. 30. “Kriegervereine und Polentum in Oberschlesien,” Oberschlesische Zeitung, 1 August 1908, supplement. This article referred to thirteen veterans being expelled. The issue was also highlighted by the Schlesische Volkszeitung (30 July 1908) and Germania (“Maßregelungen in Oberschlesischen Kriegervereinen,” 8 July 1908). 31. The “ultramontane” slate won a strong majority in the third class, split the second class with the liberals, but failed to make any dent in the liberal hold on the first class (Polizeivetretung, Beuthen, to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 27 November 1903; Landrat Beuthen to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 4 December 1905, Syg59, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO). 32. In 1905, the population of Kattowitz (35,772) was 8 percent Jewish, 20 percent Protestant, and 72 percent Catholic. Seventy-five percent of residents were recorded as having German as their mother tongue, 19 percent Polish, and 6 percent both languages. See Gemeindelexikon für das Königsreich Preußen Auf Grund der Materialen der Volkszahlung vom 1 Dezember 1905 und anderer amtlicher Quellen, vol. 6, Provinz Schlesien (Berlin: Verlag des Königlichen Statistischen Landesamts, 1908), 132–33. Only 20 percent of voters in the first class and only 25 percent of those in the second class were Catholic, while the third class was 80 percent Catholic (cited by Korfanty in Reichstag address, Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstages, XII Legislaturperiode, II Session, Band 258, 12 January 1910, 449). 33. Almost identical appeals were printed in Polak (“Katolicy Katowic!” 6 November 1909, supplement, 1) and Oberschlesische Volksstimme (7 November 1909, sec. 3, 1). 34. Schwidetzky, 103, citing Wahlaufruf of the Bürgerausschusses printed in Kattowitzer Zeitung, 7 November 1909. 35. Schwidetzky, 103–4. 36. Based on account offered by State Secretary of the Interior Delbrück in the Reichstag (Stenographische Berichte, 12 January 1910, 456–67). 37. “Wybory miejskie w Katowicach,” Polak, 1–2; speech by Korfanty, Stenographische Berichte, 12 January 1910, 453–54. 38. “Ein ‘Landesverräter?’” Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 23 December 1909, 2. 39. Kirchliche Vermeldungen, 5 December 1909, APB. 40. “Sie schweigen in allen Tönen,” Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 5 December 1909, 2. 41. Stenographische Berichte, 12 January 1910, 440–56. 42. The Ferrar commemoration was noted by both Oppersdorff and Korfanty in their Reichstag speeches (Stenographische Berichte, 12 January 1910, 445, 451). See also “Die Ferrer-Intelektuellen,” Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 12 November 1909, sec. 2, 1. 43. The Gleiwitz-based Oberschlesische Volksstimme, the oldest German-language Catholic newspaper in

the industrial region, declared itself “from party-political and religious motives a decided opponent of antiSemitism” (24 October 1909, 2). 44. “Die jüdischliberale Majorität!” Oberschlesische Zeitung, 16 September 1908, supplement. Katolik wrote of the “Jewish Tageblatt ” and the “Progressive Jewish Grenzzeitung ” (24 March 1903, 2; 4 June 1903, 3). Gazeta Katolicka referred to the Tageblatt as a “Jewish rag” (14 July 1906, 3). Górnoślązak wrote that “all of the Jewish press” and the “German-Jewish dailies” stood in the “Hakatist camp” (15 February 1902, 1). In Bogutschutz, Father Skowronek said from the pulpit that the Kattowitzer Zeitung and Oberschlesische Tagesblatt belonged only in “Jewish and Masonic homes,” not in Catholic ones (Ogłoszenia kościelne, 31 December 1899, APB). 45. As a rule, Polish editors denied any intent to boycott Jewish/German stores. See Korfanty’s Reichstag remarks in Stenographische Berichte, 12 January 1910, 450. Father Skowronek was, at times, much less ambiguous, using his Sunday announcements in Bogutschutz to urge parishioners to avoid “Jewish department stores” and “Jewish Kattowitz” (Kirchliche Vermeldungen, 17 December 1905; Ogłoszenia kościelne, 15 December 1907, APB). 46. Peter Maser and Adelheid Weiser, Juden in Oberschlesien (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1992), 110. 47. Stenographische Berichte, 12 January 1910, 449–51. 48. The Oberschlesische Volksstimme (8 January 1913, 1) claimed that fewer than 10 percent of Upper Silesian Landräte appointed since 1900 were Catholic. 49. General directors of companies or industrial associations who ran for the Reichstag or Landtag as German-national candidates in 1903–12 included Richard Remy, Otto Junghahn, Gustav Williger, and Hans Voltz. All were born outside the region, and it is likely all were Protestants (one—Junghahn—was the son of a pastor). See Alfons Perlick, Oberschlesische Berg- und Hüttenleute: Lebensbilder aus dem Oberschlesischen Industrierevier (Kitzingen: Holzner Verlag, 1953). 50. Katolik reiterated this point right after the emergence of the controversy over the dismissal of officials from the Kriegervereine (“Kriegerferajny,” 9 July 1908, 1). 51. “Zur Schulpolititk in den Ostmarken,” 17 March 1909, sec. 2, 1; “Die Lehrer und der ‘Deutsche Tag,’” 30 September 1909, 3; “Der oberschlesische Lehrer,” 24 October 1909, sec. 2, 1. 52. From address of Głos Śląski editor Józef Siemianowski in Gleiwitz, quoted in “Polen und Zentrum,” Schlesische Volkszeitung, 30 March 1909. 53. Polak, 21 July 1908, cited in Oberschlesische Zeitung, 24 July 1908, supplement. 54. “Dwaj przyjaciele: Dr. Stephan i Napieralski,” Polak, 19 October 1909, 1; “Centrum, sprawa polska, i Pose l Napieralski,” 19 October 1909, supplement, 1; Gazeta Robot-nicza, 27 May 1909; Schwidetzky, 84. 55. Loth, Katholiken, 166–80. 56. Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 149–50; Szramek, “ Ś.P. Adam,” 315; Schwidetzky, 88–89. David Blackbourn (Class, 229–30) has noted that a similar logic prevailed in the Center party: such well-known democrats as Matthias Erzberger, who had little sympathy for the Black-Blue Bloc’s specific economic policies, supported the overall effort to break the Bülow Bloc. 57. Jerzy Marczewski, Narodowa Demokracja w Poznańskiem, 1900–1914 (Warsaw: Pa n stwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1967), 261–75; Orzechowski, Narodowa, 239–41. 58. Edward Krzemien, “Nam się nie chce chcieć,” Kuryer Śląski, 3 October 1909, 1. 59. Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 4 November 1909. Similar articles are cited in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 127. 60. Quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 47–49. 61. Orzechowski, Wojciech, 129–30. 62. “Korfanty przed swymi wyborami,” Gazeta Robotnicza, 21 October 1909, quoted in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 121. 63. Orzechowski, Wojciech, 133–34, 138–39. 64. “Burda socyalistyczna w Pawlowie,” Polak, 21 October 1909, 1; Orzechowski, Wojciech, 122. 65. In 1909, there were still only nine hundred members of the German socialist party and eleven hundred members of the Polish socialist party in all of Upper Silesia (i.e., district of Oppeln), and the circulation of Gazeta Robotnicza never broached three thousand (Hawranek, Polska, 360, 391). Gazeta Robotnicza even reported a “catastrophic fall” in circulation during 1909 (Ryszard Kaczmarek, Józef Biniszkiewicz (1875–1940) Biografia polityczna [Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1994], 43).

Membership in the socialist (free) unions was somewhat more vigorous, but before 1910, it also hovered under three thousand and was concentrated more among masons and printers than in mining and heavy industry (Hawranek, Polska, 356–57; Felicja Figowa, Związki robotników polskich w byłej rejencji opolskiej w przedaniu pierwszej wojny światowej [Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1966]; Hawranek, Polska, 356–57; 17; Puls, 179–81). 66. Zeitungsbericht der Regierungspräsidenten zu Oppeln, quoted in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 134. 67. Goniec Wielkopolski, 19 August 1910, quoted in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 135–36. 68. Szramek, “ Ś.P. Adam,” 316–18. See also Orzechowski, Wojciech, 144–48; Schwidetzky, 86–87; Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 157–59. 69. Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 262–65; Orzechowski, Narodowa, 268–69. 70. Orzechowski, Narodowa, 269–70; Schwidetzky, 88. Głos Sląski, a smaller independent radical newspaper founded in 1903, served briefly as the focus of local opposition to the Napieralski-Korfanty accord, but it, too, was bought out by Napieralski in March 1911. Gazeta Katolicka, the clerical newspaper that had been struggling financially for years, ceased publication in 1910. 71. Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 161. The entire National Democratic press in Posen, by comparison, had a combined circulation of around fifty thousand (Hagen, 241). 72. Schwidetzky, 87. 73. “Die Zentrumsleute und der schlesische Partikularismus,” Kurjer Śląski, 4 May 1911, in Gesamtüberblick, 551–52; “Die Agitation für die Zentrumspartei” Gazeta Ludowa, 27 March 1911, in Gesamtüberblick, 392–93. 74. “Verwirrung im polnischen Lager,” Głos Sląski, 2 February 1911, in Gesamtüberblick, 184. 75. Orzechowski, Wojciech, 154–55. 76. Schwidetzky, 93–94; 110–11; Orzechowski, Narodowa, 275. 77. “Z ruchu wyborczego,” Katolik, 4 January 1912, 2. 78. Kapica to Kopp, 9 January 1912, VIII.IA.24a.18, AAW. 79. For example, the Polish vote dropped from 50 percent to 24 percent in Laurahütte, where Korfanty grew up; from 58 percent to 30 percent in Siemianowitz; from 61 percent to 29 percent in Bogutschutz; and from 60 percent to 21 percent in Zalenze (Syg231, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureaus, APO). 80. Schwidetzky, 97–98, 110–11. 81. Pobudka Wyborcza (Electoral Reveille), vol. 2 (Posen, 1912), quoted in Szramek, “ Ś.P. Adam,” 316. 82. Paul Weber, Die Polen in Oberschlesien: Eine statistische Untersuchung (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1914). 83. For a typical critique of German census data, see Michalkiewicz, part 2, 51–54. 84. In the district of Lublinitz, the percentage of residents declaring both German and Polish as mother tongues rose from 5.9 percent in 1900 to 22.2 percent in 1905 and fell back to 5.7 percent in 1910 (Weber, Die Polen, x–xii). School censuses also tended to classify as “bilingual” many schoolchildren whose parents were presumably declaring themselves “Germans.” In the county of Kattowitz, for example, the school census recorded 69 percent of children as having Polish as their mother tongue (compared to 65 percent in the regular census), 14 percent German (compared to 30 percent), and 17 percent both languages (compared to 3 percent). See Preußische Statistik 231, no. 2 (1912): 382. 85. “Liczba Polaków na Górnym Śląsku,” Katolik, 5 September 1912, 1. 86. Statement by Kapica to Polish electoral committee in Oppeln, printed in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 50. 87. “Ich weiß was ich will,” Schlesische Volkszeitung, 17 July 1912. 88. For a more detailed discussion of Catholic workers organizations in Upper Silesia, see James Bjork, “Getrennt durch einen gemeinsamen Glauben: Die Organisierung katholischer Arbeiter in Oberschlesien, 1870–1914,” in Die christliche Arbeiterbewegung in Europa, 1850–1950, ed. Claudia Hiepel and Mark Ruff (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 176–98. 89. Grenzkommisar Mädler to Rergierungspräsident Oppeln, 6 February and 2 March 1909, Syg100, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 90. Hawranek, Polska, 340, 394; John J. Kulczycki, The Foreign Worker and the German Labor Movement: Xenophobia and Solidarity in the Coal Fields of the Ruhr, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 72–73. 91. On the strike in the Ruhr and particularly the role of the ZZP, see Kulczycki, Foreign Worker, 223–52. 92. On the 1913 strike in Upper Silesia, see Puls, 201–23; Michalkiewicz, part 2, 587–91.

93. By one count, membership in socialist labor unions rose to twelve thousand by the eve of the First World War, with miners constituting the bulk of the increase (Michalkiewicz, part 2, 585, 591). 94. Dziennik Śląski, no. 184, quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 53–54; “O wyborach slów kilka,” Katolik, 27 January 1912, 1. 95. “Sprawa Opolska,” Katolik, 29 August 1912, 1. 96. Sperber, Kaiser’s Voters, 254–64. 97. Statistik des deutschen Reichs 250, no. 2 (1913). 98. J. Kubis, “Die soziale Tätigkeit des Geistlichen mit besonderer Berüchtsichtigung der oberschlesischen Verhältnisses,” Schlesische Pastoralblatt, part 1, August 1, 1906, 143–45. 99. Siegfried Nozon, “Was muß die oberschlesische Geistlichkeit tun, um das Volk dem katholischen Glauben true zu erhalten?” Schlesisches Pastoralblatt, 1 February 1906, 23–24. 100. AV Myslowitz, vols. 7 and 10, AAK. 101. Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 9 June 1909, 2. 102. In 1907, after hearing a pitch by a Verband activist, a parish workers association in Chorzow that had earlier rejected affiliation with the Verband agreed by a vote of one hundred to five to join the organization (Katolik, 7 February 1907, supplement, 1; Gazeta Katolicka, 9 February 1907, 3). 103. Data for 1905 from Grenzkommissar Mädler to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 9 July 1905, Syg82, RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO; data for 1909 from Nachweisung, Regierungspräsident Oppeln to Landräte, 3 March 1909, LA Oppeln, APK; data on women’s organization (Verband katholischer Vereine erwerbstätiger Frauen u. Mädchen) from Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 13 June, 2. 104. Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 20 June 1909, 2; 22 June 1909, 3. 105. In Rosdzin, for example, a Franciscan mission reportedly inspired 250 people to join parish associations (Zientek to Kopp, 10 December 1908, AL Rosdzin, AAK). 106. Myszor, Duszpasterstwo, 74. 107. Statistics from vol. 6 (1916) of the Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland, ed. H. A. Krose (Freiburg: Herdersche Verlag). 108. Arbeitskreis, “Konfession,” 395. 109. Liedhegener (Christentum, 449–66) refers to the “fortification” (Befestigung) of the Catholic milieu in Bochum against Social Democracy and de-Christianization between 1889 and 1914. 110. On the controversies surrounding Christian trade unions (the so-called Gewerkschaftsstreit), see Horstwalter Heitzer, Georg Kardinal Kopp und der Gewerkschaftsstreit, 1900–1914 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1983). 111. Police report, 10 June 1904, Syg64, RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 112. Grenzkommisar Mädler to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 1 March 1909, Syg100, RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 113. Berlin Verband flier, n.d., Syg64, RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO; Königshütter Tageblatt, 14 April 1905. 114. Handbuch der Katholischen Vereine (Breslau: Verlag der Fürstbischöflichen Geh. Kanzlei, 1908). 115. In Laurahütte, the local Amtsvorsteher reported that it was “ not absolutely necessary” to have a separate Polish-language chapter of the workers association, since members seemed to understand German perfectly well (21 June 1909, Syg299, LA Kattowitz, APK). 116. Wording used by Josef Musiol, Polizeikommisariat Beuthen to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 25 May 1906, Syg49, RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 117. The secession of a German group from the hitherto unified workers association in Beuthen in 1906 led to considerable bad blood concerning the division of common property—for example, the association banner (Polizeiverwaltung Beuthen to RB Oppeln, 4 July 1906, Syg49, RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO; Dziennik Śląski, 2 April 1906). Tygodnik Katolicki reported matter-of-factly that between 1911 and 1912, three men in Zalenze switched from the Polish to the German chapter of the workers association (2 June 1912, 195). 118. Circulation figures from Gröschel, 43, 82–83, 150–51. 119. Kirchliche Vermeldungen, 13 December 1908, APB. 120. “Tu Polacy—tam Niemcy,” Katolik, 19 October 1906, 1. 121. Vogel, 30. The “Schaffgotsch capital” that Vogel describes as flowing to the Kurier can be presumed

to be the work of Bernhard Stephan, the Schaffgotsch general director and a local judicial councillor. In contrast to the vast majority of general directors in the mining and metallurgy industry, Stephan was a devout Catholic and Centrist and also a leading exponent of the Center-Polish compromise. See Perlick, 206–7; Kapica, Mowy—Odezwy— Kazania, 61–66. 122. Wenske to Skowronek, 17 September 1910, VIII.I.A.24.a.18, AAW. 123. Kirchliche Vermeldungen, 21 March 1909, APB. 124. Ogłoszenia parafialne, 19 September 1909, APB. 125. Polak, 3 October 1909, supplement, 1. 126. “Po co czytasz gazety polskie?” Polak, 12 October 1909, supplement, 1. 127. Speaking from the pulpit a few years earlier, Skowronek had urged parishioners, “Teach your children to read and write in Polish” (Ogłoszenia parafialne, 10 September 1905, APB). 128. Skowronek to Kopp, 18 September 1910, VIII.I.A.24.a.18, AAW. 129. “An das katholische Oberschlesien” Oberschlesische Kurier, 26 September 1912, 1st supplement, 1. 130. In one list of announcements, for example, a Kriegerverein concert was listed immediately above a notice for a meeting of the Polish section of a Catholic workers association (27 July 1912, supplement, 3). 131. 25 July 1912, 1st supplement, 1. 132. “Die Lawine der Verleumdung,” 31 July 1912. 133. 31 August 1912, 1; 5 January 1912, supplement; 4 January 1912, supplement, 2. 134. “Zentrumsmänner auf die Schanzen!” 11 January 1912, supplement. 135. 6 January 1912, supplement. 136. 12 June 1912, 2; “Deutscher oder polnischer Religionsunterricht?” 24 April 1912, 1st supplement, 1. 137. A letter from a “Polish reader of the Kurier ” was printed in the newspaper urging the “loyal Polish population” to abandon the Polish “agitational newspapers” and subscribe to a “Polish Center newspaper” (4 January 1912, supplement; 21 January 1912, supplement, 1). No such newspaper existed at the time, but the Kurier was encouraging interest in the forthcoming Tygodnik Katolicki, which was to be printed on its press. 138. “Die Zentrumsleute und der schlesische Partikularismus,” Kurjer Śląski, in Gesamtüberblick, 551–52. 139. Oberschlesische Kurier, 4 January 1912, supplement. 140. 16 January 1912, supplement; 21 January 1912, supplement, 2. 141. Bernhard Stephan to Felix Porsch, 14 November 1912, Porsch Nachlass, Ib.3, AAW. 142. The Social Democrats complained of pro-Sosiński agitation by Catholic priests in Domb, Rosdzin, Zalenze, and Zabrze, all parishes with Centrist pastors (Kaczmarek, 53). 143. Oberschlesische Kurier, 1 February 1912, 1st supplement, 1. 144. Citations from Jewish writers: 27 January 1912, supplement, 1, and 14 August 1912, 1; listing of synagogue services: 7 April 1912, 2nd supplement, 1. 145. Wenske once wrote to Father Skowronek that if his press did not print the Polish-language newspaper for the Chrisian Gewerkschaften, the job would be taken by “some Jew” (Wenske to Skowronek, 17 September 1910, VIII.I.A.24.a.18, AAW). 146. Rudolf Morsey, for example, describes the Cologners’ program simply as “liberal-democratic”: see his “Der politische Katholizismus, 1890–1933,” in Der soziale und politische Katholizismus: Entwicklungslinien in Deutschland 1803–1963, ed. Anton Rauscher, vol. 1, 122–24. 147. One article, for example, emphasized the huge advantage in overall membership that the Gewerkschaften enjoyed vis-à-vis the Berlin Verband’s “crafts sections” (Fachabteilungen) in Germany as a whole. Oberschlesische Kurier, 6 June 1912, 2. 148. Grenzkommisar Mädler to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 1 March 1909, Syg100, RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO. 149. Skowronek to Kopp, 18 September 1910, VIII.I.A.24.a.18, AAW. 150. Margaret L. Anderson, “Interdenominationalism, Clericalism, Pluralism: The Zentrumsstreit and the Dilemma of Catholicism in Germany,” Central European History 21, no. 4 (1990): 350–78. 151. Ronald Ross has drawn attention to the importance of “sectarianism” in muting the national divide in Upper Silesia, in Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1976), 68–74. 152. “Priester Nieborowski und ‘Jungdeutschland,’” Gazeta Ludowa, 25 September 1913, in

Gesamtüberblick, 1108. 153. “Die überkatholiken,” 20 April 1912, 1st supplement, 1; “Religio-politische Schwarmgeisterei,” 21 May 1912, 1st supplement, 2. 154. Oberschlesische Kurier, 18 June 1912, supplement, 1. 155. For analyses of the Center party as a vehicle for socioeconomic interests, see especially Blackbourn, Class; Loth, “Soziale Bewegungen.” 156. The Prussian school census of 1911 recorded the following percentage of school-children as coming from bilingual homes: Beuthen, 20 percent; Gleiwitz, 25 percent; Köngishütte, 31 percent. By comparison, in the Landkreise of Beuthen and Kattowitz, largely composed of pit villages and smaller factory towns, the proportions were 15 percent and 17 percent. See Preussische Statistik 231, no. 2 (1912): 382. 157. Smith, 192.

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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 first 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 firstperson plural in debating their collective identity—many Upper Silesians anticipated the ultimate demise of the Polish language in the regionPage 175 → 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 difficult 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 significantly expanded. “We are now talking about something that seemed a utopia five 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—first 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 farPage 176 → from clear who would be the beneficiaries of this headlong rush away from the German imperial past.

Conciliation

“Politics,” an editorial in Katolik informed its readers in the fall of 1915, “is the art of drawing benefits out of current possibilities, of using time to create the most advantageous possible circumstances for the nation or the state. Whoever cares about the welfare of the nation, therefore, cannot give up politics for a certain time, because every day can bring new opportunities.”3 While nicely summarizing Adam Napieralski’s lifelong political ethos, this statement was particularly apt in describing the controversial policy of “conciliation” pursued by the Katolik camp throughout the First World War. At a time when most nationally conscious Poles were despairing of the possibility of devising an “activism” that would be both tolerated by imperial authorities and beneficial to the Polish cause, Napieralski and his allies stuck to a course of close collaboration with Berlin, stubbornly insisting that there was no inherent contradiction between a German military victory and the welfare of the Polish nation. Katolik activists were hardly unique in collaborating with one of the warring imperial states. In the first years of the conflict, collaboration of one kind or another was the rule rather than the exception among the Polish elite of the Russian and Austrian partition zones, and this was so not only among traditional aristocratic loyalists. The leaders of the most populist and militant currents in Polish politics, motivated by long-standing convictions about which empire constituted the greatest threat to the survival of Polishness, also lined up firmly behind the war efforts of either Russia or the Central Powers. On August 17, 1914, the major centrist and rightist parties in the Congress Kingdom, led by Roman Dmowski’s National Democrats, offered enthusiastic support for the Czarist war effort that promised to unite all the Polish lands under one crown and smite Poland’s most dangerous foe. Other Polish activists raised troops for Józef Pilsudski’s famous Polish Legion in order to fight as a semiautonomous unit alongside the Austrian army against what they viewed as the real enemy of Polish national aspirations—Czarist Russia. The result of these divergent forms of “activism”—the mobilizationPage 177 → of thousands of Poles on opposite sides of the battlefield—was profoundly troubling to many Polish patriots. By the midpoint of the war, after having regularly excoriated each other for undermining the national interest by fighting the wrong enemy, the best-known russophiles and the best-known austrophiles had come to the conclusion that their own collaborationist initiatives were becoming untenable. Roman Dmowski, restyling his russophilia into a Westernoriented ententophilia following Russia’s dramatic defeats in 1915, relocated to London and concentrated his efforts on wooing Western public opinion to support Polish national aspirations. Pilsudski’s often contentious collaboration with the Central Powers continued until the summer of 1916, when the outspoken soldier refused to support further recruitment for the Polish Legion as long as it was being treated as merely another unit in the Austrian—or, worse yet, German—armed forces. The following year, Pilsudski’s continued opposition to recruitment of Poles into German-dominated units led to his arrest and imprisonment for the remainder of the war.4 While most Austrian and Russian Poles had, at least initially, rallied behind their current rulers, the reaction of much of Germany’s Polish elite to the outbreak of the war was far more equivocal. The National Democrats of the Prussian partition zone were every bit as convinced as their colleagues in the Congress Kingdom that Germany was the greatest threat to Polish national survival, but acting on this conviction was obviously a very different proposition in Prussia, where it meant treason. One prominent National Democratic politician, Marian Seyda, declared that “in Great Poland and West Prussia, Polish society was compelled to silence from the first day of the war.”5 Like the majority of the German Social Democrats, the Polish parliamentary club eschewed any action that could be interpreted as overt disloyalty and, in the early months of the war, voted unanimously for war credits.6 The National Democrats channeled their oppositional sentiments either into emigration abroad or into the activities of the Interparty Circle (Koło Międzypartyjne), a secret coordinating group that maintained contacts among loyal Polish activists and with various groups abroad.7 Only a minority of prominent Prussian Poles adopted a genuinelyPage 178 → “activist” germanophile orientation. The staunchest of these loyalists were drawn from the ranks of the great magnates, who were often connected by marriage to German aristocratic families.8 But this traditional “court party,” while boasting impressive lineages and considerable wealth, had relatively little clout among the Polish-speaking population at large. Another prominent loyalist, Archbishop Edward Likowski of Posen-Gnesen—whose long-delayed appointment as archbishop in 1914 represented one of the first wartime conciliatory gestures of the German government—seemed

to have more effective means of reaching the Catholic faithful. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, to the great satisfaction of Berlin, Likowski called on the faithful to support the German war effort and pray for a German military victory.9 The archbishop’s primary conduit for communicating with the Catholic population of the diocese, however, was through his parish clergy, among whom National Democratic and germanophobe sentiment was quite pronounced. No message of Prussian loyalism or German-Polish conciliationism was likely to pass through this filter undiluted. The most promising means for rallying Polish public opinion behind the German war effort was through the masscirculation Polish-language press. Indeed, two of the giants of the Polish publishing world—Upper Silesian “press king” Adam Napieralski and Wiktor Kulerski, editor of the widely popular Gazeta Grudziądzka in West Prussia—proved ready and willing to cooperate with German authorities. Only days after the outbreak of the war, Napieralski was petitioning frontier commissioner Mädler for permission to extend his newspaper business into any occupied stretches of the Congress Kingdom. A month later, he and Kulerski concluded a formal agreement with German authorities, in which the Polish publishers pledged their full cooperation with government censors and offered assurances that any Polish-patriotic references were directed squarely and solely at Russia. The Germans, in turn, permitted the free circulation of the Katolik-affiliated newspapers and Gazeta Grudziądzka in the Congress Kingdom and also agreed to provide them with fast-breaking war news from the wire services. This arrangement gave Napieralski a protected and privileged status in reaching the Polish-speaking public of the Congress Kingdom, an opportunity that he exploited aggressively once a successful German offensive in the late summer of 1915 put the entire Congress Kingdom under the occupation of the Central Powers. Within a year,Page 179 → Napieralski had established a network of newspapers servicing most of the occupied territory, including the Kurier Zaglębia in Sosnowiec, the Dziennik Polski (Polish Daily) in Częstochowa and Godzina Polski (Hour of Poland) in Łódz.10 The symbiosis between the advances of the German army and the expansion of the Katolik press was all the more striking in view of the profound mistrust that most of German officialdom harbored toward Napieralski. Career bureaucrats in Silesia had long dismissed Napieralski’s alleged moderation as a smoke screen, a sign of the journalist’s subtlety and cleverness and hence of the greater long-term threat that he posed to the advance of Germandom. Indeed, on lists of Polish and Social Democratic activists prepared before the war by the district president of Oppeln, Napieralski’s name was among those underlined in red, “to be immediately arrested” in case of war or a general strike.11 The Katolik editors swift proclamations of loyalty after the outbreak of the war helped to ensure that this threat was never carried out. Some of Napieralski’s colleagues were briefly arrested, though, and several newspapers published by the Katolik press were forced to cease publishing for a short time.12 All of Napieralski’s publications, particularly the new ones in the Congress Kingdom, were subject to strict censorship, and agents of the Katolik press traveling between Silesia and the Congress Kingdom continued to be harassed.13 If Napieralski was failing to gain the trust of German officials, he was having at least equal difficulty in convincing much of the Polish public that his germanophile activism had (Polish-)patriotic roots. Fliers distributed in Warsaw sarcastically gave Godzina Polski the nickname Gadzina Polski (The Polish Reptile), and most Poles boycotted the new publications as organs of German war propaganda.14 So Napieralski took pains to explain the patriotic basis of his actions. An activist, conciliationist stance by Prussian Poles, he argued, provided a kind of insurance policy for the nation, ensuring that in the event of a German victory or even a mild and inconclusive German defeat, Poles would enjoy “a powerful voice in the ultimate settlement of the Polish question.”15 In an unfinished memoir,Page 180 → Napieralski would describe the logic behind his strategy even more bluntly: “Poles in Germany and Austria should come out sufficiently clearly and loyally in favor of the Central Powers, Poles in the Congress Kingdom for Russia and the coalition. One of these sides will lose, obviously—but without any doubt, Poland must win.”16 This kind of cold calculation seemed to confirm the suspicions of such German officials as frontier commissioner Mädler or district of Oppeln president von Schwerin that Napieralski’s “loyalism” was strictly an exercise in realpolitik, a bid to wring maximum concessions from the Germans in the interest of his real, Polish fatherland. Cynicism ran both ways, of course. The most spectacular wartime gesture of “goodwill” by the German government, the proclamation of an independent kingdom of Poland in November 1916, was, after all, primarily

driven by the German high command’s desire to recruit hundreds of thousands of Poles into the depleted armies of the Central Powers. Not surprisingly, even loyalist Poles showed a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for General Ludendorff’s quest for fresh military recruits. When informed of expectations that eight hundred thousand men might be raised for the war effort, one Polish leader dryly told Matthias Erzberger, “[T]here are not that many suicidal people in the kingdom of Poland.”17 Such vignettes, while underlining the fundamental mistrust prevailing between Germans and Poles during the war, simultaneously pointed to a countervailing rapport between the Polish conciliationists and those members of the German elite to whom they confided such impolitic observations, the one constituency that moderate Polish leaders had always viewed as natural allies: German Catholics, or, more exactly, Center party politicians. Indeed, in the negotiations that Napieralski, Kulerski, and others conducted with “German authorities,” their primary interlocutor was Matthias Erzberger, the outspoken Centrist parliamentarian who had assumed direction of Germany’s propaganda toward neutral countries and had become one of Chancellor Theobold von BethmannHollweg’s closest confidants.18 A devout Catholic and noted polonophile, Erzberger had been one of the Reichstag’s most energetic opponents of anti-Polish exceptionalPage 181 → legislation, and in the early months of the war, he intensively lobbied for the reintroduction of Polish-language religious education in Upper Silesian primary schools.19 Erzberger spearheaded the press agreements with the Katolik camp; intervened to ensure free passage across the frontier for its agents; and argued, against the skepticism of the entrenched officialdom of the German East, that Berlin should use selective censorship and financial patronage to buttress moderate Polish activists in their struggle against the National Democrats.20 The rapport between such Centrists as Erzberger and such Polish conciliationists as Napieralski raised the question, which had surfaced regularly since Napieralski’s defection to the Polish national party in 1903, of whether the Katolik camp was again groping for a way to reintegrate into the Center party. Speculation in this direction was further fueled by the close partnership that redeveloped between Napieralski and Father Jan Kapica, the Upper Silesian priest who had once declared the coming together of the Polish party and the Center to be his primary political goal.21 During the war, Kapica emerged as one of the more prolific and eloquent polemicists in favor of a politics of German-Polish conciliation, writing frequent contributions in both the German Catholic and nonpartisan German press. In 1917, he followed up on these editorial interventions with the publication of a thick pamphlet entitled The German Cultural Mission, Catholicism, and National Reconciliation, published by the Katolik press in 1917. The case that Kapica constructed for concilation was a fascinating mix of realpolitik and Christian idealism. The Upper Silesian priest was quite familiar with Friedrich Naumann’s wartime proposals for an economically integrated but culturally pluralist Mitteleuropa—indeed, he was reportedly “enraptured with” the notion and discussed it with Napieralski “for hours”—and many passages of his writings constitute an ingratiating effort to carve a special role for Poles and a Polish state within this broad Central European vision.22 Drawing on longstanding German discussions about the benefits of a Polish “buffer state” (Pufferstaat) on Germany’s eastern flank, Kapica offered assurances that “a free, pro-German PolandPage 182 → will constitute the strongest bulwark against . . . the Russian danger.”23 Indeed, he argued, Poles would be useful not only as strategic but also as cultural partners, since “precisely the German Poles can be the intermediaries and heralds of German culture in the East.”24 Without any apparent sarcasm, Kapica invoked the lofty rhetoric of a German “cultural mission” to criticize the reality of recent German Polenpolitik: “Nationalism is contrary to the German essence. It contradicts German chivalry toward the weak, German generosity, respect for foreign rights and foreign particularity, it contradicts the German people’s sense of justice and objectivity.”25 While such passages were designed to appeal to a mainstream, kulturprotestantisch German audience, the bulk of The German Cultural Mission was devoted to a more challenging ethical critique of the entire idea of nationalism, which Kapica understood as the exaltation of loyalty to a community of descent over all other loyalties. Echoing the rhetoric of Father Stephan in The Beuthen Trial and the antinationalist arguments of the German pedagogue Friedrich W. Förster, as well as his own earlier editorial pronouncements before the war, Kapica declared that the “confession of nationalism is pagan, its ethics pagan, its concepts of law, the state, and religion all pagan.”26 It was not that nationality was illusory or that the bonds of nationality were unimportant. “ Conationals are our blood

relatives,” Kapica insisted, “and so we should love the nation [Volk] and our national comrades more than a foreign nation.” But he stressed that these ties based on biological descent were subordinate to other loyalties. Invoking Christ’s remark that “whoever loves his father or mother more than more is not worthy of me,” Kapica argued that the same could be applied to loving one’s nation more than Christ.27 The obvious testing ground for Kapica’s vision of a “Slavic-German cultural community” was Kapica’s and Napieralski’s own backyard of Upper Silesia.28 Indeed, alongside their broader Mitteleuropa initiatives, the Silesian conciliationists were active throughout the war in trying to reunify the region’s Catholic clergy and lay Catholic activists behind a single coherent program. These efforts received a modest boost from the accession of Adolf Bertram to the bishop’s chair in Breslau in September 1914, followingPage 183 → the death of Cardinal Kopp. Like Kopp at the time of his move to Breslau, Bertram was a native of north-central Germany unfamiliar with the eastern borderlands and had a reputation as a “state-friendly” bishop. Nonetheless, the Katolik press pledged to “judge him by his actions,” and at least some polonophile priests optimistically viewed Bertram as a breath of fresh air following Kopp’s haughty authoritarianism.29 In April 1915, in a bid to gain the bishop’s sympathies for Polish linguistic desiderata, Napieralski sent Bertram a memorandum explaining his own protracted struggle to combat state-driven germanization while holding at bay the forces of Polish radicalism. To preserve the Catholic population and the church itself from these twin dangers, Napieralski argued, the clergy and the moderate Polish camp needed to unite again, as in the years of the Kulturkampf, in demanding a minimum set of concessions from Berlin: Polish-language religious instruction and (as a prerequisite) the teaching of reading, writing, and singing in Polish in the public schools.30 Perhaps even more important than winning over the new bishop to this strategy of conciliation was gaining the support of Upper Silesia’s mainstream clergy. Napieralski’s wartime rhetoric had already generated considerable goodwill among some of the key Centrist priest-politicians in the region, even prompting them to pull the financial plug on the Polish-language Center organ Tygodnik Katolicki in early 1915. Father Skowronek reportedly told Napieralski that Katolik “now show[ed] itself to be so loyal” that it was impossible to justify subsidizing a rival newspaper.31 Napieralski and Kapica aimed at a comprehensive rapprochement in the ranks of Silesian Catholicism, orchestrating a series of confidential meetings in Kattowitz in late May and early June 1917 that brought together some of the region’s moderate polonophile clerics with the predominantly Centrist clergy of the deanery of Myslowitz (gathered for a regular pastoral conference).32 The program that the two Polish conciliationists pushed at these meetings closely approximated the old Katolik ideal of a regional, implicitly “Polish” Upper Silesian Center party. The entire Upper Silesian clergy was once again to pursue a common political agenda—atPage 184 → least implicitly under the auspices of the Center party—and concentrate on developing chapters of the Center-affiliated Volksverein in parishes throughout Upper Silesia. The Centrist clergy, in turn, was expected to lobby more vocally not only for Polish-language religion classes in the schools but also for the teaching of Polish songs and at least two years of universal Polish reading and writing instruction. This proposed grand compromise met with a skeptical reception from both ends of the clergy’s national spectrum. The National Democratic Gazeta Ludowa, edited by the young Polish-national activist and Reichstag delegate Father Paweł Pośpiech, denounced the conciliationist initiative as a conspiracy to resubordinate Upper Silesian Polish voters to the Center party, a line that was soon echoed by most of the Polish-language press in Prussia. Even Father Brandys, the other Silesian priest serving as a Polish delegate to the Reichstag and previously a moderate ally of Napieralski, complained that the plan would amount to a complete capitulation to the Center. Simultaneously, many of the Center-affiliated priests from the industrial region expressed reservations about demanding mandatory Polish reading and writing instruction in the schools and would agree only to a more modest call to allow voluntary and private Polish lessons.33 Unable to close ranks behind a common program, Centrist and polonophile clerics once again began to go their own separate ways. In August, at a meeting of Center party leaders in Breslau in which bilingual Upper Silesian priests made up a majority of the participants, it was agreed that the propagation of parish-level Volksvereine should be pushed ahead “without regard” to the misgivings of polonophile clerics, as the young Father Carl Ulitzka (Ratibor) brusquely put it.34 The most assertive polonophile pastors, in turn, developed their own independent initiatives. Led by Father Skowroński, a number of priests joined with lay Polish activists in launching the St. Jacek Educational Society (Towarzystwo

Oświaty im św. Jacka). The society, founded in Oppeln in October 1917, was dedicated to the cultivation of the Polish language and, particularly, of a Polish-national intelligentsia, goals that the organizers had despaired of ever seeing accomplished in parish-based Volksvereine.35 While the program of the Polish conciliationists was proving a hard sell even among Upper Silesia’s bilingual clergy, the response that Napieralski’s and Kapica’s overtures elicited from the Prussian bureaucracy wasPage 185 → truly demoralizing. A memorandum by Father Kapica appealing for the restoration of the use of the Polish language in school-based religious instruction was dismissed by Rudolf Küster, the influential councilor in charge of educational affairs in the district of Oppeln. Agitation for Polish instruction, he declared, was the result not of any genuine popular sentiment but merely of “the special egoism of the Polish-oriented clergy,” which the “power of German culture” in the Upper Silesian people would successfully oppose.36 In what must have seemed a particularly galling irony, even the modest concessions that were offered to the Polish population during the course of the war, such as a June 1917 decree guaranteeing Polish-language religious instruction in the province of Posen, were conspicuously not extended to their own home territory, the district of Oppeln. Faced with repeated demands from both Polish and Center-party representatives that Polish religious instruction be offered in Upper Silesia as well, Prussian minister of education Schmidt was intransigent, deploying the old argument that since the local wasserpolnisch dialect was not “real” Polish, using standard Polish was inappropriate in the region. By the spring of 1918, Father Kapica had despaired of coaxing any real concessions of Berlin. He wrote in an editorial in the Schlesische Volkszeitung: The explanation of the Kultusminister [Schmidt] is an utter fiasco for the Upper Silesian conciliationists. They now stand before the Upper Silesian people with empty hands. The people will no longer have any trust in their work of conciliation. For Hakatism, however, it is a great relief. It has won. In Upper Silesia, everything remains the same! There is no less joy among the Polish radicals about the defeat of the hated Upper Silesian conciliationists. The way for them is once again open!37 Adam Napieralski, however, was not quite prepared to admit defeat. His attention was still transfixed on the reality of German military hegemony in East Central European reality, a hegemony that had been further underlined in February by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In the spring of 1918, Napieralski’s Katolik press published the pamphlet Germany, Austria-Hungary, Poland, his final bid to win German officials over to the idea of endowing a resurrected Polish state with as much territory and genuine autonomy as possible. The pamphlet contained almost no trace of the Page 186 →ethical/philosophical critique to which Father Kapica had devoted much of The German Cultural Mission. It was, rather, a pure appeal to German national interest, which Napieralski argued would be served by a strong Polish state capable of assuming from Russia the “leadership of the Slavic world in Europe.” This rather desperate attempt to square Polish and German national aspirations involved projecting all Polish territorial claims to the east and making only halfhearted protests against proposed German annexations along the old German-Russian frontier. So eager was Napieralski to secure the existence of a Polish state—any Polish state—that he even dangled before his German readership the role that such a state could play in encouraging “a steady emigration of Poles from Prussia to Poland” and reducing Polish agitation in the Reich.38 The downfall of Napieralski’s collaborationist strategy, of course, was his fundamental miscalculation about the outcome of the war, a mistake no doubt connected to his long immersion in German culture and politics and his lofty regard for German power.39 More remarkable than this mis-step in judging global military capabilities, however, was the way in which his growing preoccupation with high politics, specifically the question of Polish statehood, caused the Upper Silesian “press king” to lose his legendary feel for the mood of his own local constituency. Perhaps grown too accustomed to operating under the authoritarian wartime regime, Napieralski failed to keep pace with the accelerating radicalization of the Upper Silesian populace, particularly its large and politically volatile working class, as shortages, high prices, and workplace repression mounted in the final years of the war. During the summer of 1918, in a political drama strikingly reminiscent of events fifteen years earlier, Napieralski’s old nemesis, Wojciech Korfanty, would reemerge from several years of relative obscurity to become, once again, the standard-bearer of the Polish national cause and the tribune of the downtrodden Upper

Silesian people. But in contrast to the first, decidedly regional wave of radical enthusiasm that had swept Korfanty to stardom in 1903, his second moment in the spotlight would coincide with one of the most protean periods of European history, a time of continentwide turmoil, revolution, and nationalist insurrection. Page 187 →

Radicalism In the first weeks of the war, as tens of thousands of young Upper Silesian men were sent to the front, police officials and Landräte reported (often with “a tinge of surprise,” as one Polish historian noted) that mobilization was proceeding smoothly and that “the Poles are behaving neutrally and peacefully.”40 Subsequent commentary on Upper Silesian soldiers almost always painted a similar picture of docility and dutifulness. In a December 1915 report discussing desertion among Polish-speaking soldiers, Prussian minister of the interior Loebell specifically cited the “Upper Silesian Poles” in the army as behaving “irreproachably.”41 But as we have seen in case of the Katolik camp’s conciliationism, wartime loyalism did little to soften German officials’ hostile attitude toward all things Polish. Indeed, the experience of fighting alongside other German citizens at the front seems to have been more effective in accentuating a perception of ethno-linguistic difference than in fostering civic solidarity. Even before the war, it had been common for military recruits to be punished—beaten or, more rarely, sentenced to prison—for daring to speak Polish in uniform, and wartime memoirs recount frequent physical and verbal abuse as well as a sense of social isolation. “The Germans do not consider us as their own,” concluded Arka Bożek, a teenager during the war and later a prominent Polish activist. “Always and everywhere we [Upper Silesians] stood out as something separate. To our ‘comrades’ there, we were not Germans, and so we instinctively hung together.”42 Paul Orlinski, a young soldier born in Zalenze, later recalled that although he considered himself thoroughly “germanized” after having gone through the school system, “my ‘germanized’ heart burned when I was told by ‘true’ Germans [in the army] that we came from ‘der Polakei,’ ‘Oberpobolien,’ ‘the ends of the earth’ [weitvergessenen Winkel], and so forth.”43 In Upper Silesia’s foundries and mines as well, the first half of the war was a time of acquiescence mixed with subdued disgruntlement. The commitment of all major labor unions to the wartime Burgfrieden led them to discourage any disruptions that could harm the war effort, and close cooperation between military officers and leading industrialists ensured draconiansPage 188 → restrictions on public gatherings.44 Profound changes in the profile of the local workforce—as locally born adult men were conscripted into the military and their places were taken by a more heterogeneous combination of women, youth, and conscripts and prisoners of war from the East—also made labor-organizing difficult.45 But although workplace militancy was temporarily silenced, discontent focused on questions of consumption was becoming more and more vocal. In Upper Silesia, as in much of Central Europe, disruptions in prewar trade patterns and a frequently corrupt and incompetent rationing system soon produced food shortages and upward price spirals.46 The unavailability or prohibitive prices of basic foodstuffs precipitated demonstrations as early as the fall of 1915. Rallies led by “agitated women” targeted town halls and mayor’s offices in Kattowitz and Myslowitz and marched through the streets of such working-class suburbs as Rosdzin and Schoppinitz. In a number of cases, local officials were sufficiently alarmed to summon the police to disperse the demonstrations by force.47 The year 1917 would witness a continuation of such hunger protests but also a pronounced revival of more traditional workplace militancy. One factor in this resurgence was the passage by the Reichstag of the Auxiliary Service Law (December 1916), which created workers councils and gave labor unions an institutional voice, albeit very much a minority one, in collective bargaining with employers.48 Union organizers now enjoyed greater opportunities to recruit members, and workers were in turn more interested in joining organizations that seemed to enjoy some clout. From January to December 1917, membership in the Social Democratic miners union surged from 2,150 to 10,412, and that of the metalworkers’ union grew from 226 to 5,153.49 The leadership of these unions—as well as the ZZP, the Gewerkschaften, and the Hirsch-Duncker unions—remainedPage 189 → highly cautious and vocally discouraged workplace militancy, but the raising of expectations raised by this wave of mobilization, coupled with the steadily worsening food situation, spurred a dramatic outbreak of popular unrest in the summer of 1917.

Between May and August, the entire industrial region was convulsed by a series of wildcat strikes and massive hunger demonstrations. Some government bureaucrats pointed to the militancy of local women, aggravated by the worsening food situation, as the driving force behind the new wave of work stoppages. “It is precisely the mood among the miners’ wives,” a local official in the county of Pless reported, “that has become truly alarming.”50 Several of the largest hunger marches culminated in the looting of shops and food storehouses, violent scuffles with police and soldiers sent to quell the disturbances, and hundreds of arrests. Local union leaders tried to distill this mass discontent into a series of concrete, negotiable demands, but the leading Upper Silesian industrialists, backed by the region’s civil and military authorities, were not in a negotiating mood. Instead, they secured an even more sweeping ban on public meetings and threatened “agitators” with being sent to the front.51 Such drastic measures proved moderately successful in disrupting potential coordination among strikers within the region or with workers in other parts of Germany or in occupied Poland, but it only further deepened distrust of and hostility toward employers. Wildcat strikes continued periodically through the fall and winter of 1917 and spring of 1918 and escalated to a mass phenomenon once again in the summer. Alarmed industrialists demanded the militarization of a number of mines. By September 1917, a state of siege had been declared in the entire industrial region. But the region’s deputy military commander marveled that even these extreme measures made “little impression” on the workers, who continued acts of spontaneous defiance despite the discouragement of every major union.52 While the existence of massive popular discontent in this last year of the war was undeniable, it remained far from clear how this waxing militancy would be ideologically channeled and who would ultimately emerge as its spokespeople. As had been the case during an earlier period of (far more modest) socioeconomic distress around the turn of the century, it initially seemed that social conflict would be defined in terms of class antagonismsPage 190 → and that the primary beneficiaries would be the Social Democrats. Membership growth among labor unions, as we have seen, worked primarily to the advantage of the socialist miners and metalworkers unions, and the Upper Silesian circulation of Volkswacht, the German-language Social Democratic daily published in Breslau, enjoyed explosive growth during the war. With only a few hundred subscriptions in the region before 1914, Volkswacht reportedly had almost thirteen thousand subscribers by the fall of 1917.53 This unprecedented penetration by the Social Democratic press helped to ensure that Upper Silesian workers had some sense of being part of a trend of mounting labor militancy throughout the German Empire, from the Ruhr to Saxony to Berlin. By the fall of 1917, of course, workers could also look to the unfolding Bolshevik revolution in Russia—widely publicized in Upper Silesia, despite the efforts of German censors—as an even more dramatic and provocative example of social insurrection. Word-of-mouth news from Russian prisoners of war working in local mines and foundries provided another conduit for information about revolutionary events to the east.54 This was not only the era of Leninist revolution, however, but also the era of Wilsonian self-determination, and the experience of wartime hardship could be interpreted by national activists not so much as exploitation of laborers by capitalists but, rather, as oppression of Poles by Germans. Convincing Upper Silesians of the “Polishness” of their suffering was not, to be sure, an easy matter. As memoirist Arka Bożek recalled, workingclass, German-literate Upper Silesians tended to see little in common between themselves and either the “poor wretches from Częstochowa” who came to the region in search of work or the “fantasists” and “dreamers” among the bourgeois “Posen Poles.”55 Once again, the task of indigenizing Polish nationalism, of erasing the persistent gap between local inhabitants’ vision of themselves and their vision of “Poles,” fell to the old tribune of the people Wojciech Korfanty, who stormed back onto the public stage in the final years of the war. This reemergence was striking testimony to Korfanty’s legendary reputation, for at the beginning of the war, although he still held a seat in the Prussian Landtag (from a constituency in the province of Posen), Korfanty seemed to have slipped to the status of a second-tier politician. Through the fall of 1914, he loyally followed Napieralski’sPage 191 → conciliationist line, even collaborating with Matthias Erzberger’s foreign propaganda efforts. By the end of the year, however, a combination of Korfanty’s frustration with the lack of concessions from Berlin and German authorities’ slight and diminishing faith in Korfanty’s reliability put an early end to his collaborationist “activism.”56 For about two years, Korfanty was all but politically invisible as he quietly reestablished contacts with his old allies—and recent enemies—among the National Democrats, both at home and in exile in Switzerland.57

In January 1917, Wojciech Korfanty took the floor of the Landtag to deliver the kind of passionately oppositional speech that had helped create his reputation as a firebrand fifteen years earlier. In the approving words of the National Democratic Gazeta Ludowa, he spoke “as a Pole,” blasting the Prussian government for the insufficiency of its concessions to the state’s Polish-speaking population. The conciliationist camp condemned the speech as counterproductive, a provocation that would only provide ammunition for hard-line polonophobes in the German government.58 But Korfanty’s defiance was clearly in tune with the mounting hostility of working-class Upper Silesians toward military and civil authority, signaling a revival of Polish-national “radicalism” in the region. Finding an outlet for this growing militant sentiment was not easy, however, for even more “radical” Polish activists continued to oppose strike activity that might disrupt Upper Silesia’s productive capacity and lead to social revolution. Korfanty and his National Democratic allies looked to a more impeccably constitutionalist form of mobilization: electoral politics, specifically the special Reichstag election for the district of Lublinitz-TostGleiwitz necessitated by the death of the Centrist incumbent. With the Center supporting the candidacy of Gleiwitz lawyer Benno Nehlert, who was all-too-palatable to German-national circles, the Polish electoral committee came under strong pressure not only to put forward a countercandidate but to choose one with the charisma and oppositional credentials necessary to win. The more radical elements in the Polish camp quickly rallied around Korfanty, and reactions at local campaign rallies demonstrated that his popular appeal was back. The run-up to the by-election unfolded almost as a replay of Korfanty’s earlier breakthrough victories in Kattowitz-Zabrze. The local Catholic parish clergy once again campaigned passionately and almost unanimously on behalf of the CenterPage 192 → party candidate. As in the 1905 by-election, the Katolik press essentially sat out the elections, refusing to break party discipline by openly criticizing Korfanty but also refusing to agitate on his behalf. As in the closely fought runoff election of 1903, the Social Democrats ended up throwing their support behind Korfanty in the final days of the campaign, after they concluded that Nehlert was catering to the annexationist aspirations of the pan-Germans. Wojciech Korfanty once again figured not only as the Polish candidate, the champion of linguistic grievances and foe of germanization, but also as an all-around populist tribune, demanding equal suffrage and the secret ballot for Landtag elections; an immediate peace without annexations; the shifting of any war debts onto wealthy industrialists; and state support for workers and farmers, veterans, widows, and orphans. It was a winning formula. On election day, June 6, 1918, Korfanty garnered 63 percent of the vote, providing the Polish national movement with its most impressive electoral victory in Upper Silesia in more than a decade and signaling a decisive shift in the balance of power within the region’s Polish camp.59 Unlike fifteen years earlier, when established authorities ranging from the German government to the Catholic clergy to Napieralski’s political machine had been able to blunt and gradually absorb a Korfanty-led populist protest, this new upsurge of radicalism in Upper Silesia was followed by a chain of events that would, in the course of only a few months, overthrow virtually every fixed point of the old imperial German order. Ludendorff’s spring offensive, Germany’s final bid for military victory in the First World War, had stalled by July. A counteroffensive by the Entente had the German army in full retreat by August, and setbacks on the war’s other fronts were pushing Germany’s allies to the point of collapse. During the second week in November, as army and navy units throughout Germany mutinied and strike activity reintensified, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated and fled to Holland, and an official armistice brought hostilities to a close. Germany became a republic, temporarily headed by a coalition cabinet of Majority and Independent Socialists. Authority at the local level devolved to an awkward constellation of old-regime bureaucrats and workers’ and soldiers’ councils (Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte). The situation on the ground in Upper Silesia was even more complicated than elsewhere in the fledgling republsic. By mid-November, workers’ and soldiers’ councils had formed in all of the larger communities in the region,Page 193 → though their ideological profiles varied significantly according to the demographics of the given community. In the largest cities (Beuthen, Kattowitz, Gleiwitz), which functioned as commercial and administrative hubs as well as centers of industrial production, the councils included a broad cross section of working-class to middle-class representatives and were dominated politically by the Majority Socialists and Democrats. In overwhelmingly working-class communities (e.g., the pit villages of Beuthen and Kattowitz counties), the councils tended to be more solidly proletarian, more militant, and more open to polonophile

sentiment, and they often included councilors who adhered to the ZZP or the PPS along with councilors supporting the Majority Socialists. Only in Zabrze, a smelting center and, for two decades, one of the “reddest” parts of the industrial region, did the left-wing Independent Socialists enjoy the upper hand.60 The relatively moderate complexion of most of the local workers’ and soldiers’ councils, however, did not correspond with any decline in underlying popular discontent with living and working conditions, which drove ongoing wildcat strike activity through the winter of 1918–19 and provided a ready pool of recruits for a more revolutionary politics. In late December, oppositional members of workers’ and soldiers’ councils in the county of Beuthen organized a meeting of the Spartacist League (the first incarnation of the Communist party), which enrolled thousands of members within only a few weeks.61 While Upper Silesia’s Spartacists were challenging the November revolution for not being a genuine revolution, Polish activists in the region were dismissing it for being irredeemably “German” and thus of no concern to national Poles. After Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication, Polish activists in Posen moved quickly to form the Supreme People’s Council (Naczelna Rada Ludowa, or NRL), which was to serve as a kind of provisional government for the Prussian partition zone’s Polish population. Korfanty himself was chosen as one of three members of the NRL’s commissariat, underlining both the importance of Upper Silesia to Polish territorial aims and Korfanty’s own status as one of the National Democrats’ best-known and most charismatic leaders in all of Poland.62 Over the following severalPage 194 → weeks, a Silesian section of the Supreme People’s Council was organized in Beuthen to assume a wide range of quasi-sovereign functions in the region: coordinating the network of local people’s councils (Rady Ludowe) that had formed in the closing year of the war, supervising elections to a provisional Polish assembly in Posen, collecting taxes, and even beginning to organize a homegrown Polish military force.63 The emergence of these new governing bodies did not, to be sure, eliminate party-political strife in the Polish ranks. But the primary cleavage during these months—between the National Democrats and the newly formed, ZZP-affiliated National Workers’ Party (Narodowe Stronnictwo Robotników)—only highlighted the skewing of the ideological spectrum in Prussian Polish politics toward the Catholic and nationalist CenterRight.64 The Polish socialists were still too disorganized to form a credible left wing, and the once-dominant Katolik camp, its conciliationist program spectacularly discredited, struggled to keep pace with the new reality. Adam Napieralski himself retired to a sanatorium in Saxony to recover from a serious illness, while his newspaper empire, left in the hands of caretakers, came to provide a reliable echo of the overriding national goal of bringing Upper Silesia under Polish rule.65 The various groups jockeying to succeed the collapse of German imperial authority in Upper Silesia—the Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, the Rady Ludowe, the Spartacists—coexisted uneasily but relatively peacefully through the end of the year. Indeed, during these early protean weeks, there was frequent mixing and interpenetration between the rival movements. Polish leaders actually encouraged participation in the “German” workers’ and soldiers’ councils, and, as noted earlier, adherents of the ZZP and the Polish socialist party served on a number of local councils. In Beuthen, the leaderships of the Polish people’s council and the local soldiers’ council worked out a formal agreement in which the former pledged to support the maintenance of law and order while the latter agreed to refrain from any anti-Polish agitation.66 At the grassroots level, as well, there was considerable flux in individuals’ engagement with various political currents. In his memoirs, Arka Bożek described the crowd at a packed meetingPage 195 → of the Spartacist League in Gleiwitz as a bewildering sociological and ideological mix: “white-collar proletarians” as well as “real” laborers; Germans, Jews, and “already quite germanized Upper Silesians” as well as a few more polonophile peasants (like himself); “prewar bullies who had transformed themselves into revolutionaries” as well as “enlightened and reasonable workers.” Bożek recalled objecting strongly to the anti-Polish comments of some German socialist speakers, but he admitted that he himself was at the time “a conglomerate of a socialist, a Spartacist, and a conservative,” in which “[o]ne fought with the other, and the other with the third.”67 Despite such overlapping loyalties, the question of which institution(s) would ultimately exercise sovereign authority in Upper Silesia could not be fudged indefinitely. As weeks dragged on and it became clear that the Allied representatives gathered in Paris were still far from issuing a final verdict on Upper Silesia’s fate, Social Democratic officials in Berlin and Breslau and leading Upper Silesian industrialists became increasingly impatient

with the ambiguities of the situation on the ground. If the authority of the new German republic was not restored soon and definitively, they feared, a Spartacist-led general strike and/or an armed invasion by Polish armed units from across the border would result in this crucial industrial center being lost forever. The 117th infantry division was dispatched to Upper Silesia in early December as a border protection force (Grenzschutz), but local industrialists, deeming this force insufficient, raised funds for its reinforcement and for the raising of an Upper Silesian Freiwilligen-Korps, one of the many volunteer units (Freikorps) composed of recently decommissioned soldiers that the government hastily recruited to fight Poles in the East and leftist revolutionaries throughout Germany. To coordinate the reassertion of German authority, local Social Democratic officials, in cooperation with the leadership of the Sixth Army Corps in Breslau, established the Central Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Kattowitz. By late January 1919, the Central Council had declared most of the eastern half of the district of Oppeln (including the entire industrial region) to be under a state of siege, and the council’s chairman, SPD functionary Otto Hörsing, was on his way to assuming near-dictatorial powers. Over the next several months, as many Polish activists were arrested for treason and dozens of workers were shot by Grenzschutz or Freikorps units,Page 196 → the overlapping tensions between rulers and ruled and between germanophile and polonophile partisans became increasingly explosive.68

Separatism Even as many Upper Silesians began to take sides in the struggle to “save” their homeland for Germany or “restore” it to Poland, much of the region’s political, economic, and cultural elite was decidedly unenthused about union with either Berlin or Warsaw. A combination of long-standing regionalist resentment against the German state, prejudices about Polish managerial capacities, and fears that the new regimes in both states were bent on socialist economic and cultural experiments sent this heterogeneous group of dissenters groping for alternatives to incorporation into either a German or Polish centralized state. It was far from clear what such a third-way solution might look like or what the boundaries of such an entity would be. But at a time when new states were springing up across East Central Europe and when virtually every boundary in the region was open to revision, creating some kind of special status for this pivotal industrial center seemed both plausible and desirable to many of the region’s elite. The idea of (Upper) Silesian statehood was backed at one time or another by a diverse group of supporters driven by very different motives. In mid-November 1918, the leaders of the Social Democratic and Democratic parties in Breslau—all traditional supporters of a strong German nation-state—threatened that the province of Silesia would secede from the republic and attempt to reconstitute a new confederation with southern and western German states in the event that left-wing forces in Berlin staged a putsch or prevented a meeting of the National Assembly.69 Somewhat later, and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, a collection of conservative senior bureaucrats, military commanders, and other stalwarts of the old regime developed plans to forge an independent state or states out of the territories of the Ostmark (East and West Prussia, Posen, Silesia,Page 197 → even the Baltic states) in order to protect them from the dual threats of Polish annexation and Moscow- or Berlin-based “Bolshevism.”70 In all these circles, achieving independence from Germany was clearly envisioned as a temporary expedient in exceptional circumstances, a circuitous means to ultimate reincorporation into Germany rather than a permanent distancing from the German nation. Similar motivations could be found among those who came to advocate an independent Upper Silesian state. Several of the general directors of the region’s leading industrial concerns—men known as longtime pillars of Germandom and now the primary fund-raisers for the Freikorps — backed some form of Upper Silesian separatism in the winter of 1918–19, arguing that such an arrangement best protected the area from Bolshevism, Polish annexation, and the burden of war reparations to the Allies.71 Given such calculated strategizing by actors whose sympathies had always been decidedly germanophile, it is tempting to dismiss these discussions of (Upper) Silesian statehood as a tactical, intranational issue, a dispute “among Germans” about how best to preserve German rule, just as the simultaneous sparring between the National Democratic activists of Prussian Poland and the socialists and populists of the other partition zones represented a dispute “among Poles.”72 Indeed, interwar-

era German writers sympathetic to the separatists took pains to argue that Upper Silesian separatists really aimed to “preserve Upper Silesia for Germandom.”73 Polish historians have generally agreed, although they of course described the movement more pejoratively, as a maneuver aimed solely at protecting “the interests of German capitalists and landowners.”74 But the most passionate and persistent supporters of Upper Silesian separatism were driven by more than tactical motives. For these separatist leaders—almost all locally born, educated middleclass, and Catholic—calls for Upper Silesian independence were symptomatic of a long-term aversion to “Prussia” and “Berlin.” While in many ways closely analogous to the regionalist and confessional grievances of contemporary Catholic separatists in the Rhineland, the additional burden of linguistic and ethnic discriminationPage 198 → pushed the alienation of some Upper Silesian separatists beyond anti-Prussianism to a more fundamental alienation from Germandom.75 In these circles, the cause of Upper Silesian secession was couched not only or even primarily in a rhetoric of interest but, rather, in a Wilsonian rhetoric of selfdetermination. It was an attempt—albeit belated, rushed, and improvised—at Upper Silesian nation building. The men who best represented this tendency within the Upper Silesian independence movement and who emerged as its leading propagandists in December 1918, were Ewald Latacz, a lawyer and the chairman of the soldiers’ and workers’ council in Loslau, and the two Reginek brothers: Thomas, a young curate working in the industrial region, and Jan, a schoolteacher in Ratibor. The son of a Catholic schoolteacher and Center politician, Ewald Latacz has been described as “a typical representative” of the “Upper Silesian Center-party intelligentsia,” which was basically germanophile in its cultural loyalties and linguistic practices but harbored “a strong hatred, in the best case a deep mistrust, against the central government in Berlin.”76 The Reginek brothers might also be considered members of this regional intelligentsia, since Thomas experienced the standard educational pilgrimage of a Silesian priest (from Catholic Gymnasium in Beuthen to university and seminary in Breslau), while his brother Jan became a schoolteacher and ultimately chairman of the local workers’ and soldiers’ council in Ratibor. But the Reginek brothers’ closer connection to “popular” and Polish-speaking roots— their father was a farmer in the county of Oppeln—ensured that their integration in this Catholic intelligentsia was more tentative than Ewald Latacz’s and that their feelings of alienation from the German system were more pronounced.77 Latacz and the Reginek brothers began to translate their particularist sentiments into a full-fledged Upper Silesian separatist movement during the last week of November. Using contacts he had cultivated during his service in the regional War Economic Office, Latacz arranged a confidential meeting in Kattowitz between Jan and Thomas Reginek and two representatives of Upper Silesian heavy industry who were thought to be sympatheticPage 199 → to separatist proposals.78 During the following week, after having presumably secured at least tacit financial backing from the industrialists, Latacz and the Reginek brothers launched a two-track campaign: to sell the idea of Upper Silesian independence to foreign statesmen as well as to popularize the notion among the region’s own population. One obvious place to seek support for such a third-way solution to the Upper Silesian question was in Prague, the capital of the third emergent state to border the region. Czechoslovakia, though only weeks old, was already recognized by the Allies, and with its highly industrialized economy, it could provide a crucial protector and trading partner for an Upper Silesian free state. On December 2, 1918, Father Reginek led a small delegation to Prague to meet with Czechoslovak premier Karel Kramář and sound out his government’s attitude toward the prospect of an Upper Silesian free state. Although Reginek would later report that the idea was “ well received,” the Czechs were careful not to make any rash commitments without the backing of the Western Allies.79 A week later, a second Upper Silesian delegation, which included Fritz Wenske, the editor of the staunchly Centrist and proclerical Oberschlesische Kurier, went to Prague to consult with Czechoslovak president Tomaś Masaryk. It, too, received the same cordial but noncommittal response.80 This bout of unofficial diplomacy, nonetheless, caused considerable outrage among German centralists. When one Social Democratic official was accused of being in one of the delegations to Prague, he issued a vigorous denial in Volkswille, and when Wenske’s involvement was publicized, the German liberal press denounced him as a “traitor.” Jan Reginek was eventually forced to resign from thePage 200 → chairmanship of the workers’ and soldiers’ council in Ratibor due to his participation in the initiatives, and there was talk of placing him under arrest.81 Since the courting of support abroad was yielding few results and stirring considerable controversy, the Upper

Silesian secessionists devoted most of their efforts to rallying grassroots support for the idea of independence. The mobilization campaign confirmed the existence of a close affinity between separatist sympathies and Upper Silesia’s Center-party intelligentsia, both clerical and lay. On December 6, 1918, at a meeting of the Center electoral committee for the district of Kattowitz-Zabrze, Father Ludwig Skowronek submitted a resolution declaring that Silesia’s union with Prussia and Germany had dissolved with the abdication of Wilhelm II, leaving the region free to determine its own fate.82 Skowronek’s position was swiftly endorsed by the Center-affiliated Neisser Zeitung, which defended the province’s right to “self-defense against the unprecedented Berlin dictatorship and against Polish and German Bolshevism.”83 On December 9, two of the leading Center-party dailies, the Oberschlesische Kurier and the Oberschlesische Zeitung, distributed copies of a bilingual pamphlet entitled “Upper Silesia—an Independent Free State?” as a special supplement to that day’s newspaper. Sponsored by the Upper Silesian Committee and presumably written by Father Reginek, the pamphlet was an unabashed call for the region’s inhabitants to exercise their right of self-determination and create an “Upper Silesia for the Upper Silesians.”84 The separatist publicity campaign was not, to be sure, strictly limited to Center-party circles. On the same day that the pamphlet supporting a free state appeared, the leaders of the local workers’ and soldiers’ council in Tarnowitz, both Social Democrats, published another bilingual appeal for a “Silesian republic.” A regional interparty meeting in Kandrzin, though summoned at the initiative of a clerical Center party activist (probably Father Carl Ulitzka), revealed widespread sympathy for at least a limited and temporary form of separation from Germany.85 OberschlesischePage 201 → Kurier editor Fritz Wenske claimed that there was also considerable support for an Upper Silesian free state “in Jewish circles.”86 Nonetheless, while secessionist sympathies could be found among diverse demographic groups, it was clear that clerical and proclerical lay activists were serving as the effective vanguard of the movement. The issue that did most to galvanize support for Upper Silesian independence among the Catholic clergy and to identify separatism with the church was the question of confessional schools. The formation of a coalition government of Majority and Independent Socialists in Prussia had given the portfolio of education minister to Adolf Hoffmann, an Independent Socialist and militant atheist who wasted little time in issuing decrees that excluded the clergy from any role as school inspectors and eliminated mandatory religious instruction in the primary schools. Despite efforts by the more moderate Central Council in Breslau (effectively a Majority Socialist–Democratic party coalition) to prevent implementation of these measures until a meeting of the National Assembly, the Hoffmann decrees caused instant outrage in clerical circles and quickly became one of the central themes of the separatist cause.87 The initiatives underlined the relative powerlessness and renewed outsider status of the Center party during these first months of the republic, creating a plausible narrative of continuity between the liberal- Protestant Kulturkampf that followed German unification and a socialist-atheist “second Kulturkampf” that threatened to follow the establishment of a German republic. This surge in distrust of Berlin among Upper Silesia’s clergy allowed them to enter into greater sympathy with the restive, oppositional mood of their parishioners. In recent years, the region’s priests had often played the role of spiritual gendarmes, regularly berating their flocks for flirting with “revolutionary” activities. Not only had such harangues usually failed to prevent parishioners from voting for Korfanty, reading socialist newspapers, or engaging in wildcat strikes, but they may also have contributed to a modest, but noticeable, drop in religious observance during the finalPage 202 → years of the war.88 Now, by vocally defending local interests against outsiders, the clergy was able to rehabilitate some their oppositional credentials. The Center-party press certainly did its part to cultivate the image of a “people’s” clergy. In a full-page article entitled “The Truth about the Church,” the Oberschlesische Kurier painted a heroic portrait of the typical Upper Silesian priest, whose grueling fifteen-hour workday began in the early morning with three to four hours in the confessional. During a recent epidemic in Königshütte, the editors wrote, many priests caring for the sick went several days without changing clothes or getting proper sleep.89 Thomas Reginek himself was one of the energetic young curates that lent some verisimilitude to this pastoral ideal type. While resolutely hostile to Social Democratic influence— Volkswacht referred to him derisively as a “socialist-slayer”—Reginek was an enthusiastic innovator of new charitable and associational initiatives in every parish in which he worked.90 The rapport between priest and parishioner that this

kind of activity fostered, he argued in his memoirs, was strained but never shattered during the revolutionary months surrounding the end of the war. “Even in the ‘reddest’ parts of Upper Silesia,” Reginek wrote, “priests were never accosted.” In contrast to the pervasive suspicion of outsiders, there remained “a trust in the clergy, which for centuries has served as the people’s only disinterested counselor in social and economic, as well as religious, matters.”91 The defense of the church figured prominently in the unfolding separatist publicity campaign, though confessional grievances were always closely interlinked with issues of economic exploitation, linguistic discrimination, and perceptions of general contempt from outsiders. A bilingual flier circulated on December 19—distributed as a supplement to the Center-party press and presumed penned by Father Reginek—mocked the efforts by both the Prussian and Polish governments to woo the Upper Silesian population. The author—declaring, “[N]ot you, dear Upper Silesian,Page 203 → but the treasures of the earth give rise to this exceptional ardor”—asked rhetorically whether the “Upper Silesian nation” should always labor for the benefit of others. The pamphlet went on to emphasize the threat that “foreign” rule posed to the transmission of the Catholic faith. Are you to send your children to schools where they will not hear your mother tongue and from which the godless have banned the cross— where praying to God is not allowed, teaching holy religion is not allowed, and your child is not allowed to carry the catechism and Bible to school? Do you want to belong to a state that oppresses the Catholic church, a state that is run by godless, faithless people without religious feeling? In Berlin, a new Kulturkampf is already beginning! They want to take over church and monastic property, the hard-earned offerings given by you and your ancestors. . . . And is it any better in Warsaw? Who is in charge there? Pilsudski, who wants nothing to do with the church or religion, who is separating the church from the state and the schools on the Prussian model. The flier concluded by citing Switzerland as a precedent for a prosperous, independent, multilingual state and calling on U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, “as a just man,” to support Upper Silesian statehood.92 It is difficult to know exactly how separatist slogans were received by ordinary Upper Silesians, since the idea was never put to a vote or even made the subject of a petition campaign, but impressionistic reports suggest that the idea of secession—or at least far-reaching autonomy—resonated among many inhabitants. In mid-December, the Central Council in Breslau, which was growing increasingly concerned about the acceleration of secessionist demands, sent several emissaries to tour Upper Silesia. They reported that “the idea of Upper Silesian autonomy is talked about everywhere” and that local officials were convinced that the way to win over the population was by treating them as “neither Poles nor Germans but, rather, an independent nation, a mixed people with their own dialect and their own race.”93 These reports about the popular appeal of the separatist movement were reaching Breslau at the same time as other ominous news from the eastern borderlands. The newly founded Spartacist League was recruitingPage 204 → thousands of adherents in the Upper Silesian industrial region, while in the province of Posen, an armed uprising on December 27 put an effective end to German rule. The leadership of the Silesian Central Council concluded that if there was to be any hope of generating support for continued German control of Upper Silesia, some attempt to placate separatist sentiment in the region would have to be made. They invited various representatives from Upper Silesia, including separatist spokesmen Thomas Reginek and Ewald Latacz, to a special conference in Breslau to meet with major Silesian party leaders and delegates from the central government in Berlin.94 The Majority Socialists, having just ended their coalition with the Independent Socialists, were now prepared to jettison plans for deconfessionalizing Silesia’s schools, while the separatist representatives—even the generally polonophile Father Reginek—made clear both their desire to avoid annexation by Poland and their willingness to negotiate with Berlin for greater autonomy. The discussions in Breslau, however, also revealed a profound gap between the separatists and most of the other participants in their prescription for dealing with popular discontent in Upper Silesia.

Alexander Pohlmann, a leader of the Democratic party in Upper Silesia and longtime mayor of Kattowitz, spoke for much of the old-regime administrative elite when he argued that what was needed to pacify the Upper Silesian population was not more carrot, in the form of wide-ranging administrative and cultural autonomy, but a more effective stick. The Upper Silesian,” he insisted, “will see the expression of state authority, and when he sees this, he will be satisfied and submit to it. . . . It is not possible to proceed any other way in Upper Silesia.”95 Another left liberal, sanitation councilor Bloch, agreed: “The Upper Silesian leans to the side where he knows power lies.”96 The provincial leaders of the Social Democratic and Center parties were not quite as blunt, but they, along with the region’s leading industrialists (even those sympathetic to separatist plans), agreed that military force would be a necessary part of meeting the “Great Polish” and “Bolshevik” threats in Upper Silesia. Latacz and Reginek objected that it was precisely these leaders’ past misrule and habitual reliance on coercion that had turned the Upper Silesian population against Germany, and they invoked their greater familiarityPage 205 → with authentic popular sentiment. Father Reginek spoke of having “immersed himself in the people” after his theological studies, while Latacz stressed being a “born-and-bred” Upper Silesian who could speak Polish. Latacz added that “in Kattowitz . . . , the most German city in Upper Silesia . . . , one cannot get to know Upper Silesia, especially not in the circles that the Honorable Mayor Pohlmann and School Inspector Hacks [another conference participant] frequented, and most especially not when these gentlemen only converse once or twice with an occasional worker.” This isolation prevented those in the highest administrative echelons from realizing the depth and breadth of ordinary inhabitants’ alienation from Germany. Father Reginek told the conference participants that, in his experience, one could not bring up union with Germany (or, worse yet, Prussia) at a public meeting in Upper Silesia without being driven out or shouted down. Latacz argued that if a straightforward plebiscite were held at that moment, some 80 to 90 percent of the population in the territory on the right bank of the Oder River would vote for incorporation into Poland. Such an estimate was based on his judgment that “not only the purely Polish-speaking but also the bilingual and German population are inclined to union with Poland.” The only viable strategy for containing the pro-Polish sentiment of the moment, the only “really catchy slogan,” Latacz concluded, was Upper Silesian statehood—more precisely, “separation from Germany, no union with Poland, and putting off until the future a settlement of the question of state membership.”97 This was going too far for the overwhelming majority of the policy makers gathered in Breslau. They did, however, accept the argument that “something concrete must be offered to the Upper Silesians” if any local support for continued German rule were to be generated. They came up with the Breslau Resolutions, five broad proposals for granting greater cultural and administrative autonomy to Upper Silesia. First, government positions were now to be filled by “men who understand the particularities of the Upper Silesian situation and who enjoy the trust of the people, with the greatest possible enlistment of Catholic, Polish-speaking men.” Second, there would be no changes in the relationship between church and state without consultation with church authorities, particularly no impediments to school-based religious instruction in the children’s mother tongue. Third, the bishop of Breslau would be requested to establish a special delegation district (Delegatur) in Upper Silesia, based in the industrial region.Page 206 →Fourth, no new ordinances or decrees that significantly affected Upper Silesia were to implemented without consultation with local officials. Fifth, a special commissar for Upper Silesia would represent the region’s interests in the Central Council in Breslau. In the first week of January 1919, the Berlin government agreed to the resolutions, which were then publicized on brightly colored bilingual posters throughout the region.98 As a remedy for decades of Upper Silesian cultural and linguistic desiderata, the Breslau Resolutions left much to be desired. They proved most effective in addressing the purely confessional concerns of the Catholic church and the Center party, particularly in defusing the panic over the Hoffmann decrees. The promised administrative changes were more difficult to implement. The creation of a separate delegation district for Upper Silesia met considerable resistance from Cardinal Bertram and even from some elements of the Upper Silesian clergy. Only later, with the intervention of the Vatican in “neutralizing” the area prior to the plebiscite, would an autonomous ecclesiastical administration be initiated. Reforms in state administrative practice were either exceedingly vague, as in the promise to “assess the feeling” (Fühlung zu nehmen) of local representatives about policy changes, or had the potential to enhance centralized authority rather than local autonomy, as the subsequent appointment of Otto Hörsing as a quasi-dictatorial “commissar” for Upper Silesia would demonstrate.

The first of the Breslau Resolutions touched on the most vexing and intractable issue involved in granting Upper Silesia greater regional rights: the question of “parity,” particularly linguistic parity, in public life. The pledge to open up more opportunities in the civil service for locally born Catholics descended from Polish-speaking families was not, in principle, a trivial concession. Since 1886, these men had been explicitly banned from appointment to high-level bureaucratic positions, and after the publication of the Breslau Resolutions, at least some high-profile posts now passed from Protestant conservatives to Catholic Centrists.99 The appointment in February 1919 of the bilingual Josef Bitta, a lawyer and Center party leader, as district president of Oppeln marked a significant step toward ending systematic discrimination based on confession and descent. But what did such moves really say about the future status of the Polish language? Did greater career opportunities for some middle-class Catholic Upper Silesians who grew up speaking Polish mean that Polish could nowPage 207 → actually be taught in the schools and freely used in public life? Early indications were hardly encouraging for advocates of such changes. The participants in the Breslau conference had decided to expunge any reference to Polish being recognized as an “official” language in the district of Oppeln, once they realized that this would implicitly require all government employees to be functionally bilingual.100 Any such commitment, just like any blanket commitment to provide systematic instruction in Polish language in the schools, ran up against the fact that very few teachers or other civil servants could read and write Polish properly. One observer estimated that even though many Upper Silesian schoolteachers came from Polish-speaking homes, only 2 or 3 percent were truly fluent enough to teach the language.101 Ongoing doubts about the sufficiency of concessions from Berlin and Breslau helped to ensure the persistence of secessionist agitation. An organization called the Upper Silesians’ League was founded in Beuthen in midJanuary, again with Father Reginek and Ewald Latacz in the lead. Their program, published in a full-page manifesto in the Oberschlesische Kurier, incorporated many of the points included in the Breslau Resolutions but went further, demanding full linguistic parity in “courts, administration, the church, and the schools”; raising (albeit vaguely) the need for greater “social legislation” and “worker protection”; and insisting on the “indivisibility” of Upper Silesia as a necessary part of any final territorial settlement.102 These issues, like the Upper Silesians’ League itself, would reemerge repeatedly during the long subsequent struggle over the fate of the region. But the first round of debate over the issue of Upper Silesian separatism had already raised profound doubts as to whether a “third way” equidistant from both Germany and Poland was either feasible, given the lack of international support for the idea, or credible, given the involvement in the separatist movement of industrialists and others who were clearly germanophile. Could a putatively regionalist, supranational, or nonnational movement be accepted as nationally innocent, or did all such activity have to be judged by whether it ultimately served the German or Polish cause? The difficulty of determining when behavior was pro-German, pro-Polish, or genuinely nonnational was highlighted during the run-up to thePage 208 → elections to the German National Assembly and Prussian Landtag, held, respectively, on January 19 and January 26, 1919. The Polish electoral authorities, concluding that participation in the balloting would only confer legitimacy on further German rule, called on all Poles to abstain from voting. The decision was unanimously backed by the Polish press, including the Katolik publications, as well as some of the most polonophile clergy.103 For the leadership of the Center and Social Democratic parties, who viewed the upcoming elections as critical for determining the future complexion of the young German republic, a mass abstention by all of their Polish-speaking or polonophile constituents would have meant the loss of tens of thousands of crucial votes. Both parties, therefore, struggled to frame the balloting as a “red-black,” rather than a “German-Polish,” contest. The Social Democrats naturally emphasized the imperative of class solidarity. Two days before the election, the Volkswille of Breslau addressed an appeal to “Polish workers,” arguing that the fate of socialism in Germany should interest them even if Upper Silesia would ultimately be awarded to Poland, since German socialism promised to be “the helper and promoter of progress in all lands.” Socialism, the editors stressed, “is neither German nor Polish.”104 In its electoral campaign, the Center proved even more eager to exploit supranational as well as subnational identifications. Already on December 16, 1918, in an effort to emphasize the party’s confessional basis and its autonomy, the leaders of the region’s Center party had unanimously voted to change the official name of the Upper Silesian branch of the party to the Catholic People’s Party (Katholische Volkspartei, or KVP). The

reinforced confessionalization of the party’s image was apparent in everything from leadership positions—Father Ulitzka, pastor in Ratibor, was chosen as the KVP’s chairman—to its campaign rhetoric, which presented the National Assembly elections as a straightforward choice, as Ulitzka put it in one electoral appeal, between “Christian democracy and un-Christian democracy.”105 Cardinal Bertram weighed in with announcements, printed in both German and Polish, declaring voting to be a “holy obligation,” which should be used “to the benefit of country andPage 209 → church.”106 The Oberschlesische Kurier, the KVP’s leading mouthpiece in the industrial region, once again conjured the memory of the Kulturkampf, when “Germans and Poles fought and suffered together for the Catholic church.” Exhorting Polish and German voters to “show their common faith with the ballot” just as they marched together in annual Corpus Christi processions, the editors concluded with a slogan: “On January 19, we are not voting German or Polish. On January 19, we are all simply voting Catholic. Long live the Catholic faith and our Holy Father in Rome!”107 Since this was the first election in which women could vote, a particularly vigorous effort was made to translate female piety into a heavy turnout for the KVP. Women were heavily represented on electoral committees (though only a couple were listed as parliamentary candidates), special newspaper ads specifically targeted women voters, and parish-based chapters of the Catholic Women’s League offered courses on electoral agitation for women activists.108 Closely connected with this aggressive push for confessional solidarity was an equally powerful invocation of regional solidarity. In publishing the list of candidates put forward by the KVP, the editors of the Kurier noted that one could tell by “the sound of their names” that “almost all candidates are sons and daughters of Upper Silesian soil,” and they added that many were also “bilingual in writing and speaking [Wort und Schrift]” and “empathize with the feelings of our Polish Catholic brothers.” Their varied occupations—for example, artisan, labor organizer, lawyer, teacher—were also cited as evidence of the party’s popular character.109 If these references were insufficient to advertise the KVP’s regionalist claims, the printing of the manifesto of the Upper Silesians’ League on the pages of the Kurier a few days before the balloting for the National Assembly provided another, none-toosubtle association between the party and regionalism. The strategy of avoiding any close connection to Germandom proved to be smart politics. The two political parties descended from the old liberal and conservative parties of the imperial era fared disastrously in the National Assembly and Landtag elections, garnering only about half ofPage 210 → the share of the vote that the Germannational parties had received in the Reichstag election of 1912. But if the German-national parties were the obvious losers in the elections, it was far from clear if the Polish national movement could be considered the winner. Total turnout in the district of Oppeln was 59 percent, compared to about 85 percent in the rest of Germany, suggesting that about 30 percent of voters deliberately abstained in compliance with the Polish boycott. This was roughly comparable to the level of support the Polish party had received in the 1912 Reichstag election, but a closer look at local results reveals different trends in different parts of the region. Very high levels of abstention in the far southeastern counties of Pless and Rybnik as well as in the industrial suburbs of the industrial region suggests that most Polish speakers in these communities were rallying around the Polish protogovernment. But both in the largest cities of the industrial region and in the more agricultural counties to the northwest of Gleiwitz, abstention rates were quite low, often significantly lower than the level of support the Polish party had received in 1912. Discrepancies between different areas seems to have been closely correlated with the presence or absence of active local Polish popular councils.110 In much of Upper Silesia, then, the Social Democrats and KVP successfully framed the election as a contest between their rival worldviews rather than a protoplebiscite over state affiliation. The Social Democrats were clearly the biggest winners, gaining support in largely rural areas where they had never really competed before and winning more than a third of the vote in the district of Oppeln as a whole. The SPD seems to have reaped the benefits of being both a longtime vehicle of socioeconomic protest and the new party of government. The latter role, however, was already beginning to alienate some of the Social Democrats’ more radical supporters, as evidenced by a surge in support for the Independent Socialists in the brief interval between the National Assembly and Prussian Landtag elections.111 The KVP, in the meantime, maintained its position as the leading party in the region, winning almost half of the total vote and even barely beating the SPD (though not the combined socialist parties) in the industrial region.112 This was enough for the Oberschlesische Kurier toPage 211 → label the result

“a brilliant victory”; the KVP had, after all, contained what most observers assumed would be a “red flood.”113 Although the chief competitors in the parliamentary elections had consistently downplayed national controversies in their campaigns, it was inevitable that the results would be scrutinized for clues about Upper Silesians’ national loyalties. The German nationalist Freie Vereinigung predictably trumpeted the turnout of almost 60 percent as proof of the pro-German and anti-Polish sentiment of a majority of the population, a claim that would be reiterated by the German government in its protest against tentative Allied plans to award Upper Silesia to Poland without a plebiscite.114 Polish leaders objected that many votes for “German” parties, particularly the KVP, had been solicited and given under the understanding that casting a ballot would not be inferred to be a statement of national loyalty. Attempts by some KVP leaders to draw just such an inference provoked outrage in the Polish press, as well as among many clergymen who had assured parishioners that a vote for the KVP was a vote for a supranational Catholic cause, not for Germany.115 This easy slippage from a putatively supranational position to effective acceptance of German rule was a frustrating but also highly familiar phenomenon for Polish national activists. After all, the national indifference practiced by a majority of Upper Silesia’s Catholic clergy effectively meant accepting existing state boundaries—in other words, ongoing loyalty to Germany. In January 1919, it was still (just barely) possible to view this rule as applicable, to speak of German rule as a given reality to which good Catholics had to accommodate. But over subsequent months, as the Allies prepared to hold a plebiscite on the region’s fate, this habit of being Germans by default became more and more untenable. Upper Silesia was about to become the scene of the largest exercise of formal self-determination in history, and the region’s “born leaders” now had to decide whether they would agitate for union with Germany or Poland or, if they insisted on not having a preference, would be able to accept whatever decision was made by a majority of their neighbors. Until the summer of 1914, even the most committed Polish activists in the Prussian partition zone thought of the resurrection of an independent Polish state as a distant dream, a source of inspiration but probably unreachablePage 212 → in the foreseeable future. Adam Napieralski called it “a utopia,” and his archrival Wojciech Korfanty wrote of the vision of a Polish nation-state in scarcely less ethereal terms, as “the inviolable property of my heart.”116 For less admiring German observers, Polish statehood was merely one of the reactionary fantasies entertained by the various enemies of the Reich, a goal in the same category as the restoration of the Hanoverian monarchy or the temporal power of the pope. Whatever one’s normative opinion of the idea, almost everyone agreed that Polish independence was a theme suited better to poets than to policy makers. The outbreak of the First World War changed everything. As the Central Powers gained the upper hand on the eastern front and as most of the Polish-speaking areas of the Russian Empire fell under effective German-Austrian rule, the idea of an (at least formally) independent Polish state emerged as a viable response to a radically altered geopolitical landscape. As we have seen, the prospect of creating a Polish kingdom under German sponsorship provoked heated disagreement among the Polish-national elite, with austrophile activists cautiously supporting the project and ententophile (largely National Democratic) politicians denouncing it as a betrayal of Poland’s true interests. Napieralski, Father Kapica, and other Upper Silesian “conciliationists” staked out an extreme germanophile position, convinced that no matter how obsequious Poland’s relations to Germany seemed in the short run, formal independence would in the long run ensure a significant Polish role in the fate of Mitteleuropa. But two fatal miscalculations ultimately scuttled this strategy: the conciliationists overestimated Germany’s military capabilities and severely underestimated the degree to which wartime privations and abuses had radicalized their own core constituency—Upper Silesia’s Catholic, Polish-speaking, largely working-class population. Germany’s military defeat and the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy in November 1918 left these weary and disgruntled inhabitants expecting radical change, but it was far from clear which of the various putative “revolutionary” programs in the air would prevail. A fragile new governing elite, made up of an uneasy alliance of old-regime bureaucrats and Social Democratic functionaries, tried to rally support for the new republic with promises of social justice and democratization. The local Catholic intelligentsia, especially the ever-assertive parish clergy, cooperated with this program to a certain extent but showed their greatest enthusiasmPage 213 →

for the cause of Upper Silesian separatism, which they envisioned as an answer to the region’s long-term cultural and economic desiderata. Polish activists, in the expectation of imminent merger with Poland, put together their own shadow governing authority and dismissed autonomist proposals as disingenuous and half-hearted attempts to address grievances that could only be solved by national self-determination. All of these bids at restoring a stable social order, in the meantime, were rejected as hopelessly “bourgeois” by a late-blooming but vigorous Spartacist movement that aimed at a much more radical overturning of the economic system. It was a dizzying multiplicity of actors and movements, and the array of issues that were put into motion during these months would be raised again repeatedly in coming years. But over the next two years, all would somehow have to be absorbed into a single, deceptively simple question that would dominate the region’s life until its final—or putatively final—resolution: would Upper Silesia be German, or would it be Polish?

1 Schwidetzky, 104 n. 6, based on an account in Gazeta Opolska, 9 September 1913. 2 Cited by Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 185. 3 “Auf der Wacht für das nationale Wohl,” Katolik, 11 September 1915, quoted in Gesamtüberblick, 689. 4 Ibid., 47–74. 5 Quoted in Felicja Figowa, “Napieralski i Korfanty wobec Niemiec i sprawy polskiej w poczatkach pierwszej wojny światowej,” Zaranie Śląskie 1 (1960): 195–96. 6 Marian Orzechowski, “Działalność polityczna Wojciecha Korfantego w latach I wojny światowej,” Zaranie Śląskie 4 (1963): 590–91. 7 Lech Trzeciakowski, Pod pruskim zaborem 1850–1918 (Warsaw: Wiedza, 1973), 349–50. 8 Ibid., 351. 9 Ibid., 347. 10 Ibid., 184–96. 11 Oberpräsident Schlesiens to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 3 April 1913, Syg116, Zespół RB Oppeln, Präsidalbureau, APO. 12 Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 181. 13 Ibid., 188, 196–97. 14 Szramek, “ Ś.P. Adam,” 195. 15 “Auf der Wacht für das nationale Wohl,” Katolik, 11 September 1915, in Gesamtüberblick., 689. 16 Quoted in Szramek, “ Ś .P. Adam,” 327. 17 Matthias Erzberger, Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1920), 175. 18 On Erzberger’s overall role and the importance of Catholicism in his foreign propaganda efforts, see Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 96–117. 19 See Erzberger, Der Kampf; Edward Mendel, Polacy na Górnym Śląsku w latach I wojny światowej: położenie i postawa (Katowice: Wydawnictwo “ Śląsk,” 1971), 122–26. 20 Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 188, 191–92. 21 Quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 50. 22 Ibid., 4. 23 Jan Kapica, Die Deutsche Kulturmission, der Katholizismus, und die nationale Versöhnung (Beuthen: Druck und Verlag Katolik, 1917), 64. 24 Ibid., 71–72. 25 Ibid., 48. 26 Ibid., 44. 27 Ibid., 120–21. 28 Ibid., 173. 29 “Kirchenverhältnisse der Breslauer Diözese,” Dziennik Śląski, 15 July 1914, in Gesamtüberblick, 612–13. The polonophile Thomas Reginek described Bertram as “a just, ascetically minded pastor in national matters” (Proboszcz Śląski: Wspomnienia [London, 1952], 67–68). 30 Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 205–6. 31 Königliche Grenzkommissar (Mädler) to Regierungspräsident Oppeln, 10 May 1915, Syg128, Zespół

RB Oppeln, Präsidialbureau, APO. 32 Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 147. 33 Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 206; Mendel, 149–51; Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 55–56. 34 Leugers-Scherzberg, 248 and n. 5. 35 Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 147–49. 36 Schwerin to Kapica, 2 December 1915, reprinted in Kapica, 246n. 37 Schlesische Volkszeitung, no. 118, quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 57. 38 Deutschland, Österreich, Polen, 22–23, quoted in Paweł Dubiel, “Memoriał Adama Napieralskiego w sprawie odbudowy państwa polskiego,” Zaranie Śląskie 2 (1970): 302–12. 39 A point stressed by Czapliński, Adam Napieralski, 185. 40 Ibid., 183. 41 Mendel, 103. 42 Arka Bożek, Pamiętniki (Katowice: Śląsk, 1957), 53–55. See also Mendel, 46–47, 101–2. 43 Paul Orlinski, “Brief an den ‘Oberschlesier,’” Der Oberschlesier, 17 October 1919, 3. 44 Mendel, 199, 202–3. On the power of this military-industrial alliance, see Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 374. 45 The proportion of industrial laborers mobilized for military service was much high in Upper Silesia (25 percent) than in the Ruhr (5–6 percent): see Mendel, 55. On the changing profile of the workforce, see Mendel, 70–73; Franciszek Hawranek, ed., Dzieje Ruchu Robot-niczego na Górnym Śląsku (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1982), 62–63. 46 In working-class autobiographies, lack of food seems to be the most vivid memory of the war years. See Pamiętniki górników , particularly the memoirs of Leon Łukaszczyk (53) and Emanuel Smolka (176). 47 Characterization of the march from Gazeta Ludowa, cited in Mendel, 201–2. 48 Feldman, 197–249. 49 Mendel, 207–8. 50 Quoted in Wolfgang Schumann, Oberschlesien 1918/19: Vom gemeinsamer Kampf deutscher und polnischer Arbeiter (Berlin: Rütten und Loening, 1961), 49. 51 Mendel, 208–15; Feldman, 374–78; Schumann, 49–56. 52 Feldman, 508–10; Schumann, 59–67. 53 Thomas Reginek to G.V.A., 27 November 1917 (Mikultschutz), in AP Thomas Reginek, AAK. 54 Schumann, 57–59. 55 Bożek, 54–55. 56 Orzechowski, “Działalność,” 580–93; Figowa, “Napieralski i Korfanty,” 202–10. 57 Orzechowski, “Działalność,” 593–96. 58 Ibid., 596–97. 59 Mendel, 156–64. 60 Schumann, 70–81. 61 Ibid., 81–112; Edmund Klein, “Miarodajne czynniki niemieckie a sprawa Górnego Śląska w grudniu 1918 roku,” Studia Śląskie 13 (1968): 57–62. 62 Korfanty actually spent much of late November 1918 in Warsaw serving as a representative of the National Democrats and lobbying for a “nationalization” of the socialistleaning provisional government of Pilsudski (Orzechowski, Wojciech, 182–89). 63 Andrzej Mikołajew, “Podkommisariat Naczelnej Rady Ludowej dla Śląska w Bytomiu,” Studia Śląskie 33 (1978): 273–77. 64 Aleksander Kwiatek, Spór o kierunek działalności narodowych na Górnym Śląsku (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1991), 41–57. 65 Czaplińzki, Adam Napieralski, 218–19. 66 Mikołajew, 275. 67 Bożek, 70–73. 68 On the formation of the Central Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Kattowitz, see Schumann, 86–104, 131–64. On arrests of Polish activists, see Mikołajew, 288–89 69 Edmund Klein, “Niemieckie plany separatystyczne na Śląsku w listopadzie i grudniu 1918 r.,” Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis, Prawo 33, no. 138 (1971): 11–12; Günter Doose, Die separatistische

Bewegung in Oberschlesien nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918–1922) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 198ss7), 13–15. 70 Ralph Schattkowsky, “Separatism in the Eastern Provinces of the German Reich at the End of the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 305–24. 71 Klein, “Miarodajne,” 96–97. 72 On the Posen-based National Democrats’ reserved attitude toward the Polish government in Warsaw, see Orzechowski, Wojciech, 189–90; Kwiatek, 53–54. 73 Vogel, 50–51. 74 Klein, “Miarodajne,” 144. 75 On Rhenish separatism during this period, see Harry E. Nadler, The Rhenish Separatist Movements during the Early Weimar Republic (New York: Garland, 1987), 18–69. 76 Vogel, 55. 77 See the biography of Reginek in Pater, Słownik, 345–48. 78 The “two representatives” mentioned by Reginek (Die oberschlesische Frage: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte und Lösung [1920?], 4) were probably Franz Pieler and Heinrich Werner, the general directors of the Ballestrem and Schaffgotsch holdings, respectively (Doose, 22–23). (Doose misidentifies Pieler as the director of the Donnersmarck works; see biography in Perlick, 167–68.) Both Pieler and Werner had expressed sympathy for separatist proposals, and both Count Schaffgotsch and Count Ballestrem were Catholics and Center party activists. 79 Reginek, Die oberschlesische, 5–6. 80 There remains some confusion about the exact composition of each delegation to Prague, but each of the Reginek brothers and Wenske were involved in at least one of the trips. See Andrea Schmidt-Rösler, “Autonomie und Separatismusbestrebungen in Oberschlesien, 1918–1922,” Zeitschrift für OstmitteleuropaForschung 48, no. 1 (1999): 10; Przemys l aw Hauser, śląsk między Polska, Czechosłowacja, a separatyzm: Walka Niemiec o utrzymanie prowincji śląskiej w latach 1918–1919 (Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 1991), 29–30; Vogel, 55–56; Klein, “Niemieckie,” 17–19; Doose, 28–35. 81 “Landesverräter?” Oberschlesischer Kurier, 1 January 1919, 2nd supplement Piotr Dobrowolski, Ugrupowania i kierunki separatystyczne na Górnym Śląsku i w Cieszyńskiem w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw and Kraków: PWN, 1972), 87–90. 82 “Schlesien für sich” Germania, 7 December 1918, 1. 83 Klein, “Niemieckie,” 25; Doose, 43–44. 84 Klein, “Niemieckie,” 20. 85 Ibid., 20–26; Doose, 38–47. 86 The leaders of the local Jewish communities, Wenske plausibly argued, were highly suspicious of Polish rule due to reports of pogroms in the eastern borderlands of the fledgling state. Whether they were equally enthusiastic about severing or even loosening ties with Berlin seems more questionable. “Landesverräter?” Oberschlesischer Kurier, 1 January 1919, 2nd supplement. 87 Klein, “Miarodajne,” 65–67. 88 The percentage of total Catholics in the deaneries of Myslowitz and Königshütte who fulfilled their Easter confession/communion obligation dipped from 56 percent in 1915 to 48 percent in 1918. It seems unlikely that ongoing departures for the front could account for all of this drop, since the largest wave of mobilization occurred at the outbreak of the war and thus before the 1915 Easter season. The drop in Easter communions in the Upper Silesian industrial region was roughly twice that seen in the Ruhr. For example, the rate dropped from 48 percent to 47 percent in the deanery of Bochum, from 48 percent to 43 percent in Dortmund. See Kirchliches Handbuch, vols. 6 (1916) and 8 (1919). 89 “Die Wahrheit über die Kirche,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 5 January 1919, 1st supplement. 90 Reginek to G.V.A., 27 November 1917, AP Thomas Reginek, AAK. 91 Reginek, Proboszcz, 90–92. 92 Text printed as an appendix to Klein, “Niemieckie,” 35–37. 93 Cited by Klein, “Miarodajne,” 79 n. 44. 94 The following account is based largely on Klein’s detailed discussion in “Miarodajne,” 81–111. 95 Klein, “Miarodajne,” 102–3. 96 Protocol of meeting, 30 December 1918, in źródła do dziejów powstań śląskich, ed. Kaziemierz Popiołek

(Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1963–74), 1:81. 97 Full texts of these speeches appear in Klein, “Miarodajne,” 144–55. 98 Klein, “Miarodajne,” 115–20; full text of resolutions, 116–17 n. 100. 99 Ibid., 130. 100 Ibid., 114 15. 101 “Fr,” “Wo bleibt die Gleichberechtigung der beiden Sprachen in der Schule?” Der Oberschlesier, 6 December 1919, 5. 102 Oberschlesische Kurier, 15 January 1919, supplement, 4; Doose, 110 11. 103 “O Wyborach,” Katolik, 18 January 1919, 1; Klein, “Wybory do konstytuanty niemieckiej w styczniu 1919 r. na Górnym Śląsku,” Studia Śląskie 14 (1969): 121. 104 “Warum wählst du nicht?” Volkswille, 17 January 1919, partially reprinted in Klein, “Wybory do,” 140–41 n. 375. 105 Oberschlesische Kurier, 15 January 1919, cited in Klein, “Wybory do,” 137–38 n. 368. 106 “Ogłoszenie” printed in Polish in Oberschlesische Kurier, 25 January 1919, supplement. The word for “country,” it should be noted, was kraj, the connotation of which is more geographical than national. 107 “Die Polen u. die Nationalratswahlen,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 10 January 1919, 1st supplement. 108 Advertisements in Oberschlesische Kurier, 1 January 1919, 2nd supplement, and 25 January 1919; Klein, “Wybory do,” 90–92. 109 Oberschlesische Kurier, 3 January 1919, 1st supplement. 110 Klein, “Wybory do,” 152. 111 Klein, “Wybory do,” table 1. For comparison of the National Assembly and Land-tag results, see Oberschlesische Kurier, 29 January 1919, supplement. 112 In the old electoral districts of Kattowitz-Zabrze and Beuthen-Tarnowitz, the KVP won 38 percent of the vote, the SPD 34 percent, and the USPD 14 percent (Klein, “Wybory do,” table 1). 113 “Oberschlesien schwarz, nicht rot!” Oberschlesische Kurier, 22 January 1919, 1. 114 Klein, “Wybory do,” 148–49; Wambaugh, 213. 115 Katolik, no. 73, cited in Gesamtüberblick, 505–6. 116 Czaplinski, Adam Napieralski, 185; Orzechowski, Wojciech Korfanty, 124–25.

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CHAPTER FIVE Either/Or: The Plebiscite of 1921 In his 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan famously described the existence of a nation as a “daily plebiscite.” This was, of course, meant metaphorically, but his subsequent remarks suggest that he took seriously the usefulness of border plebiscites as a policy tool. “If doubts arise regarding [a nation’s] frontiers,” he urged, “consult the populations in the areas under dispute.”1 The Allied statesmen who gathered in Paris to redraw the map of Europe after the First World War came as close as anyone ever has to putting Renan’s vision into practice. Most new international frontiers set by the victorious powers were, to be sure, still determined by Great Power fiat. But in a number of cases—including Upper Silesia—where the defeated powers and neighboring states vigorously disputed the ethno-graphic, economic, and historical criteria for assigning a given territory to one state or another, the Allied leaders eventually agreed to postpone a final demarcation of frontiers until after the holding of a plebiscite.2 Renan’s fanciful invocation of daily plebiscites hinted at the paradox at the heart of this kind of direct exercise in self-determination. Actual plebiscites, as opposed to metaphorical ones, were only imaginable because the possibility of them being repeated every decade or every century—let alone every day—was implicitly foreclosed. The preferences recorded onPage 215 → the day of the plebiscite would, instead, be the basis for a permanent territorial settlement, binding not only on the voters themselves but also for their descendants and any future immigrants. A frontier plebiscite made sense, in other words, only if it was understood to be one person, one vote, one time. For Upper Silesia’s Roman Catholic clergy, both aspects of the plebiscitary process—its radical voluntarism and its radical finality—were troubling. There was nothing new about nationalist tensions in Upper Silesian Catholic parishes. But earlier controversies had been contained by the apparently hard constraint of a stable geopolitical order that made virtually unthinkable any wholesale ecclesiastical reorganization along linguistic lines. Now, with international boundaries being subjected to popular referendum, questioning diocesan or parochial frontiers no longer seemed so radical. For the clergy, a regional elite accustomed to rallying Catholics behind such unifying causes as the defense of confessional schools, political activism on the questions of the day was more likely than ever before to mark them as nationally partisan and throw into question the legitimacy of their authority over parishioners with a different national orientation. As more and more laypeople, as individuals and in groups, weighed in on the merits of their current or prospective pastors, the question loomed of what degree of cultural conformity they would expect from their spiritual leaders and, by implication, from their coparishioners. Would each parish now be understood to have a particular national orientation, one that its clergy would necessarily share and reflect in their pastoral work? Or would Upper Silesia continue to be a region of bilingual religious communities and nationally indifferent priests?

Limbo: Neutralizing State and Church in the Plebiscite Zone Although nothing could seem more “Wilsonian” than the holding of a democratic referendum to determine where a new frontier should be drawn, the American president himself was deeply pessimistic about the prospects for setting up an electoral process that would be viewed by all sides as free and fair. On the one hand, Wilson was convinced that the existing German administration had to be removed if the plebiscite was to reflect the true will of the people. On the other hand, he worried that a military intervention to disable German authority in the region might itself seem coercive, creating an impression that Allied troops were there “toPage 216 → force the hand of the voters.”3 In an attempt to finesse this dilemma and in order to keep to a minimum the deployment of their own overstretched resources, the Allies pursued a middle course, a strategy that might be described as administrative decapitation. Civil servants up to the level of Landrat were allowed to remain at their posts, but the bureaucratic chain of command that had led from the district capital of Oppeln to Breslau and on to Berlin was severed.

Instead, local government officials now answered to the Inter-Allied Plebiscite Commission, composed of French, British, and Italian representatives and led by French general Henri LeRond. This change in civil administration was accompanied by the evacuation of German troops from the plebiscite zone and the arrival of an occupying force of ten French and four Italian battalions—about thirteen thousand troops in all; four additional British battalions supplemented this force in the weeks immediately preceding the plebiscite.4 Polish leaders welcomed the arrival of the Allied Commission and Allied troops, but they complained that this intervention was too slow in coming and did not go nearly far enough. The Allied Commission only arrived in Oppeln in February 1920, leaving Upper Silesia under the administration of the widely reviled state commissioner Otto Hörsing for several more months. Through the late summer and autumn of 1919, arrests of Polish activists and repression of Polish-national organizational efforts continued unabated, leading to growing frustration in the Polish camp. In the third week of August, Polish paramilitary forces launched an insurrection—what would later be remembered as the first of the three Silesian Uprisings—in order to bring the period of uncontested German rule to an immediate end.5 The First Silesian Uprising was quickly suppressed by the German military, and another wave of anti-Polish “terror” ensued. Dozens of insurgents were summarily shot, and thousands either fled across the frontier or were imprisoned.6 The German monopoly on power only really began to crack in November, when long-deferred elections were held for localPage 217 → communal councils. Dissatisfaction with the “Hörsing regime” translated into spectacular victories for Polish-national slates across Upper Silesia, especially in the southeast (Pless and Rybnik) and the industrial district. New Polish majorities (or, in most of the major cities, large minorities) on local councils pushed aggressively to ensure linguistic parity in administration and to (re)polonize local place-names.7 But despite the election of pro-Polish local councils and the arrival of the Allied Commission a few months later, Polish activists could still plausibly complain that the face of state coercive power in Upper Silesia remained recognizably German. A particular source of grievance was the composition of the Sipo (Sicherheitspolizei, also known as the “green police”), which the Allies continued to rely on to enforce order at the local level. Roughly half of the Sipo’s personnel came from outside the region, as did 80 percent of its higher officers, and the Poles argued that the force continued to harbor secret caches of weapon and was preparing for armed action against the Allies and the local Polish population.8 The ostensible threat posed by the Sipo became a rallying cry for Polish direct action through the spring and summer of 1920. Informing the Allied authorities that local Poles were “still subjected to persecution by the Sicherheitspolizei” and that “it was clear to him that the Commission was unwilling or unable to protect his country-people,” Polish plebiscite commissioner Wojciech Korfanty called for a general strike in early May.9 Polish fears of a German putsch were further exacerbated by the geopolitical situation in the late summer of 1920, when a rapid Soviet advance on Warsaw put in question the very survival of the Polish state. On August 17, German demonstrators, angered by reports that the French were sending military assistance to the beleaguered Poles and emboldened by rumors that Warsaw had already fallen, rioted in Kattowitz, destroying the Polish Plebiscite Commission and lynching a prominent Polish activist in the street. The failure of the Sipo (and the Allies) to restrain the German mob provided the spark—or, in the German view, the pretext— for a full-scale Polish insurrection. With French forces offering very limited resistance, Polish insurgents quickly gained effective control overPage 218 → most of the plebiscite zone, and both the Allied Commission and local German leaders felt compelled to enter into negotiations with the insurgents. Parallel agreements with the Allies and the Germans pledged a more rapid dissolution of the Sipo and its replacement by a mixed local gendarmerie (the Abstimmungspolizei, or Apo, also known as the “blue police”), as well as a more vigorous effort to confiscate privately held weapons and expel outside “agitators.”10 While this fitful dismantlement of the old state apparatus was seen by Polish activists as a belated liberation from the threat of state-sponsored terror and a necessary balancing of the scales before the plebiscite, German observers saw these developments as a descent into anarchy. In March 1920, a Reichswehr (German armed forces) officer reported to the Prussian Interior Ministry that murders in some parts of Upper Silesia had already increased fourfold since the evacuation of the German military; if the Allies dissolved the Sipo, he warned, “public order would soon be completely undermined.”11 These fears reached a peak during and after the Second Silesian Uprising. Prince Hatzfeldt, the German plenipotentiary in Oppeln, noting the mass flight of Sipo officers, teachers,

and other state employees during the uprising, complained that even after the formal end of hostilities, “murders, armed robberies, beatings, and threats against the peaceful population were an almost daily occurrence.” Once “criminal instincts” were unleashed, he warned, they were difficult to put back under control.12 British and Italian personnel serving with the Allied Commission tended to sympathize with this portrayal of the Polish insurrection as a revolt against law and order. Colonel Percival, the British representative on the Allied Commission, routinely described Polish insurgents as “terrorists,” and he was convinced that efforts to create national parity by incorporatingPage 219 → Poles into the security forces would only increase the likelihood of further disorder and violence.13 Much of the rhetorical sparring over whether Polish activists should be treated as legitimate partners in the maintenance of order or as little better than criminals revolved around the polarizing figure of Wojciech Korfanty. When the Polish government set up its Plebiscite Commission in February 1920, there was a general consensus, even among politicians on the Left, that Korfanty was the only person who possessed the combination of “knowledge of the country, personal courage, and, yes, a little bit of insolence” necessary to head the effort.14 As in the initial National Democratic “national awakening” of 1901–3, Korfanty’s charisma would animate and define the Polish cause. But unlike twenty years earlier, the backing of an independent Polish state now gave Korfanty financial resources commensurate with his larger-than-life personality. The Polish Plebiscite Commission, which was set up fully three months before its German counterpart, came to employ one thousand people in its Kattowitz headquarters and a further thirteen hundred throughout the plebiscite zone.15 This huge apparatus, as well as the man at its head, made quite an impression on foreign visitors. A New York Times correspondent visiting the Polish commission’s headquarters described Korfanty as “the most striking personality in this and perhaps any other part of the world.” I found him in the furthest corner of a huge building which is like a fortress, with iron gates at every stairway and wire netting outside all the windows. His only companion in the room where I interviewed him was a huge wolfhound which bared its fangs as I entered and was only quieted when Korfanty touched him with a leather whip which he keeps on his desk for the purpose.16 While colorful, such descriptions tended to dovetail with German efforts to portray Korfanty as a kind of mafia boss, prepared to use any means to enforce his will. This image was further reinforced in November 1920, when Teofil Kupka, a former associate of Korfanty who had defected to the GermanPage 220 → side, was shot dead in his home by Polish partisans. Although Korfanty was never formally charged with complicity in the murder, the pro-German press laid responsibility for Kupka’s death squarely on the doorstep of the Polish plebiscite commissioner.17 Controversy over attempts to neutralize authority in the plebiscite zone was not limited to the machinery of state. From their first discussions of the possibility of holding a plebiscite, Allied leaders had recognized that the most decisive influence on the vote might come from nonstate elites. General LeRond, then head of the subcommittee researching Germany’s eastern frontiers, told the Council of Four that Upper Silesia was dominated by a handful of aristocratic magnates, “veritable feudal lords, more powerful than those of the thirteenth century, for they possess, not only the land, but the subsoil, factories, and capital.” He also warned the Allied statesmen that “the [Roman Catholic] clergy has a very considerable influence” on the population and that “its role has become much more active during the past few years, through the initiative of the Bishop of Breslau.”18 While breaking the influence of economic bread lords would have involved a level of intervention in the private sector that the Allies were un-prepared to exercise (and that the Polish leaders themselves were hesitant to seek), disrupting the “germanizing” influence of the Roman Catholic church seemed much more straightforward. If the problem here was, as LeRond suggested, the subordination of the local clergy to a German bishop, the strategy of decapitation that the Allies had pursued in the state administration offered a solution. The parish clergy would remain at their posts, but they would no longer be under the direct authority of the bishop of Breslau. Who, then, would become the ecclesiastical equivalent to the Allied Commission, exercising the bishop’s administrative authority in the plebiscite zone? Predictably, the German government and episcopate, as well as the notoriously germanophile papal nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, lobbied for a minimal and purely temporary

diminution of Bertram’s authority, while the Polish government and episcopate called for a more decisive separation of the plebiscite zone from the diocese of Breslau. The dispute dragged on through the winter of 1919–20. Finally, in February 1920, the Polish government floated a compromise proposal: the papal nuncio to Poland, Monsignor Achille Ratti, would be named “high ecclesiastical commissioner” for the plebiscite zones and take up primaryPage 221 → residence in Oppeln, near the headquarters of the Allied Commission. The office of high ecclesiastical commissioner was essentially created and defined to suit the diplomatic needs of the moment: his authority would be somewhere between that of a diocesan delegate, subordinate to the bishop, and that of an apostolic delegate, directly subordinate to the pope. The bishop of Breslau was still not pleased with the proposal—he wrote to the Holy See that the appointment risked making his authority a “ridiculous shadow”—but most Vatican officials felt that some move to neutralize the region’s ecclesiastical governance was essential.19 Not surprisingly, the arrangement’s ambiguities only invited further testing of each prelate’s jurisdictional authority. The most controversial attempt by Cardinal Bertram to reassert his authority in Upper Silesia revolved around several dozen “foreign” (i.e., ex-diocesan) priests—mostly members of religious orders or diocesan priests from the United States or Poland—who had moved into the plebiscite area to campaign for Poland.20 Many of these “foreign priests” were, in fact, natives of Upper Silesia and hence eligible to vote in the plebiscite, but the presence of so many men of the cloth operating outside the local diocesan hierarchy was deeply troubling to many local pastors.21 In early November 1920, Father Josef Kubis, the senior pastor in Oppeln, organized a collective letter to Cardinal Bertram protesting the agitation being conducted by “foreign” priests in the plebiscite zone. Signed by the heads of several deaneries in the industrial region, the letter called on Cardinal Bertram to curtail this “reckless agitation against bishop and pastor.”22 On November 21, 1920, Cardinal Bertram responded with a sweeping decree forbidding any priestPage 222 → to give political speeches or participate in political demonstrations without the express permission of the local parish pastor. The ordinance also prohibited any political activism by nondiocesan clergy, regardless of whether the local pastor had given permission. Aware of the ongoing questions surrounding the scope of his authority, Cardinal Bertram added that the decree was issued “with the approbation of the Holy See.”23 The publication of the ordinance sparked a firestorm in Polish circles. Father Michal Lewek, a diocesan priest who was serving as the head of ecclesiastical affairs for the Polish Plebiscite Commission, immediately alerted the head of the commission, Wojciech Korfanty, to the potentially crippling impact of the ordinance on the Polish electoral campaign. While Korfanty mobilized Polish government officials to register an official protest to the Vatican, Lewek summoned a meeting of Upper Silesia’s polonophile clergy and appealed to the Polish bishops for support in convincing Rome to overrule Bertram’s decree. Convinced that Monsignor Ratti, who was a resident in Oppeln at the time and who had met with Bertram shortly before the ordinance was issued, must have been aware of and at least passively sanctioned the move, Polish parliamentarians and publicists directed some of their sharpest criticism at the papal nuncio. There was even discussion of recalling the Polish ambassador to the Holy See. But Ratti vigorously denied any knowledge—let alone approval—of Bertram’s ordinance, and after returning from a hastily organized mission to Rome for damage control, Bishop Sapieha of Cracow and Archbishop Teodorowicz of Lwów issued a public statement assuring the Polish nation that the pope had no prior knowledge of the November 21 decree and that the curia supported the drafting of a new ordinance that would supersede that document.24 The controversy fatally undermined Monsignor Ratti’s standing with the Poles and thus his credibility as high ecclesiastical commissioner. In December 1920, Upper Silesia was removed from his jurisdiction and placed under the authority of a full-fledged apostolic delegate, Monsignor Giovanni Ogno Serra, the secretary of the papal nuncio in Vienna, who now took up full-time residence in Oppeln. Ogno Serra sanctioned a revised ordinance that forbade engagement in political agitation by any priest, diocesan or “foreign,” regardless of the opinion of the local pastor. The removal of Ratti, the appointment of a full-time apostolic delegate,Page 223 → and the revision of Bertram’s decree seemed to add up to a decisive victory for the Poles. Ogno Serra’s rather germanophile stance during the Third Silesian Uprising would later undercut such perceptions. For the next few months, however, both sides were reasonably satisfied with the apostolic delegate’s neutral credentials.25 In the days immediately preceding the plebiscite, he issued a final appeal to Upper Silesian Catholics, reminding them

that they enjoyed full freedom of conscience and were not morally bound by any pledges or oaths that they may have made to cast their ballots for one side or the other.26 The febrile multilateral negotiations that followed the publication of Bertram’s decree—negotiations that ultimately involved the German and Polish governments, the head of the German conference of bishops, the entire Polish episcopate, the pope, and two future popes (Achille Ratti would soon be Pius XI, and Eugenio Pacelli would succeed him as Pius XII)—testified to the intensity of interest that Upper Silesia commanded during these months of uncertainty about its geopolitical fate. Yet it was possible to view this flurry of diplomatic activity from a more localist perspective, as the playing out on a European stage of the long-running “family feud” within Upper Silesia’s parish clergy. Just as Cardinal Kopp’s infamous pastoral letter of 1903 condemning Polish National Democracy was assumed by Polish activists to have been ghostwritten and masterminded by the industrial region’s willful senior pastors, so the Polish bishops were now ready to exonerate Cardinal Bertram from primary responsibility for the ill-fated ordinance. The cardinal, they suggested, was “himself a victim” and “a tool” of a strategy by the germanophile clergy to privilege their own position and ostracize their polonophile colleagues.27 In memoirs written several decades later and drawing on the archival record as well as his own recollections, Father Lewek insisted even more emphatically that “Cardinal Bertram was simply bombarded with demands for publication of a decree by the pro-German Upper Silesian clergy” and that the cardinal ultimately “succumbed to their pressure.”28 Monsignor Ratti, in this interpretation, was also an easy target for manipulation, since hePage 224 → was residing in the parsonage of Father Josef Kubis (Oppeln), one of the more partisan germanophile pastors. The eagerness of Upper Silesian pastors to silence ex-diocesan clergy reflected not so much a desire to affirm the authority of the bishop but, rather, a longing to restore their individual authority in their own parishes, as well as their collective authority in Upper Silesian society. Indeed, before seeking an intervention by Cardinal Bertram, the old-line Centrist clergy had first attempted to settle questions about national politicking within the family—that is, among the regional clergy. Leading germanophile and polonophile priests, including Carl Ulitzka and Jan Kapica, met twice in Beuthen in the fall of 1920 to discuss ground rules for national campaigning by priests, but the negotiations always stalled on the issue of activism by nondiocesan clergy, which pro-Polish priests proved unwilling to renounce.29 Neither top-down directives nor nostalgia for Kulturkampf-era solidarity, it seemed, would reimpose unity on Upper Silesia’s parish priests, many of whom had already positioned themselves among the most passionate advocates of each national cause.

Taking Sides: The Plebiscite Campaign and the Clergy The question of exactly how the 550-odd parish priests working in the plebiscite zone would divide on the national question was the subject of much anxious speculation.30 Before the end of the war, only a handful of priests had publicly identified with Polish nationalism, and many observers clung to the assumption that proPolish priests represented a tiny splinter group. Father Paul Nieborowski, formerly known as a staunch Catholic integralist and now reemerging as a rather idiosyncratic champion of the German national cause, claimed in his widely publicized pamphlet Upper Silesia, Poland, and Catholicism that the clergy was over 90 percent proGerman, with only about forty priests expressing polonophile sentiments.31 Most other estimates put the proPolish share of the clergy considerablyPage 225 → higher, usually around 100 to 120 priests, or at least 20 percent of the total parish clergy.32 The characterization of the Upper Silesian clergy as 70 or 80 percent “German” became a common claim in both German and Polish sources. National breakdowns looked rather different, however, when observers rejected the binary classification of all priests as either “German” or “Polish” and introduced a third category of “neutral” clerics. In these tripartite classifications, the proportion of “Polish” priests tended to remain around 20 percent, but at least half of the “German” clergy was recategorized as “neutral.”33 To get a better sense of what these slippery classifications meant in practice, it is worth looking more closely at how various priests moved into—and sometimes between—national camps. Although a minority, Polish sympathizers formed the most cohesive and best-organized subgroup among the parish clergy. Already in July 1919, shortly after plans to hold a plebiscite became known, Jan Kapica and Theodor Kubina, pastor of St. Mary’s in Kattowitz, founded the Theological Section of the Silesian Academic

Union (Śląski Związek Akademicki) as an umbrella group for polonophile Catholic priests. Such a formal, highprofile organization was deemed necessary, as one member of the Theological Section recalled, to demonstrate to the laity that “a Catholic priest is not necessarily a ‘Centrist’ priest.”34 Over the course of the plebiscite campaign, the Theological Section regularly intervened in public debates, criticizing the (mis)use of religious arguments in pro-German propaganda and defending the actions of Polish activists, including the launching of the Second and Third Silesian Uprisings. One memberPage 226 → later estimated that around 140 priests belonged to the organization and that some of its gatherings attracted more than ninety participants.35 At least fifty of the plebiscite zone’s 340-odd parish pastors could be counted as Polish sympathizers, including a fair number of pastors in the populous parishes of the industrial region. Support for Poland tended to be even stronger, however, among the industrial district’s large population of young curates.36 In the county of Beuthen, where a particularly high percentage of the total clergy was made up of these “journeyman” priests, one Polish observer estimated that 45 percent of the clergy was pro-Polish.37 What accounted for this surge in overt support for the Polish cause? One factor, no doubt, was the dramatic change in the impact of national activism on a young priest’s career prospects. Under the German monarchy, curates were well aware that overly exuberant identification with things Polish would make it difficult to win a pastoral appointment in parishes under the bishop’s patronage and almost impossible to win an appointment under royal or aristocratic patronage. The experience of Father Jan Kudera offered a cautionary tale of what feisty proPolish partisanship could mean for one’s career. Among the very few polonophile priests who had refused either to tone down his national activism or accept a posting outside the core Polish-speaking areas of Upper Silesia, Kudera had become a kind of floater, with no formal position whatsoever for several years. In 1920, however, under pressure from High Commissioner Ratti, Cardinal Bertram finally gave the forty-eighty-year-old Kudera his first pastoral position.38 It was a sign that the rules of the game were changing. As a German observer noted, staking out one’s support for Poland could now be considered a savvy form of “crown prince politics”—a way of for an ambitious priest to position himself for a prime pastoral appointment in an eventual new Polish diocese.39 But “conversions” to the Polish cause were not limited to young curates with little or no political track record. Many of those who now playedPage 227 → prominent roles in the Theological Section were Center-party veterans who had previously kept their distance from or, in some cases, sharply criticized the Polish national movement. The president and founder of the Theological Section was the most spectacular example of such a trajectory. Old allies in the Silesian Center party wondered aloud what had happened to the Jan Kapica (or, as he had often signed his name in those days, Johannes Kapitza) who had so recently preached loyalty to the Prussian state and written enthusiastically about the “German cultural mission” in the East.40 Other established pastors with records of supporting the Center against the Polish party, such as Wiktor Loss and Jan Chrząszcz, also now declared support for Poland in the plebiscite campaign. These apparent shifts in political alignment provoked sharp, highly personal reactions by peers and former mentors. Wawrzyniec (Lorenz) Pucher, for example, had been a close associate of Ludwig Skowronek during his decadelong service as a curate in the parish of Bogutschütz; indeed, Skowronek once characterized him as “his right hand.” 41 But Pucher publicly supported the Polish boycott of the National Assembly election in January 1919 and went on to become an avid proponent of union with Poland. Skowronek was dumbfounded: “an industrious priest,” he lamented, had become a “seducer of the people” (Volksverführer).42 Father Józef Grund was another midcareer pastor who had seemed to have entirely conventional Centrist views before the war. In 1904, for example, he had called followers of Korfanty “dumb oxen,” and he later served on the board of Tygodnik Katolicki, the clerical weekly founded as a Polish-language alternative to the Polish-national press.43 But during the plebiscite campaign, he emerged as a vociferous advocate of union with Poland. German activists responded to this perceived flip-flop by distributing a flier denouncing him as a national opportunist who had “become a ‘Great Pole’ overnight.” Other critics charged that Grund’s conversion was driven by “large cash subventions” from the Polish side.44 Page 228 → Not surprisingly, the priests in question tended to tell rather different stories about the relationship between their previous and current politics. Jan Kapica, readily admitting that he “ believed and hoped, wrote articles and gave speeches—for German victory,” emphasized that for him and his allies in the Katolik camp, “Germany’s victory

was . . . simultaneously a victory of Polish freedom and independence.” Promoting “the national particularity of the Polish people of Upper Silesia” had always been his goal; only the means had changed, in response to dramatic changes in the world at large.45 Józef Grund also stressed the continuity in his views. Writing to the bishop’s office in Breslau to defend himself against charges of national opportunism, Grund insisted that he had never been anything but a “Polish Upper Silesian” and thus “never needed to go over to a different camp.”46 For Kapica, Grund, and other priests with long Centrist histories, the enemy that they had been fighting all along was not just liberalism, socialism, or even Hakatism but, rather, Germandom. Father Grund spoke of the seamless continuity between the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and the contemporary menace of Bolshevism, seeing both as manifestations of the ongoing German threat to Upper Silesia’s Catholic culture.47 Kapica offered an even more sweeping indictment of the “German spirit,” citing the later years of the war and first year after the war as a final confirmation that nothing would change as long as Upper Silesia was tied to the German state. The old Prussian system is, indeed, dead, but the old spirit lives on in the German proletariat. It is the spirit of Luther, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Bismarck, Treitschke, Nietzsche, the spirit of arrogance, of egoism, of the will to power and domination, the spirit of force, of class dictatorship and imperialism, the spirit of human enslavement and the deification of the state, the spirit that has been inculcated in the German people by the dynasty, the landlords, the Landrat, by the NCOs, professors, and teachers. This spirit is stronger than the revolution and democracy, stronger than the Center and Father Ulitzka, stronger than the letter of the German constitution. This spirit breaks all oathsPage 229 → and promises, betrays all trust, scorns all rights, mocks all equality, recognizes only one law, the law of force.48 But if a significant number of longtime Center loyalists now saw the battle against “the German spirit” as a continuation of the Kulturkampf, a decided majority of Upper Silesia’s parish priests continued to keep their distance from the Polish cause. Whether this meant that such priests could be considered “pro-German” was another question. Since there was no German equivalent of the Theological Section, no institution specifically designed to mobilize germanophile priests in support of the German plebiscite campaign, “German” tended to be used as a default category rather than an indicator of overt national activism. Father Lewek stressed that one could find “the most varied groups and divisions” among the German clergy. Only a few priests, he believed, could be said to have “sold themselves body and soul to the Prussian regime,” and these “did not enjoy much popularity even among their German colleagues.”49 Indeed, the priests that Lewek listed as avidly pro-German—Feja, Rassek, and Nieborowski—were the same lonely three that could be found in almost every Polish complaint about “germanizers in cassocks.” Fathers Feja and Rassek had already been ostracized before the war for their close cooperation with German government officials, their disloyalty to the Center party, and their sweeping dismissal of the use of the Polish mother tongue in children’s classes in religious education. Nieborowski at first seemed a more interesting case, since the reason for his prewar marginalization among the clergy and the cause of his eventual expulsion from the Center party was not German chauvinism but his enthusiastic advocacy of Catholic integralism. Indeed, his primary comrade-in-arms in that struggle, the eccentric Count Hans von Oppersdorff, was known to be highly sympathetic to the Poles and actually campaigned for Poland in the election campaign. So when Nieborowski published his widely distributed pamphlet Upper Silesia, Poland, and Catholicism, which included the famous characterization of Upper Silesians’ nationality as “Catholic,” it could not be immediately dismissed as a typical Hakatist screed. But both Nieborowski regionalism and his Catholic integralism proved to be short-lived. Even before the plebiscite campaign was over, he had turned againstPage 230 → the idea of Upper Silesian autonomy, and after the vote, his drift toward a rather conventional German nationalism accelerated. By 1924, he had left the priesthood entirely and jumped from the Center to the German National People’s Party.50 A priest who seemed far more likely to swing the bulk of Upper Silesia’s clergy behind the German cause was Carl Ulitzka, the chairman of the KVP and one of the most influential members of the sprawling collective leadership of the German plebiscite campaign.51 Not only was Ulitzka the official head of the political party that most priests still considered synonymous with the Catholic cause, but he was also far less vulnerable than Feja, Rassek, or Nieborowski (in Nieborowski’s later years) to charges of being a “government priest.” From his first forays into municipal politics in his native Ratibor to his later years as a leading national-level Center-party

politician, Ulitzka was a spirited partisan, not prone to cozying up to the German-national establishment. His sensitivity to the social question bred a pronounced sympathy for Christian trade unions and skepticism toward Upper Silesia’s aristocratic magnates.52 Ulitzka was also a solid utraquist; indeed, his insistence on using Polish in his pastoral work was one of the reasons that the Nazi regime would later banish him from Upper Silesia. The KVP chairman was, in short, as plausible a representative of the Center-party tradition as Father Kapica. But just as the attempt by Kapica to claim that tradition for the Polish cause provoked cries of betrayal from many Upper Silesian clerics, so Ulitzka’s bid to translate Center loyalty into active support for Germany in the plebiscite campaign ran up against stiff opposition among many Center-party activists, both clerical and lay. Resistance to identification with the German-national cause was particularly strong in the summer of 1919, as popular discontent with the state of emergency imposed by state commissioner Otto Hörsing reached its height. The Oberschlesische Kurier, which continued to harbor strong sympathies for Upper Silesian separatism, railed against the “socialist police state” and the “new red Hakatism” that had evolved out of the “old black-Page 231 →white-red Hakatism.”53 Josef Musiol, a KVP delegate to the Prussian legislature and another separatist sympathizer, also publicly condemned the crackdown on dissent and called for the release of all Polish leaders who had been arrested over the spring and summer.54 Even during the August uprising, which provoked considerable alarm among most KVP supporters, criticism of the German government was often harsher than criticism of the insurgents.55 Within weeks after the suppression of the uprising, leading Centrist pastors, such as Father Tylla, led the call for a general amnesty for all those involved in the insurgency.56 In the run-up to the November communal elections, the editors of the Kurier insisted that any alliance with the German parties would “immeasurably discredit” the KVP and that, on the German as well as the Polish side, “opposition between world views is stronger than national affinities.”57 The chairman of the Beuthen city council, Heinrich Skowronek, designated the defense of confessional schools and social programs for widows and children as the key planks of the party platform. “The KVP,” he stressed, “must reject attempts to give the election a national-political character or to give supporters of the Catholic People’s Party national-political voting instructions.”58 Even Father Ulitzka felt compelled to renounce systematic cooperation with the Hörsing “system,” which “stands in the way of any effective politics of pacification, conciliation, and coalition building that could bring together all of the Upper Silesian population.”59 The KVP’s policy of triangulation between the German and Polish camps paid off on election day. Although the Polish-national party was the clear winner of the communal elections, the KVP’s vote total only declined by about 25 percent, while the SPD suffered catastrophic losses of 70 to 80 percent.60 “The old black-white-red and new red Hakatists,” the Kurier noted withPage 232 → satisfaction, “have reaped what they sowed through their politics of force in Upper Silesia.” While conceding that it was regrettable that the Polish party, rather than the KVP, was the primary beneficiary, the editors emphasized the overall gains for the Catholic cause: “In the end, there is only one Catholicism, regardless of whether the adherents are German or Polish.”61 But for Father Ulitzka and most of the KVP leadership, the party’s abstention from national partisanship was only a temporary expedient, made necessary by the hegemony of the anticlerical Otto Hörsing within the Germannational camp. In the aftermath of the communal elections, as Hörsing resigned as state commissioner and as administrative authority was assumed by the new Catholic and Centrist district president, Josef Bitta, it became far more plausible to portray ongoing union with Germany as a defense of das katholische Deutschland rather than capitulation to “red Hakatism.” This was, indeed, the primary theme of a widely publicized speech that Ulitzka delivered in Kattowitz on January 2. Upper Silesia, he argued, owed its economic development and cultural progress to influence from the West (i.e., Germany), and the region’s population, in turn, had an obligation to demonstrate ongoing solidarity with Germany’s embattled Catholic minority.62 In the spring and summer of 1920, the leadership of the KVP aligned the party unambiguously behind the German campaign and cultivated stronger ties with the other German parties. Up until that point, all of the major pro-Center newspapers in the Upper Silesian industrial region—the Oberschlesische Volksstimme, Oberschlesische Zeitung, and Oberschlesische Kurier —were independently owned and exhibited strong sympathy for an Upper Silesian free state. But in July 1920, the Volksstimme was purchased by a consortium headed by Father Ulitzka and using funds provided by the Silesian Committee, an interparty group established by the German government to manage plebiscite propaganda efforts. The Volksstimme now became not only the official organ of the KVP leadership but also a reliable mouthpiece for the German plebiscite campaign.63 Pamphlets published by the Volksstimme’s press dismissed the

idea of an Upper Silesian free state as a “utopia,” and Ulitzka and his closestPage 233 → allies in the party, such as Franz Erhardt, a leader of the Christian trade unions, stepped up their attacks on the KVP’s separatist wing.64 When such Beuthen politicians as Heinirch Skowronek and Josef Musiol refused to retreat from their advocacy of a free state, they were declared “troublemakers” and eventually expelled from the party.65 Polish polemicists were quick to suggest that the KVP’s growing identification with the German national cause was driven by the most venal of motives. The satirical magazine Kocynder printed a cartoon showing Ulitzka sporting an iron cross and drinking a glass of cognac while making financial calculations. The caption read, “The plebiscite is better business than pastoral work.” An accompanying mock interview quoted the KVP chairman bragging about his success in fund-raising for the plebiscite: “Money is pouring in from all directions, from the government, from Catholics, from Lutherans, and most of all from the Jews, who have the property here.”66 The separatist press was also sharply critical of Ulitzka’s embrace of Germandom. An editorial in the Bund/Związek, the organ of the League of Upper Silesians, disapprovingly noted that a meeting in Königshütte led by the Ratibor pastor had concluded with a lusty rendition of Deutschland über Alles. 67 The same newspaper also published a letter from an “old priest” lamenting that a Catholic newspaper, the Volksstimme, now felt free to attack members of the clergy if they happened to sympathize with Poland. Some clergymen, the anonymous author wrote in a thinly veiled reference to Ulitzka, “so much enjoy the roles of party leader and plebiscite agitator that they do more to harm the church than to aid their fatherland.”68 No doubt many of the Upper Silesian priests who were described as nationally “neutral” or “indifferent”—a category that encompassed fully half of the parish clergy by some counts—shared this concern that aggressive German partisanship meant ostracizing fellow priests while fraternizing with Hakatists, socialists, and liberals. One might have expected, then, that a large number of such priests would have rallied around the KVP’s separatist wing and aligned themselves with the League of Upper Silesians.Page 234 →The league, after all, was resolutely proclerical and could make a plausible claim to be the “true” successor to the Center party tradition. Thanks to the financial backing of such Catholic industrialists as the Schaffgotsches and Ballestrems, it also disposed of formidable resources.69 In the winter of 1919–20, agents of the league outbid both the German Plebiscite Commission and the Polish Plebiscite Commission to gain control of the mass-circulation Oberschlesische Kurier. Father Victor Durynek, the religion instructor in the Oberrealschule in Beuthen and an activist in the league, became the Kurier’s new de facto editor, ensuring that it continued to offer sympathetic coverage of the separatist movement.70 Durynek also served as editor of the official weekly periodical of the league, the bilingual Bund /Związek, which was launched in March 1920 and enjoyed a circulation of several hundred thousand by early 1921.71 But as attractive as this “third way” might have seemed for Upper Silesia’s legions of neutral priests, few explicitly endorsed the free-state movement. In fact, there do not seem to have been any parish priests who followed Father Durynek’s lead in publicly affiliating with the League of Upper Silesians. The vast majority of clergymen who were identified as nationally “indifferent”—as followers of “the Golden Mean” who conscientiously “answered [parishioners] in the language in which they were spoken to”—interpreted this position not as an alternative form of political activism but, rather, as a form of political quietism, a pastoral strategy for mitigating the divisions that would inevitably arise over the question of national sovereignty.72 Writing under the name of “Pacificus” in Der Oberschlesier, one cleric argued that the neutral priest should be “the stabilizing element in the flood, the resting point against which the waves of national hatred and conflict break.”73 Paul Michatz, an avowedly neutral curate who worked in the industrial region during the plebiscite campaign, would later write that he systematically avoided politics “for idealistic as well as aesthetic reasons” and instead devoted himself “to pastoral work, whichPage 235 → aims to alleviate the conflicts and heal the wounds caused by open fratricidal warfare.”74 Not everyone described this stance in such noble terms. One pro-Polish priest characterized neutrality as a cowardly avoidance of controversy, dictated by the “comfortable principle of ‘Leave me alone.’”75 An editorial in Dziennik Poznański was equally derogatory, speaking of the two hundred or so Upper Silesian priests who were “neither Germans nor Poles, that treat nationality as unnecessary ballast and subscribe to the principle: Ubi bene, ibi patria.”76 With a bit more sympathy, Father Lewek wrote of the large number of priests “who were not meant by nature to be fighters” and “did not want to break solidarity with the Centrist priests” and

who therefore took no public stance during the plebiscite campaign.77 Lewek also makes clear, however, that these priests generally did not abstain from the plebiscite altogether. Like almost every adult resident of Upper Silesia, most presumably did cast a ballot for one side or the other, even if their choices remained inscrutable to their colleagues, to their parishioners, and to historians today. Just as the nationally “indifferent” clergy should not be imagined as a phalanx of die-hard regionalists who saw an Upper Silesian free state as the solution to the national question, so they should not be imagined as living in a realm of otherworldly national innocence. Priests who attempted to maintain some form of national neutrality knew that almost every action they took and almost every word they spoke could and would be interpreted as indicating a preference for Germandom or Polishness and that a position of perfect equidistance between the two was illusory. Father Karl Wilk, who cultivated a reputation for national neutrality with almost mathematical precision (presiding over the Gesellenverein as well as the Związek św. Josefa, contributing articles to Katolik as well as publishing German-language religious literature in Cologne), understood that this balancing act would never satisfy everyone. He later wrote to his superior, “That there are individuals, on the Polish as well as the German side, who are not content with such a stance and interpret it incorrectly—today, in a time of nationalism, that is no surprise!”78 Given the difficulty of maintaining such a position—indeed, even of defining such a position—it is all the more remarkable that so many observersPage 236 → considered this amorphous third category indispensable to describing properly the national sentiments of the Upper Silesian clergy.

Conflict and Coexistence during the Plebiscite Campaign For all the anxieties that were expressed about the influence that priests would exert on voting decisions, relatively few Upper Silesian Catholics could have been under the impression that the church spoke in a single, authoritative voice on the issue of whether Upper Silesia should belong to Germany or Poland. Indeed, a resident of the industrial region would not even have had to stray from his or her own parish to find clergy spanning the full national spectrum. Consider, for example, Father Tomasz Reginek’s description of the priests serving with him in the parish of St. Hedwig’s in Königshütte. The germanophile senior pastor, Franz Tylla, was characterized as an “old, dignified priest,” albeit a bit too close to the local municipal authorities. The first curate, Father Ferche, the son of a teacher, was known to be pro-German “but acted very diplomatically.” The second curate, Father Szczeponik, “wavered in his declarations, like many priests, and during the plebiscite campaign acted passively, not meddling in politics and not concerning himself with nationality.” The third curate, Father Gnilka, was described as “a typical Upper Silesian” who “had a radical Polish disposition but for certain personal reasons did not like to reveal this publicly.”79 Father Reginek himself, the most recently placed curate, had spent the first months after the end of the war as a high-profile advocate of Upper Silesian independence, but he had moved into the Polish-national camp by 1920. This diversity in national orientations was not entirely new, of course, and during the plebiscite campaign, as in previous years, the habits of utraquist pastoral work often muted the distinction between a “German” and a “Polish” priest. Parishioners across the industrial region could still expect virtually every priest to hear a confession, give a homily, or provide religious instruction in either language. But in the highly charged atmosphere of the plebiscite campaign, parish priests could not avoid making some decisions that would be interpreted as nationally partisan. One contentiousPage 237 → issue was whether religious services should be held on May 3 to observe the anniversary of Poland’s 1791 constitution. Polish activists argued that since churches had traditionally observed dates associated with German patriotism (e.g., the emperor’s birthday), accommodating an important date in Polish history was simply a matter of fairness, an acknowledgment that adherence to Poland was now a legitimate option for Upper Silesians. Many old-line Centrist pastors, however, believed that active participation in the lavish demonstrations that were held in honor of the May 3 holiday in 1919 and, on an even greater scale, in 1920 would inappropriately suggest a special affinity between Polishness and Catholicism. The result was a patchwork observance of the holiday: overtly polonophile pastors and many neutral, accommodating ones presided at services honoring the Polish constitution, while other pastors refused to sanction such services. In the densely populated parishes of the industrial region, Polish sympathizers whose own parishes were not holding special services could fairly easily travel to a neighboring parish where the pastor’s attitude was more favorable.80 But this variation in practice led to considerable bad blood. Father Skowronek in Bogutschütz complained that the

pastor in nearby Eichenau, his erstwhile protégé Wawrzyniec Pucher, ostentatiously led a procession in honor of the Polish national holiday from his own parish into Bogutschütz, thus highlighting the fact that Skowronek had refused to sponsor such an observance himself.81 Seeing the pastors of neighboring, demographically similar parishes taking such divergent stances on a nationally loaded issue, some laypeople demanded that the assignment of priests should be based more closely on the (ostensible) national profile of the communities in question. In September 1920, the church council of the parish of Miedzna sent letters (in Polish) to Cardinal Bertram and Monsignor Ratti refusing to accept the placement of a new pastor, Father Labus, who had been approved by the parish patron, the Prince of Pless. “Our parish,” the council stated matter-of-factly, “is Polish and wants as pastor a Polish priest, which Father Labus is not.”82 A group of petitioners from Myslowitz, claiming that three-quarters of its parishioners were of Polish nationality, requested the dispatch of at least “two good Polish priests” instead of the existing lineup of threePage 238 → proGerman clergymen.83 German complaints about pro-Polish clerics were less likely to reference the national “fit” between priest and parishioners, instead suggesting that Polish national agitation was unacceptable anywhere. But this begged the question of where polonophile priests serving in the bishopric of Breslau were to go. Since only a small minority could actually be stationed in “the sands of Brandenburg,” purging such priests from more “German” parishes would mean concentrating them in such counties as Pless or Rybnik, thus implicitly conceding that these areas were now “Polish.” For the moment, demands by laypeople for such a preemptive “sorting out” of the diocesan clergy were firmly rejected. Cardinal Bertram denounced them as signs of “a revolutionary movement against all authority.”84 But with the plebiscite campaign heightening national sensitivities, it was increasingly difficult for priests who were strongly identified with one side or the other to conduct pastoral care across linguistic lines. Some disputes between priests and parishioners were, to be sure, faintly comical. In the parish of St. Barbara in Königshütte, a complaint was lodged about the behavior of the polonophile Father Eduard Mende during a German-language wedding. Members of the wedding party had pointedly greeted the curate in German, but since Mende knew many of them to be of Polish descent, he began—“to the astonishment of all of the wedding guests”—to speak in Polish and to make disparaging remarks about Germans. The embarrassed groom finally told the curate, “I believe the wedding is German,” prompting the curate to respond, “[I]t is not like I was speaking Russian!” Only then did he switch to German.85 But some priests whose national orientation diverged from a majority of their parishioners now claimed to fear for their lives. Ludwig Skowronek declared that he did “not [feel] safe for a single hour” due to the opposition that was allegedly being fomented by his polonophile curate. On three occasions, he felt compelled to seek refuge in the parsonage to escape physical assault.86 Polonophile priests felt even more bereft of protection from colleagues and superiors who differed with them on the national question. The first eightPage 239 → months of 1919 had been a harrowing time for pro-Polish clergymen, as dozens of them were arrested for “high treason” and many others faced harassment by paramilitary forces. Aleksander Skowroński had received an anonymous letter—illustrated with a hand grenade, skull, and cross-bones—threatening him with death if he publicly supported union with Poland.87 In a few cases, priests figured not only as potential victims of violence but also as potential perpetrators. In September 1920, Father Wiktor Potempa, a curate in Gleiwitz and a Polish activist, was assaulted by German militants at a meeting. He promptly drew a handgun and shot one of his attackers.88 While Catholic observers differed on who was to blame for the mounting strife within the church, most agreed that these divisions, combined with the disruptions of the war and postwar social and economic dislocations, were taking a toll on Upper Silesia’s legendary popular piety. In the annual round of parish visitations in the fall of 1920, some pastors in the Königshütte deanery reported that “the faithful do not attend services as avidly as before the war” and that “attendance at church services, particularly the Polish (weekday) devotional services, leaves something to be desired.”89 Even in the Oberschlesische Kurier, which had traditionally tended to flatter its readers’ self-perception as model Catholics, one could find a highly critical report analyzing recent church statistics. Noting that the number of communions per parishioner was higher in western Germany than in the Upper Silesian industrial region, the author concluded: “Upper Silesia, to put it bluntly, makes a very poor impression. . . . The numbers are bitter. Some of those who let themselves be deceived by the overflowing

churches on Sunday and the thronging of the communion rails will see that in ‘good Catholic’ Upper Silesia there is still much to be accomplished.”90 As the matter-of-fact reference to “overflowing churches” suggests, there could be no talk of a free fall in religious practice or rampant de-Christianization. Many clergymen, in fact, continued to insist that religious behavior remained “good” or at least “satisfactory,” and Easter communion rates during the immediate postwar years remainedPage 240 → steady.91 But the possibility that civil strife might start to tear away at the fabric of local parochial life and, indeed, turn Upper Silesia’s bilingual Catholic milieu into a literal battleground was being taken increasingly seriously. Such fears spurred some regional and confessional activists to call for a de-escalation of polarizing rhetoric. Ewald Latacz pointedly defined the German-Polish conflict in Upper Silesia as an intracommunal, rather than intercommunal, affair—an unnatural “fratricidal war” that threatened to pit “friends, children, parents, and siblings against one another.”92 Another separatist sympathizer argued in the Oberschlesische Kurier that “even after the plebiscite, the overwhelming majority of those now living in Upper Silesia will still have to live with one another,” so all public figures should show “respect for the convictions of those who think differently.”93 While these pleas for conciliation were most often premised on a general sense of regional community, references to the specific centripetal power of “the bonds of Catholic faith” were also common, and Catholic activists were not shy about engaging in rhetorical sparring with the anticlerical and especially the socialist press as part of their attempts to bridge the intraconfessional divide between germanophile and polonophile Catholics.94 Throughout the plebiscite campaign, the Kurier took pains to rebut almost every public attack on a Catholic priest, regardless of whether the cleric in question was pro-German or pro-Polish. When the polonophile Father Rogowski was accused of shooting a policeman during an altercation, the editors dismissed the story as untrue. Rumors that the germanophile Father Tylla was offering sweets to children in only the German sections (not the Polish sections) of classes for first confession and communion werePage 241 → firmly repudiated.95 The conciliationist wing of the Polish camp showed a similar tendency to rein in criticism of the Catholic clergy. Adam Napieralski’s old flagship newspaper Katolik instructed readers not to send complaints about “germanizing” priests to its editorial office but to write directly to the ecclesiastical high commissioner.96 While no doubt partially inspired by a desire to avoid legal complications and potential censorship by the Allied Commission, this policy also reflected Napieralski’s longstanding concern about criticism of individual priests spiraling into wholesale attacks on the church. Gestures of intraconfessional conciliation were, ironically, somewhat harder to find in the ranks of the Upper Silesian clergy itself, despite its long tradition of corporate consciousness and collective action. The failure of Carl Ulitzka, Jan Kapica, and other leading priests from each national camp to reach a compromise agreement on the role of ex-diocesan priests in the plebiscite campaign suggested that divisions were, at least for the time being, too deep for the region’s clergy to speak with one voice on anything related to the national question. But subtle forms of everyday accommodation persisted, even among clerics whose own national partisan-ship was unmistakable. Perhaps the most remarkable example of a priest who managed to operate as both a high-profile national activist and a consummate team player within the church was Teodor Kubina, vice president of the Theological Section and pastor of the overwhelmingly germanophile parish of St. Mary’s in Kattowitz. In May 1920, as the plebiscite campaign was starting to heat up, a member of the parish council informed the German plebiscite commissioner, Kurt Urbanek, that Kubina was planning to hold a huge outdoor mass in the church courtyard during which several Polish banners would be dedicated. Urbanek complained to Kubina that such an event would be disruptive and provocative. “Surprisingly,” Urbanek wrote to Cardinal Bertram, “Pastor Kubina immediately agreed with this assessment. He explained that due to the general tension, such an event would, in fact, lead to unwanted agitation and could create the impression that religion was being misused.”97 Such instances of quiet, mutual consultation and accommodation would not always leave a paperPage 242 → trail—they were, after all, more nonevents than events—but they nonetheless provide important clues to the resilient communicative networks and personal ties that impeded Upper Silesia’s slide from family feud into civil war. The continuing power of confessional bonds as well as confessional divisions can also be discerned in the patterns of violence that convulsed Upper Silesia during the plebiscite campaign. It was a point of pride among Polish polemicists that despite the bellicose rhetoric that was often directed against germanophile priests, none were actually subjected to physical assault, even during the allegedly lawless days of the Second Silesian Uprising.98

This ongoing taboo on raising one’s hand against a cleric contrasted sharply with the harsh treatment meted out to other germanophile elites. Policemen, railway and postal employees, administrators in mines and foundries, and especially schoolteachers were routinely beaten and humiliated and sometimes killed outright.99 Polonophile priests did not enjoy quite the same immunity from physical violence that their germanophile counterparts did, but the wave of arrests and harassment that pro-Polish priests faced during 1919 could plausibly be explained as an initiative of the “red Hakatist” Hörsing regime, implemented by Grenzschutz and paramilitary forces that included large contingents of non-indigenous and non-Catholic “outsiders.” Genuine intraparochial violence, committed by local germanophile parishioners against polonophile pastors, could still be said to be beyond the pale. By contrast, national antagonisms that overlapped with religious differences seemed to escalate more readily into systematic violence. Prior to the plebiscite, the single instance in which a Catholic clergyman was killed—the murder of Father Wincenty Ruda by Grenzschutz forces in January 1919—involved a priest who was not known for national activism but who was at the center of a local confessional feud fueled by a slight to the parish’s Protestant aristocratic patron.100 Another incident that pointed to the exacerbating role played by confessional difference was the razing by Polish insurgents of the Protestant hamlet of Anhalt, probably the largest-scale atrocity of the plebiscite campaign.101 Such a confessionally cohesivePage 243 → microcommunity, after all, was much more easily isolated and targeted than the amorphous population of germanophile Catholics scattered throughout the parishes of the industrial region. Upper Silesia’s Jewish community, overwhelmingly germanophile and geographically concentrated in a few large cities, seemed an even more vulnerable target. As the chief rabbi in Oppeln lamented, whenever national hostilities erupted into violence, “it affected the Jews twofold, as Germans and as Jews, against whom the Poles agitated especially.”102 But while the Polish press did often include disparaging references to Jews and to their role in the local German community, Upper Silesia—unlike many other areas in East Central Europe in which Jews were caught up in nationalist conflicts—did not witness actual pogroms during the plebiscite campaign. The absence of lethal anti-Jewish violence might be credited to a number of factors, including the realization by Wojciech Korfanty and other Polish leaders that Poland was already under scrutiny for its treatment of its Jewish minority and that any attacks on Jews in Upper Silesia would further undermine sympathy for the Polish cause in the West. Another clue to this general restraint toward the local Jewish community was the conviction, best articulated by Korfanty in the Reichstag debate over voter intimidation a decade earlier, that the “Hakatist” (implicitly Protestant) governmental and heavy industrial sector, rather than the (implicitly Jewish) mercantile sector, constituted the main antagonist of the “Polish people” in Upper Silesia. Jews, in this view, were at worst passive accomplices of the “Hakatists,” at best persuadable bystanders. As one Polish situation report rather optimistically concluded in the early days of the plebiscite campaign, the Jews were “a realistically minded element,” some of whom, after assessing the new balance of power between nationalities, could be expected to be “not unsympathetic to the idea of Polish sovereignty.”103 This perception of local Jews as nationally “unsteady” (chwiejny) involved a strong element of distrust, of course. Under certain circumstances, this could easily escalate into outright hostility. But in Upper Silesia, it was not necessarily a marker of difference from the majority population; indeed, national “unsteadiness” could be considered one of the stronger common experiences potentially linking the region’s Jewish and Catholic communities. Page 244 →

“The Most Gullible People in the World”: Interpreting the Plebiscite Results On Sunday, March 20, 1921, after almost two years of frenzied campaigning, Upper Silesians went to the polls to choose a nation-state. Most cast their votes on the way to or from morning church services, while still dressed in their finest Sunday apparel. Anticipating outbreaks of violence, the Allied Commission had kept all official phone lines reserved for emergency communication, but there were, in the event, only a handful of relatively minor complaints about attempts at intimidating voters. By evening, attention had turned to the tabulation of the results, and by morning, it was clear that the plebiscite had resulted in a solid German victory. Of the 1,186,342 voters who cast valid ballots, 59.6 percent opted for Germany, only 40.4 percent for Poland.104

For Polish activists—above all, for Wojciech Korfanty, who was still confidently predicting victory only hours before the polls opened—the result was a bitter disappointment. It was not simply that the pro-Polish vote was well below the 65 percent of the population that spoke Polish as a mother tongue. The previous year’s plebiscites in Allenstein, Marienwerder, and Carinthia had, after all, produced even more spectacular gaps between the percentage of the population speaking a Slavic dialect and the percentage opting to join a newly constituted Slavic state.105 But Upper Silesia was supposed to be different. Many of the region’s “ethnographic Poles” had been voting as “national Poles” for almost twenty years, and only sixteen months earlier, in the communal elections of November 1919, Polish slates of candidates had won majorities across most of the region. Given the subsequent establishment of polonophile local governments across much of the region and considering the lavish resources that the Polish Plebiscite Commission had devoted to propaganda, it was not unreasonable for Polish activists to expect that a higher percentage of Polish speakers than ever before would express a Polish-national orientation. So why was the result so favorable to Germany? Official Polish critiques published soon after the plebiscite claimedPage 245 → that “the only explanation to be found” for the “apparent German majority” was “German terror.”106 Given the orderliness of the voting process itself and, above all, the near universal turnout at the polls, this claim has met with a skeptical response. As a correspondent for the London Times wrote, the remarkable participation rate “shows that the true feelings of the Province have been fearlessly expressed.”107 An American scholar writing on the plebiscite has made a similar argument, suggesting that the participation rate of 99 percent among resident Upper Silesians was “hardly compatible with the presence of effective terror by either side.”108 The implicit assumption linking high voter turnout with voter freedom is, of course, a high degree of faith in the integrity of the secret ballot. If there was no way to monitor how people voted or to punish them for voting the “wrong” way, then keeping suspect voters away from the polls altogether was, indeed, the only imaginable way to “terrorize” voters. The problem with this assumption is that the actual voting procedures used in Upper Silesia did not, in fact, provide such a reliable veil of secrecy. The plebiscite employed a so-called double-card method of balloting: a voter was given two ballots, one marked “Germany” and the other marked “Poland,” and was instructed to place one of these ballots in the voting envelope and then in the voting urn and to tear up and discard the other one. Of course, the second ballot, rather than being discarded, could be demanded as evidence of having voted “correctly” in return for payment or for protection against reprisal. Indeed, a number of complaints about vote fraud specifically referred to demands—in at least one case, from a voter’s own relatives—that a voter display the “discarded” ballot as evidence of having voted for the “right” side.109 A more persuasive reason for bracketing aside the question of electoral “terror” is not that such charges were implausible but, rather, that they came, as the Allied Commission noted, “with equal frequency from both sides,” suggesting that intimidation did not skew the result significantly in favor of either Germany or Poland.110 Some constituencies—for example, the so-called out-voters, emigrant Upper Silesians who returned to the plebiscite zone in groups tightly coordinated by the GermanPage 246 → government and patriotic groups; or the residents of large agricultural estates, especially in the far north and west, who never saw the Herrschaft of local landlords challenged by Polish insurgents or polonophile French occupation forces—certainly did vote overwhelmingly for Germany, far more so than any language statistics would have predicted, and this pattern may have reflected a degree of outright coercion as well as more subtle and ambiguous forms of social deference. But German publicists also documented numerous instances of alleged intimidation, particularly in the southeastern counties of Pless, Rybnik, Kattowitz, and Tarnowitz (the “region of terror,” as it was luridly described), where German administration had been most effectively disabled in favor of French occupation forces and, for extended stretches, Polish insurgents. Here, as in the German-dominated northwest, men with guns almost exclusively favored one side. In many other communes, however, and particularly in the fiercely contested industrial region, it was far less clear who was in a better position to threaten voters, and the razor-thin differences between the vote for Germany and the vote for Poland militated against claims that either side had been able to engage in systematic, effective intimidation. As a working proposition, then, albeit with important caveats, we can return to the claim of Richard Blanke, shared by most Anglo-American observers, that the plebiscite results “can be accepted as a fair representation of the national sentiments of Upper Silesia’s population.”111 This, however, only raises another, more interesting and

more complicated question: what is meant by “national sentiments”? To what extent, in other words, did the national choices expressed in the plebiscite reflect something durable, the product of a long-term, unilinear process of “identity” formation; and to what extent did they reflect something volatile, the product of either a contingent calculation of interest or a transient state of attraction or revulsion to a particular national label? Blanke’s understanding of “subjective nationality” strongly favors the former interpretation. The plebiscite vote, he argues, indicated that the population, “in 1921 and earlier,” was “roughly 40% nationally-conscious Germans, 40% nationally-conscious Poles, and 20% ethnic Poles who were subjectively German in nationality.” Blanke makes a point of stressing that this distribution “[does] not seem to be an aberration” and conformed “to the longterm pattern of voting in Upper Silesia.”112 Leaving aside the dubious contention that there was any “long-termPage 247 → pattern” in the dizzying roller coaster of early twentieth-century elections in Upper Silesia, Blanke’s sharp distinction between “nationallyconscious Germans” and “ethnic Poles who were subjectively German” is in tension with his own narrative of how “Poles” became “Germans.” He suggests that this process was primarily about upward social mobility and that this movement involved germanization not only in the “subjective” sense but “eventually in the objective sense as well.”113 If this is, in fact, what was happening, a static categorization of Upper Silesia’s population makes little sense. Many of those who counted as “nationally-conscious Germans” in 1921 had presumably been, at one point, “ethnic Poles who were subjectively German,” and many of those who could be described as “ethnic Poles who were subjectively German” at the time of the plebiscite would presumably make the leap in the future to being “nationally-conscious Germans.” Contemporaries tended to be more sensitive to the dynamic nature of the processes involved here. In an article in the regional journal Der Oberschlesischer, Jan Kapica went so far as to argue that six hundred thousand out of the eight hundred thousand Upper Silesians declaring German as their “mother tongue” were, in fact, “descended from Polish blood.”114 This was obviously a very rough estimate, but it reflected the universally recognized fact that most pro-German Upper Silesians, including most locally born German leaders, had Slavic surnames (e.g., Ulitzka, Lukaschek, Urbanek) and hence could be presumed to have at least some Slavic-speaking ancestors. The point at which people with such backgrounds felt themselves to be sufficiently “germanized” to declare German as their “mother tongue”—and thereby, according to Blanke, to count as “objectively” German—was itself highly subjective and, as we have seen, an issue of enormous controversy in every census. It is far from clear, however, that the group that Blanke highlights— those who declared Polish as a mother tongue but voted for Germany in the plebiscite—was necessarily composed of people halfway on the journey to a German national identity. As already noted, the largest percentages of pro-German Polish speakers lived in some of the most rural parts of Upper Silesia, settings that would seem to provide the fewest opportunities for the kind of empowering, modernizing acculturation that Blanke describes. To the extent that such voting patterns did not simply reflect socioeconomic deference to or intimidation by bread lords, it is plausible that many of them were motivated by distrust of the Polish state and governingPage 248 → Polish elites rather than by any kind of positive association with Germany. Indeed, Rudolf Vogel, an early and astute historian of plebiscite propaganda, argued that the German campaign’s most ingenious and effective publicity efforts involved Polish-language or bilingual publications that relentlessly criticized the Polish leadership without ever claiming an overt connection to the German government. Perhaps the most striking example of such an oblique approach was the success of Wola Ludu (The Voice of the People), a bilingual periodical spearheaded by Teofil Kupka, the former colleague of Korfanty whose high-profile defection and subsequent assassination provided one of the plebiscite’s most spectacular scandals. Vogel described the periodical as appealing to people’s “most primitive instincts: personal attacks against Korfanty and his schlachta [the Polish aristocracy—a pejorative reference to educated Poles from outside the region], Jew-baiting, exploitation of the people by the schlachta and the industrialists.”115 The underlying assumption of such a rhetorical strategy was that a good number of more or less polonophile Upper Silesians were sufficiently disillusioned by perceptions of corruption and thuggish behavior among Polish partisans that they were ready to vote for Germany as a protest. It is impossible to know just how many proGerman voters would have described their choice in this way, but the fact that German campaign managers actively courted such a constituency compels us to take it seriously as a component of the German margin of victory.

If the ranks of what might be called “ballot Germans” included men and women who opted for Germany as a lesser evil rather than a focus of subjective identification, the same was certainly true for “ballot Poles.” Blanke’s characterization of all pro-Polish voters as “nationally-conscious Poles” conveys a misleadingly straightforward view of the transition from language and culture to political orientation. In fact, as Polish activists were well aware, many of those who were persuaded to cast a ballot for Poland in 1921 were men and women who had previously gone through enough linguistic and cultural germanization to count as “objectively” German. Such stories of interrupted germanization were, after all, common to virtually every locally born Polish leader, from Wojciech Korfanty on down. A number of personal testimonies support Jan Kapica’s contention that some Upper Silesians who had moved far down the road to assimilation now became “uncertain” in their national orientation.116 A contributor to Der Oberschlesier described how his friends expressedPage 249 → astonishment that someone like him, who spoke flawless German and seemed perfectly at home in German society, could express pro-Polish sentiments. He invoked genealogical origin as part of the explanation but ultimately emphasized that he and others simply “feel themselves to be Polish.”117 Others cited more concrete experiences that pushed them away from identification with Germany. A factory engineer from Zabrze, writing to the Oberschlesische Kurier in response to an article that rhetorically asked if Prussia treated Upper Silesia as a “colony,” stated that he had felt such treatment “on my own person.” When applying for jobs at foundries run by Protestants and “Hakatists,” he was constantly grilled about his family background. “The birthplace of one’s parents, one’s mother tongue, and one’s religion,” he complained, “rank among the most important skills and experiences that one has to possess.” If Upper Silesia was not offered the status of an autonomous federal state within Germany, the correspondent concluded, he was ready to vote for Poland.118 Frank Mocha, the son of another Upper Silesian engineer, recounted an even more decisive rejection of Germandom. Although the family had experienced considerable cultural germanization—he and his siblings always addressed their mother as “Mutter”—Mocha’s father had supported the Silesian Uprisings, and when he found himself on the wrong side of the new frontier in 1922, he had crossed the Oder River in the middle of the night to start a new life in Poland.119 Since such partially germanized but thoroughly disillusioned Upper Silesians represented the margin of victory or defeat in the plebiscite, the Polish Plebiscite Commission spared no expense in trying to mobilize them. In a bold spending spree in the early months of 1920, an agent working for Wojciech Korfanty outbid several rival offers to purchase the Oberschlesische Grenzzeitung, which had long served as the organ of Left Liberalism in the industrial region, from the former owner’s widow. Korfanty’s agents soon also snatched up the Kreuzberger Zeitung, previously an organ of the German nationalists, as well as the Schwientochlowitzer Zeitung. Even when the Poles were outmaneuvered by their German rivals, as in the purchase of the old Center-party daily Oberschlesische Volkstimme by a consortium led by Father Ulitzka, they could claim some symbolic inroadsPage 250 → into a German-speaking constituency. One of the Volksstimme’s editors, Arthur Trunkhardt, promptly quit his post and took up a position as editor of a new German-language newspaper advocating union with Poland.120 These German-language propaganda efforts were far more than a tactical head fake. Indeed, they constituted a major component of the Polish Plebiscite Commission’s entire campaign. On the eve of the plebiscite, the combined circulation of German-language, pro-Polish periodicals was thirty-five thousand, almost 20 percent of the total circulation of all pro-Polish periodicals.121 Several of these newspapers were officially targeted at the members (or potential members) of the Upper Silesian People’s Party (Oberschlesische Volkspartei), a group founded in the first months of the plebiscite campaign to agitate for union with Poland. Prince Hatzfeldt judged the founding of the party to be a “very smart chess move, aimed above all at splitting off the nationally doubtful elements from the Catholic People’s Party (Center).”122 Indeed, the Centrist press expressed alarm about the ability of the party to seduce Catholics into the Polish fold. In January 1921, the editors of the Oberschlesische Kurier issued a warning to female readers to stay away from a women’s meeting sponsored by the Oberschlesische Volkspartei, which “pursues Great Polish goals under a German banner.”123 Anxieties about the drawing power of the new party appear to have been well-founded: by January 1921, the Volkspartei claimed some seventy thousand members, almost twice as many as the Polish Socialist Party.124 If this estimate was anywhere close to being accurate, we must conclude one of two things about this constituency of pro-Polish “Germans”: either thousands of monolingual German speakers, including many Protestants and/or recent immigrants from western Germany, had been persuaded to vote for Poland, or the overwhelming majority of Volkspartei members were “germanized” Upper Silesians of at least partial Slavic background. Since the latter

seems by far the more likely interpretation, the Polish leadership’s approach to this constituency is truly extraordinary. Rather than exhorting them to “return” to their “real” Polish nationality, the organizers of the Volkspartei were prepared to treat themPage 251 → as cultural—perhaps even ethnic—“Germans” who simply favored union with Poland.125 How are we to categorize such people? During the First World War, they could have been described as subjectively German ethnic Poles. Only a couple years later, with another twist of the region’s national kaleidoscope, they reappear as subjectively Polish ethnic Germans. The assumption that the national sentiments of many (perhaps most) Upper Silesian voters were subject to unpredictable shifts was clearly shared by those on the front lines of the plebiscite campaign. Prince Hatzfeldt wrote in the spring of 1920, “[T]he mood of the population is fluctuating,” and a Polish observer judged that “relations between particular national groups change from day to day.”126 In September 1920, Wojciech Korfanty warned the Council of Ministers in Warsaw that if Poland was still at war with the Soviet Union on the eve of the plebiscite, the prospect of military conscription would cost the Polish side three hundred thousand votes.127 Germany and Poland often appeared to be locked in a crass bidding war for the support of impressionable swing voters. Allegations swirled that Polish agents were promising a “Korfanty cow” (and German agents an “Urbanek goat”) to rural inhabitants who voted the right way. A recent analysis of German and Polish plebiscite propaganda found that by far the most common single theme—highlighted in over four hundred of the twelve hundred pamphlets, posters, and fliers that were examined—was the impact of the plebiscite on Upper Silesians’ economic welfare. Voters were bombarded with comparisons of the value of the German and Polish currencies, of the cost of bread and other staples in each country, and of the two nations’ relative debt burdens.128 In the minds of German and Polish campaign managers, it seemed, the typical Upper Silesian voter was a classic homo oeconomicus, a nationally indifferent rational actor trying to use his or her vote to maximize utility. Many observers found this mutability of public opinion appalling. A correspondent for the Times of London thought it left the region’s residents prey to each side’s clever advertising strategies: “The Upper SilesiansPage 252 → are the most gullible people in the world, as they will believe anything you say. Everything depends on who gets their ear last.”129 A priest from Posen, writing in the National Democratic Nowiny Codzienne in Oppeln, impatiently told local Catholics of Polish descent that it was “God’s will” that they vote for Poland: “[E]verything else that is said by one side or the other means nothing. Whether the border goes here or there, whether there is more to eat on one side or the other, whether the roads are better or worse, is not the issue here.”130 But Upper Silesians had received a rather different message from some local priests. At the outset of the plebiscite campaign, Father Kapica had urged voters to consider three issues in deciding how to cast their ballots: their religious welfare, their national welfare, and their economic interest. He concluded that proper consideration of each of these would lead them to opt for Poland, but if voters were, as he insisted, “completely free” to make their own calculations, they presumably had the right to come to a different conclusion.131 Upper Silesian separatists went even further in defending the apparent inclination of many residents to straddle the fence. The League of Upper Silesians, which claimed a membership of four hundred thousand by the eve of the plebisicite, insisted that the highest priority of most residents was keeping the region together, regardless of whether it was under Polish, German, or some other sovereignty.132 In an ingenious, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to demonstrate their point, the proseparatist press called for the distribution of special “Germany” and “Poland” ballots that also had the words “League of Upper Silesians” printed in German and Polish at the bottom. Those who chose to cast those ballots would be expressing not only a preference for Germany or Poland but also a parallel preference for an undivided and autonomous Upper Silesia.133 When the Allies showed no interest in thus confusing the binary clarity of the plebiscite question, the leaders of the league attempted to demonstrate the organization’s influence by directly lobbying the German and Polish governmentsPage 253 → on behalf of regional interests. But although officials in Berlin and Warsaw did meet with representatives of the league and address their concerns, the negotiations did not result in a clear-cut endorsement that can be said to have influenced voters significantly one way or another.134 In the absence of exit polling, it is impossible to say with any precision what proportion of pro-Polish and proGerman voters were “late deciders,” swayed, by contingent circumstances or effective campaign appeals, to vote differently than they might have a year, a month, or even a day earlier. But the volatility of voting behavior in

Upper Silesia over the preceding two decades, coupled with the conviction of so many observers that the plebiscite was destined only to record an “accidental result,” determined by who got the voters’ ear last, should certainly dissuade us from assuming that the ballots cast on March 20, 1921, were necessarily evidence of a durable national “identity.”

Moving and Staying: Priests and Parishioners after the Plebiscite Following the initial outbursts of emotion that followed the plebiscite—relief among the Allies, jubilation among the Germans, disappointment among the Poles—all the interested parties realized just how anticlimactic the results of the vote actually were. Despite hopes among the Germans and many Upper Silesian separatists that the plebiscite zone would be awarded as a unit to the plebiscite’s overall winner, the wording of the Treaty of Versailles made clear that the Allies were only obliged to take into account the communal-level results in determining where a new German-Polish frontier should be drawn. Those communal-level results did not, in the end, provide much guidance, particularly in the coveted industrial district, which was split nearly evenly between pro-German and pro-Polish voters. Instead of illustrating where a border should run, the map of communal-level voting results in the Industrial Triangle—featuring an archipelago of German-leaning cities amid a sea of Polishleaning villages and working-class suburbs—merely served as a kind of Rorschach test, drawing out observers’ preexisting biases. General LeRond, the consistently polonophile president of the Allied Commission, proposed a new frontier that came very close to the one proposed by Wojciech Korfanty.Page 254 → Both the “LeRond Line” and the “Korfanty Line” skillfully carved a territory with a bare Polish majority that nonetheless encompassed roughly two-thirds of the total plebiscite zone. The British and Italian commissioners, by contrast, reflecting their home governments’ increasing sympathy for Germany and distrust of France, endorsed a boundary that left to Germany three-quarters of the plebiscite zone, including the entire industrial region.135 The apparent diplomatic deadlock in the spring of 1921 provided yet another opening for advocates of an Upper Silesian free state to press their case. Such separatists as Heinrich Skowronek, Josef Musiol, and Victor Durynek made overtures to Adam Napieralski (who had kept a very low profile throughout the plebiscite) to add his still considerable clout to the initiative. But despite widespread suspicions that Napieralski would seize the opportunity to make common cause with his old confessional confederates and, in the process, undercut his longtime nemesis Wojciech Korfanty, the cautious Katolik editor refused to break national solidarity.136 Separatist activists also sought to win the support of policy makers and a broader public in Great Britain and perhaps even the United States. An English-language essay originating from the separatist stronghold of Beuthen waxed eloquent on the “special and homogeneous character of Upper Silesia,” which was populated by “a mixed race in which German and Slavic blood have mingled to create a higher unity.” Just as it would be madness to force Americans to divide themselves on the basis of genealogical origin, the author argued, so it would be with an Upper Silesian—“the American of Europe.”137 The region’s leading landowners and industrial magnates, led by the Prince of Pless, also made direct appeals to British officials to back an undivided and autonomous Upper Silesia. British observers on the scene were divided over whether such schemes had broad popular support, but the question was essentially moot. Any viable planPage 255 → for an Upper Silesian free state required a political and military commitment that Great Britain’s policy makers were neither willing nor able to make.138 While supporters of an Upper Silesian free state were necessarily dependent on the goodwill of the Allies to see their goals realized, the Polish leadership was not content to wait on interallied diplomatic maneuverings to play themselves out. Once before, after all, the Allies had shown their “perfidy” by reneging on a tentative plan to assign Upper Silesia to Poland outright, and Wojciech Korfanty in particular was not prepared to accept passively another such defeat. On May 1, the Polish Plebiscite Commission’s Grenzzeitung circulated the (rather contradictory) rumors that the Allies were preparing to award the lion’s share of the plebiscite zone to Germany and that leading germanophile industrialists were planning to destroy the region’s industrial plant rather than see it go to Poland. The news provoked a general strike the next day, and later that evening, the third and most successful of the Silesian Uprisings broke out. Tens of thousands of insurgents, including many polonophile members of the plebiscite police, quickly seized control of most of the territory east of the “Korfanty Line,”

disarming, detaining, and sometimes brutalizing germonophile police officers and other German sympathizers in the process. Korfanty, dismissed by the Polish government from his position as plebiscite commissioner (ostensibly due to his failure to prevent the uprising), quickly declared himself the “dictator” of the insurgency. Despite the Polish government’s formal repudiation of the uprising, a portion of the insurgency’s leadership and much of its equipment clearly came from across the Polish frontier. The French occupation forces were also accused of complicity in the uprising, since the only armed resistance to the advance of the insurgents came from the relatively small contingent of Italians. The German government, convinced that no help was coming from the Allies, began to commission Freikorps units to engage the Polish insurgents and attempt a reconquest of the plebiscite zone. By the late springPage 256 → of 1921, an undeclared conventional war was raging across central Upper Silesia.139 It was one of the bloodiest periods in Upper Silesian history. Over two thousand combatants and perhaps a comparable number of civilians lost their lives, and thousands more fled their homes to avoid reprisals from either the insurgents or the Freikorps.140 It also, not surprisingly, marked the nadir of relations between Upper Silesia’s germanophile and polonophile Catholic clergy. The germanophile and neutral clergy viewed the uprising as an unconscionable flouting of lawful authority and were appalled that members of the Theological Section had not condemned it. Ogno Serra, the papal delegate residing at the parsonage in Oppeln (just beyond the farthest advance of the insurgents), issued a stinging condemnation of the violence that, while not naming names, clearly suggested that the Poles were to blame for the unrest. He expressed particular outrage that several priests, including at least one diocesan priest, were openly fighting alongside the insurgents.141 Members of the Theological Section, however, complained directly to the Vatican that atrocities by the insurgents were being grossly exaggerated, particularly with regard to treatment of germanophile parish priests. While several had been taken into custody, none had been seriously mistreated or physically harmed.142 The polonophile clergy in western Upper Silesia, by contrast, was being subjected to genuine terror. Two priests were killed, eleven others were physically assaulted, and over fifty were forced to flee to Polish-occupied territory.143 Indeed, the first trickle of emigration began before the outbreak of the uprising. Alek-sander Skowroński, for example, had already fled his parish at the end of April, after a grenade had been thrown at the parsonage of a neighboring polonophile pastor.144 By the time the Allies reestablished peace in Upper Silesia in the late summer of 1921, much of the western part of the plebiscite zone had been effectively “cleansed” of its pro-Polish clergy. A few priests who were caught up in this wave of emigration do not evenPage 257 → seem to have exhibited any genuine polonophile sentiments. For example, the arrest of Father Carl Arndt during the uprising was due to what one parishioner called animosity “of a personal nature” on the part of the local organist and teachers and some local Protestants.145 The drawing of a new official frontier between Germany and Poland—and between German and Polish dioceses—proceeded at a much more dignified pace. It was only in October that the Allied Supreme Council approved a new German-Polish frontier that essentially split the difference between the French and the AngloItalian proposals. The new boundary would run straight through the industrial region, leaving the cities of Beuthen and Gleiwitz and most of the counties of Beuthen and Zabrze with Germany but ceding to Poland the cities of Kattowitz and Königshütte and most of the county of Kattowitz. Cardinal Bertram soon named Father Kapica as a special episcopal delegate in charge of administering the regions to be ceded to Poland. It was a first step toward the region’s formal separation from the bishopric of Breslau, but the establishment of a new bishopric in Polish Silesia would take several more years. From November 1922, when sovereignty was formally transferred to Poland, until 1925, when a new diocese of Katowice was established, the region was administered as an apostolic delegacy by Father August Hlond, a member of the Salesian order who was born in Upper Silesia but who had been residing in Vienna and was therefore somewhat removed from the nationalist passions of the plebiscite campaign.146 While this shifting of diocesan frontiers also necessitated some adjustment of parish frontiers right along the new border, it should, in principle, have had no effect on the status of incumbent parish pastors. But with dozens of pro-Polish priests from German Upper Silesia and a smaller number of pro-German priests from Polish Silesia already effectively expelled from their parishes, some kind of national “sorting out” of the clergy seemed

inevitable . The communal leaders of Rydultowy, for example, informed Father Kapica that their germanophile pastor, Father Hassa, had fled the parish during the Third Silesian Uprising, while a polonophile priest, Father Bernacki, had in turn taken refuge in Rydultowy after fleeing his own parish on the German side of the border. They now requested that this de facto switch be made official.147 Cardinal Bertram was initially reluctant to accept such reassignment from below.Page 258 → His priority, as he pointedly reminded Kapica, was “stopping every kind of revolutionary movement, entirely irrespective of whether it is found on the German or the Polish side,” and ensuring that “my and your authority” would not be undermined.148 As the months wore on and the pressure on certain clergymen only intensified, however, Bertram began to resign himself to the inevitability of personnel changes. When a despondent Father Zientek wrote to him in the summer of 1922 predicting that he, as a germanophile priest, could not remain much longer in a parish that was now in Poland (Roździeń), Bertram offered little consolation. While commending Zientek for holding out against “revolutionary violence,” he admitted that it was possible that he [Zientek] would have to “yield to force” and that it might now be impossible to carry out “fruitful pastoral work in the long term” in that parish.149 By the end of 1922, some 51 of the 349 priests engaged directly in pastoral work in German Silesia had moved to Polish Silesia, while 56 of the 200 priests engaged in pastoral work on the Polish side of the frontier had moved west.150 The attrition rate among the local clergy was, in other words, somewhat higher in the regions awarded to Poland. But since polonophile priests represented a decided minority of the total clergy, the thinning of their ranks in German Silesia was more drastic than the reduction in germanophile clergy in Polish Silesia. Only a relative handful of committed Polish-national priests, perhaps between ten and twenty, remained in German Silesia, while the number of germanophile priests staying in their parishes in Polish Silesia was in the range of fifty to seventy.151 The impact of this ad hoc priest exchange was clearly evident in the old deaneries of Myslowitz and Königshütte, the ecclesiastical units that have stood at the heart of this study. The parishes of these deaneries allPage 259 → came under Polish rule after 1922, and by the mid-1920s, twenty-two of the sixty-six diocesan priests who had been working in the area at the time of the plebiscite had emigrated to Germany, including nine of twenty-six parish pastors.152 The priests who moved into these vacant positions, some of them émigrés from German Silesia, tended to be pronounced Polish patriots. Yet the church’s polonization was far from systematic; germanophile pastors remained in charge of some of Polish Silesia’s most populous parishes. Perhaps the most striking holdout was Father Zientek, the pastor of Roździeń whom Polish activists had been targeting for removal since before the plebiscite. Already convinced in 1922 that his days were numbered, Zientek stubbornly remained in his post for more than a decade, regularly sparring with government officials as well as polonophile parishioners— though now writing his acerbic correspondence in Polish.153 Other German-leaning priests, however, not only survived but thrived in Polish Silesia. In the spring of 1922, Father Josef Kubis of Załęże had met with his onetime mentor Ludwig Skowronek and several other moderate germanophile clergymen to discuss how to deal with the onset of Polish rule. They agreed that the only viable policy was obedience to the new church authorities, devoting themselves to impartial bilingual pastoral work, and—in a break with decades of Centrist activism—abstention from party politics.154 This stance won Kubis the trust of his Polish colleagues and superiors. He was elected head of the new deanery of Katowice, a position he held through the entire interwar period, and when the new diocese was officially organized in 1925, he was among the six clergymen appointed as canons of the cathedral chapter.155 The durability of utraquist traditions in the new diocese of Katowice was not simply, or even primarily, due to a few germanophile parish priests holding onto their posts. It also reflected the ongoing, widespread use of German among a large number of parishioners. Official statistics, to be sure, suggested that this constituency had been gutted by the change of sovereignty. The Polish census of 1931 recorded only sixty-nine thousand residents of the region as having German as their “mother tongue,” a huge drop from the roughly 350,000 residents who had indicated a preference forPage 260 → Germany in 1921.156 According to this official count, cities like Katowice and Królewska Huta, which had German majorities prior to the war, were left with only small German minorities (13 percent and 12 percent, respectively) by 1931.157 We know, however, that only about one hundred thousand people actually migrated from Polish to German Silesia during the 1920s.158 Assuming that the “ballot Germans”

of 1921 remained Germans, this would have left a minority population of at least 250,000.159 Polish commentators, of course, tended to insist that many of those who had voted for Germany were now, in a free Poland, embracing their authentic Polish nationality, though some conceded that the years after the plebiscite actually witnessed a “state of constant flux” and a “fluidity and lack of consolidation” in national orientation rather than a mass turn to Polishness.160 Strong (though fluctuating) showings by the German minority parties in local and national elections throughout the 1920s, as well as a steady stream of applications to German-language schools, made it difficult to deny that germanophile sentiment extended well beyond the ranks of obvious “ethnic” Germans.161 Did the Catholic church treat this contested population as German or as Polish? As before the plebiscite, the answer depended entirely on context. In a 1928 statistical survey of the diocese of Katowice, pastors recorded a total of 180,000 “German Catholics,” a figure closer to the maximal figures claimed by German minority groups than the minimal figure claimed by the Polish government. But the pastors also parenthetically noted that “most” or “almost all” of these parishioners were “germanizedPage 261 → Poles” who remained fluent in Polish.162 A very similar kind of hedging, it is worth noting, could be found in a linguistic survey on the other side of the frontier, in the more rural parishes of German Upper Silesia. Asked for what percentage of parishioners the use of the Polish language was “necessary,” a number of pastors tried to avoid a simplistic answer. One listed the linguistic breakdown of the parish as 7 percent German, 8 percent Polish, 85 percent bilingual. Another wrote, “[A]ll parishioners understand German; for 75 percent, Polish is the language of everyday use.”163 If we turn from the categorization of people to the organization of specific practices, some clearer patterns emerge. As we saw earlier in this study, Upper Silesia’s prewar clergy had generally made its peace with the reality of German-language religious education in the schools, and most priests offered little resistance to the trend of ever more schoolchildren enrolling in the German section of courses for first confession and communion. With the incorporation of part of Upper Silesia into Poland, this tradition of deference to the state began to work in the opposite direction, as parish-based religious education came to reflect the shifting of most children into Polishlanguage schools. In the parish of SS. Peter and Paul in Katowice, 342 of the children who had given their first confession in 1913 did so in German, while 138 confessed in Polish.164 By 1926, only two hundred children at that parish were enrolled in the German sections of instruction in confession and communion, while four hundred were enrolled in the Polish sections.165 For the clergy of Polish Silesia, as for Cardinal Kopp thirty years earlier, it was worth accommodating state pressure on the language of religious instruction in order to preserve the total amount of religious instruction in the schools. The five hours per week that had become the norm under Kopp was considerably higher than in the rest of Poland (where the average was only two hours) and could have been subject to downward revision by the Sanacja regime if the local clergy were deemed too uncooperative with the state’s nationalizing goals.166 In contrast to this tendency to conform to state priorities in the educational sphere, pastors tended to be extraordinarily reluctant to changePage 262 → the existing schedules of German- and Polish-language worship services. As the diocesan authorities in Katowice often reiterated in responding to charges of anti-German discrimination, the ratio of German- and Polish-language worship services changed only modestly during the interwar period, while provisions for German-language associational activity actually increased in many parishes.167 Even the statistics published by German minority organizations (and intended to be alarmist) suggest a rather under-whelming shift in the linguistic balance of worship activity. In the districts of Katowice and Świętochłowice, home of most of Polish Silesia’s German-speaking minority, the number of Sunday morning Polish masses was reported to have risen from fifty-eight to seventy-five between 1918 and 1926, while the number of Sunday morning German masses was said to have declined from thirty-three to twenty-eight.168 This represented, to be sure, a noticeable prioritizing of new Polish-language services as new parishes were founded and pastoral care expanded, as well as a certain curtailment of those German-language services—in particular, the so-called school masses for students and teachers—that were introduced under pressure from the German government prior to 1918. In most large parishes, however, the basic schedule of one German-language mass and two or three Polish-language masses every Sunday remained very much the norm. Again, it is worth noting that this conservative attitude toward the Sunday schedule of services applied equally across the frontier in German

Silesia. In 1938, after several generations of German-language schooling (not to mention five years of Nazi rule), only 17.5 percent of Catholic marriages and funerals in the province of Oppeln were being conducted in Polish, yet almost 39 percent of Sunday high masses and 45 percent of Sunday vespers services had a Polish homily and Polish singing.169 Returning to the Polish side of the new frontier, it was revealing—and, for Polish officials, distressing—that the priests who were often the most vociferous in resisting systematic nationalization or even the use of national terminology were not germanophile holdovers from the Wilhelmine era but impeccably “Polish” priests installed in sensitive posts after the change of sovereignty. Jan Gajda, Father Tylla’s successor as pastor of St. Hedwig’s in Königshütte, sparred with state officials about various national controversies as frequently as his more Germanoriented colleagues. When polonophile parishioners complained to state authorities that GermanPage 263 → parishioners were receiving more recognition for their financial contributions, that church employees were disproportionately germanophile, or that Polish choral singing was receiving insufficient support, Father Gajda was consistently unsympathetic. The church employees in question, he insisted, were not “Germans” but simply “Upper Silesians” who “only speak broken German,” and he claimed that the new “German” organist actually “felt himself to be Polish” and was, furthermore, doing more to promote Polish-language music than the old “Polish” organist. Gajda concluded his response to the police directorate of Królewska Huta with a pointed objection to state officials’ habit of “pok[ing] their noses into church affairs.” He added: “I lived for twenty years under the watch of the Prussian police, and I do not fear being under the watch of the Polish police. But I protest energetically against this ‘protection.’ If you gentlemen among the police would simply fulfill your religious obligations, that would be enough for me.”170 For Gajda, as for so many of his colleagues, the fact that he now wrote to meddlesome officials in Polish, rather than German, seemed a fairly minor twist in the ongoing defense of the Catholic “cause.” The transfer of sovereignty from Germany to Poland roughly coincided with the end of the career of Father Ludwig Skowronek, the feisty and imperious Bogucice pastor who has figured as one of the protagonists of the present study’s story. In January 1923, he told August Hlond, the new apostolic administrator, that ill health and fatigue were the primary reasons for his retirement, though he admitted that the “disorders” (Wirren) of recent years had also taken their toll.171 Indeed, in the early 1920s, Bogucice was far from the idyll of tranquil piety and childlike obedience that Skowronek had spent his life trying to cultivate. The hostile ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and nationalism were alive and well, and the two-year-long plebiscite campaign, punctuated by violent insurrections, had divided his parish as well as the region as a whole. As his colleague Tomasz Reginek would later recall, the plebiscite had unleashed “a bitter fratricidal war” that “spared no class or sex or age” and that “broke apart the closest family ties.”172 Upper Silesia’s clerical “family” was certainly not immune to this dynamic: scores of Catholic priests who had hitherto straddled or avoided national controversies felt compelled to declare themselves as GermansPage 264 → or Poles in the overheated atmosphere of 1919–21. Some of Ludwig Skowronek’s own closest associates shocked the Bogucice pastor by expressing staunch polonophile sentiments. For many Upper Silesians and especially for many parish priests, such public declarations of national sentiment effectively became binding in the aftermath of the referendum on sovereignty. Those who found themselves on the “wrong” side of the new frontier came under strong pressure to move to the “right” side. Over the next several years, almost 10 percent of Upper Silesia’s population and more than 20 percent of the region’s Catholic priests left their homes to fulfill this logic of nationalization. But while it is tempting to narrate the aftermath of Upper Silesia’s partition in the now all-too-familiar lexicon of “ethnic cleansing,” characterizing it as a decisive move toward homogeneous nation-states, the post-plebiscite reality was, in fact, far more complex. As was the case across much of East Central Europe, the majority of people who found themselves on the “wrong” side of the new frontiers did not go anywhere.173 They stayed in their previous communities, sometimes reorienting toward the majority language, sometimes adhering to a wellorganized minority group, sometimes navigating a middle course between these options. The relatively low degree of national “unmixing” meant that the institutions that had long defined Upper Silesian Catholicism—the utraquist priest and the binational parish—remained the norm on both sides of the new frontier. Homilies, confession, popular missions, religious instruction, and association meetings continued to be offered in both German and

Polish. Moderately germanophile or nationally neutral clergy, such as Skowronek’s own protégés Josef Kubis and Paul Michatz, continued to lead huge parishes and even held positions in the diocesan hierarchy. As diocesan officials in Katowice liked to point out, despite the Polish-patriotic orientation of most of the clergy, “all the priests of Polish Upper Silesia have the German Abitur and German university studies behind them.”174 Even Skowronek’s new superior, August Hlond (who by 1926 would assume the titles of archbishop of Gniezno and primate of Poland), was part of this utraquist legacy. As a boy, he had himself been one of Skowronek’s parishioners, an experience that Hlond pointedly recalled in signing one of his letters (in German) with the words “once your parishPage 265 → child.”175 It was understandable, then, that Skowronek concluded one of his final letters to Hlond with a defiant note of optimism: “[T]he dance around the idol of ‘nationalism’ will one day come to an end.”176 This confidence in the transience of nationalist passions was not only an expression of supernatural faith. It was also reinforced by the experience of having seen the salience of national divisions ebb and flow repeatedly over the course of his thirty-five-year pastoral career. Arguably the most spectacular moment of nationalist polarization that Skowronek had witnessed was not the plebiscite campaign but, rather, the electoral breakthrough of the Polish National Democrats in 1903, which shattered the previous party-political unity of Upper Silesian Catholics, fueled vitriolic exchanges between the clergy and lay politicians, and led to a few violent clashes. When Father Skowronek had attempted to spearhead the cause of confessional unity himself during the 1907 Reichstag elections, he had suffered a humiliating defeat. Nonetheless, only a year later, in the face of a new wave of antiCatholic sentiment emanating from Berlin, the “whole great Catholic family” had hammered out a new political compromise, and Skowronek’s confidence in the piety of his parishioners and in the centripetal power of parish life had returned. The years following Germany’s defeat in the First World War had witnessed a similar fluctuation in antagonism between German- and Polish-oriented Catholics. Although the looming plebiscite ensured that the question of national sovereignty was never far from people’s minds, nationality did not necessarily trump other cleavages during the two-year run-up to the vote. The communal elections of November 1919, for example, were shaped at least as much by the rivalry between proclerical and anticlerical forces, between the critics and supporters of Otto Hörsing’s “Red Hakatist” regime, as by the competition between German and Polish nationalists. To be sure, at the level of party politics, these revivals of confessional solidarity remained arm’s-length reconciliations. There was little prospect that German and Polish Catholics could be reamalgamated into a single political vehicle resembling the Kulturkampf-era Center party. But at the level of parish structure and devotional life, the notion of a common German-Polish Catholic community proved astonishingly durable. Tens of thousands of Catholics continued to be served by priests of the “wrong” national sympathy, and in scores of urban and industrial parishes, the basic rhythms of the utraquist parish—the alternation of German and PolishPage 266 → homilies, associational meetings, missions, and religious education classes—had changed only marginally between the 1880s and the 1930s. As striking as this resilience of microlevel confessional communities was the emergence during the plebiscite campaign of a rhetoric of regional unity—indeed, in some instances, a full-blown rhetoric of Upper Silesian nationhood. Claims that Upper Silesia represented an organic and indivisible whole were, of course, most often framed as a protest against the underlying premise of the plebiscite: the notion that the region’s population was composed of readily identifiable Poles and Germans. But in a number of important ways, the plebiscitary process itself made separatism plausible and viable and, in effect, gave birth to the idea of an Upper Silesian nation. The Treaty of Versailles had made Upper Silesia, for the first time in history, a polity. It was admittedly a strange polity—one called into existence in order to vote itself out of existence—but a polity nonetheless. For almost two years, residents of the plebiscite zone shared a common experience that distinguished them from their ostensible conationals in either Germany or Poland, and even after the demarcation of the new frontier, lingering controversies over property ownership, citizenship, and minority linguistic rights ensured that the former plebiscite zone would continue to exist as a subject of special international juridical scrutiny for another fifteen years. During the plebiscite and its immediate aftermath, all residents of Upper Silesia confronted the same momentous choices and the same relentless exhortation and intimidation by national activists. In the process,

Upper Silesians could be said to have been forged into a common reading public, a public riveted by a common story narrated in a written vernacular—or, in this case, two written vernaculars employed ambidextrously by proPolish and pro-German publicists. Was this not what Benedict Anderson has described as the very heart of the nation-building process?177 That the common story of the Upper Silesian “nation” was also a divisive story is not, on close examination, so exceptional either. As Ernest Renan observed, one of the most powerful elements of national narration is the willful forgetting of conflicts that come to be understood as internal conflicts, as unfortunate family feuds.178 Following Renan, the Upper Silesian plebiscite had the potential to be commemorated by regionalist activists as the local equivalent of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as an event both observed and “already forgotten” by those subscribing to a given collective myth.

1 Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Eley and Suny, 53–54. 2 The other plebiscites held after the war were in Schleswig Holstein (Germany and Denmark), Allenstein and Marienwerder (Germany and Poland), the Klagenfurt basin (Austria and Yugoslavia), and Sopron (Austria and Hungary). Plebiscites were planned in Austrian Silesia (Poland and Czechoslovakia) and Wilno/Vilnius (Poland and Lithuania) but never held. Transcripts of the discussions leading to the decision to hold a plebiscite in Upper Silesia can be found in Paul Mantoux, The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24–June 28, 1919), ed. and trans. Arthur S. Link, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3 Mantoux, 279–83. 4 See Wambaugh, 217–26 on the details of Upper Silesian administration; 111–12 on the LeRond-Stimson Agreement governing all of the German-Polish plebiscite zones. 5 The historiography of the uprisings, particularly in Polish, is extensive. For a brief but fairly typical account, see Mieczysław Wrzosek, “Działania bojowe w czasie pierwszego powstania śląskiego,” in W pięćdziesiątą rocznicę powstań śląskich i plebiscytu, ed. Henryk Rechowicz (Katowice: Wydanwnictwo “Śląsk,” 1971), 62–85. 6 The suppression of the uprising provided ample grist for Polish polemical literature, such as Die Greuel des Grenzschutzes während des Augustaufstandes in Oberschlesien (Nikolai: Miarka, 1920). 7 Edmund Klein, “Wybory komunalne na Górnym Śląsku z 9 listopada 1919 r. a sprawa polska,” Studia Śląskie 5 (1962): 7–157; Ergebnis der Gemeinderatswahlen in Oberschlesien am 9. November 1919 (Breslau: Stadt- und Universitätsdruckerei Graß, Barth, u. Comp. 1920). 8 Prince Hatzfeldt to Prussian minister of the interior, 7 July 1920, in źródła, 2:226–27; situation report of the Polish Military Organization, 3 April 1920, in źródła, 2:107–8. 9 Colonel Percival to Earl Curzon, 11 May 1920, in Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, 1st ser., vol. 11 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1961), 11–14. 10 The literature on the Second Uprising is extensive and, as with the First Uprising, features a running German-Polish debate over whether the insurgency should be interpreted as a violent seizure of power or a defensive attempt to level the playing field. For a Polish account, see “Drugie powstanie śląskie,” in Rechowicz, 86–121. For a forceful recent restatement of the German critique, see Guido Hitze, Carl Ulitzka (1873–1953) oder Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2002), 303–5. 11 Representative from Reichswehr ministry to Prussian Interior Ministry, 11 March 1920, in źródła, 2:72–73. 12 Hatzfeldt to Prussian Interior Ministry, 9 October 1920, in źródła 2:433–34. The Germans were at least as prolific as the Poles in publicizing atrocities allegedly committed by their opponents during the Polish uprisings: see, for example, Der Augustaufstand in Oberschlesien nach amtlichen Mitteilungen (Berlin: Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, [1920]). 13 Percival to Curzon, 31 August and 5 September 1920, in British Documents on Foreign Affairs, part 2, ser. F, vol. 31, 217–20, 249. 14 Assessment of Wladyslaw Berkan, quoted in Orzechowski, Wojciech, 202. 15 Ibid., 203–4. 16 “Picnic Atmosphere in Upper Silesia,” New York Times, 21 March 1921, 1. 17 Vogel, 113–15.

18 Mantoux, 389–90. 19 Stewart Stehlin, Weimar and the Vatican, 1919–1933: German-Vatican Diplomatic Relations in the Interwar Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 103–9 (quote on 107). See also Jan Kopiec and Jerzy Myszor, “Główne problemy działalności Kościoła katolickiego na Górnym Śląsku w latach 1918–1925,” in Podział Śląska w 1922 roku: Okoliczności i następstwa, ed. Andrzej Broek and Teresa Kulak (Wroc l aw: Polska Akademia Nauk, 1996), 109–10. 20 Father Micha l Lewek estimated the total number of ex-diocesan clergy agitating for Poland at fifty to sixty, in Górnośląski plebiscyt z roku 1921 oraz udział w nim duchowieństwa katolickiego (Chorzow: GŚD, 1991),50. 21 The characterization of the ex-diocesan priests as crazed fanatics has been carried over into much of the German-language literature on the plebiscite campaign. Guido Hitze, for example, has described these clerics as “medieval Crusade-preachers,” who “awakened among the simple population a religious enthusiasm bordering on hysteria, along with base violent instincts” (232–33). 22 Erzpriester to Bertram, 4 November 1920 (with cover letter from Pastor Kubis in Oppeln), I.A.25.o.29, AAW. It should be noted that there were two pastors named Josef Kubis involved here: the pastor in Oppeln who organized the initiative and the pastor in Zalenze (and head of the deanery of Myslowitz) who was one of the signatories. 23 Full (German) text printed in Lewek, 19–20. 24 Józef Bańka, “Dekret ks. kard. Adolfa Bertrama z 21 XI 1920 roku a ks. Achilles Ratti, Późniejszy Papież Pius XI,” Nasza Przeszłość 36 (1971): 294–96. 25 Father Lewek (26–33) recalls Ogno Serra as being very responsive to Polish concerns in the run-up to the plebiscite. Father Kubis, however, was already describing the apostolic delegate as a highly sympathetic partner in lobbying the Allied Commission on behalf of German interests (Hitze, 350–51). 26 Printed in Oberschlesische Kurier, 16 March 1921, 1. 27 Text of bishops’ letter to the Polish public in Dziennik Gdanski, 2 February 1921, in Gesamtüberblick, 112–13. 28 Lewek, 22–23. 29 Ibid., 16. 30 According to one article (“Oberschlesische kirchliche Verhältnisse,” Germania, 29 October 1921, 2), there were 549 diocesan priests working in the parishes of the plebiscite zone. Tallies vary depending on whether one includes priests working in teaching (rather than pastoral) capacities or priests formally attached to other dioceses. 31 Paul Nieborowski, Oberschlesien, Polen, und der Katholizismus (Berlin: Hans Robert Engelmann, 1919), 127–29. Nieborowski would later admit that this estimate was too low (“Das Bistum Breslau und Oberschlesien,” Der Oberschlesier, no. 13 [27 March 1920], 3). 32 An estimate of one hundred was given by an article in the National Democratic Gazeta Ludowa (“Die katholische Geistlichkeit in Oberschlesien,” 1 January 1920, in Gesamtüberblick, 11). A polonophile priest writing an anonymous pamphlet pegged the number of pro-Polish clerics at “no more than 100” (Den Oberschlesiern zur Aufklärung, 13). Situation reports of the Polish insurgents placed the proportion of Polish priests at 30 percent of the total, which would amount to a figure of roughly 150 (situation report of Polish Military Organization (Polska Organizacja Wojskowa, or POW), no. 21 [27 March 1920], in źródła, 2:82–83). Father Lewek (47–48) also gives the somewhat higher figure of from 120 to 140 polonophile priests, in part because he seemed to include nondiocesan priests and priests not engaged in pastoral work. 33 An estimate of two hundred pro-German and two hundred neutral priests was given in “Das katholische Geistlichen in Oberschlesien,” Gazeta Ludowa, 1 January 1920, in Gesamtüberblick, 11. A situation report of the Polish insurrectionists classified 50 percent of the clergy (or 250–300 priests) as neutral and only 20 percent (or 100–125 priests) as pro-German (situation report of POW, no. 21, in źródła, 2:82–83). 34 Lewek, 13. Lewek (5–16) also describes the close coordination that existed between the Theological Section and the Department of Religion of the Polish Plebiscite Commission (which he headed). 35 Lewek, 47–48. 36 I have counted about forty pro-Polish priests serving in curate or other assisting positions during the time of the plebiscite, most of them in the industrial region. This is almost certainly a more significant undercount than my estimate for polonophile pastors, since curates were, by definition, more mobile, less

visible, and more likely to have escaped definitive national labeling. See Pater, Słownik. 37 Situation report of POW, no. 18 (28 February 1920), in źródła, 2:52. 38 Pater, Słownik, 216–18. 39 Reference to “crown prince politics” made by Hans Lukaschek, the head of the Silesian Committee, to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, 4 February 1920, quoted in Hitze, 329 n. 754. 40 One writer for the Oberschlesische Kurier pointedly put Kapica’s name in the byline of an article critical of the excesses of Polish nationalists, along with an introductory note expressing the hope that the pastor of Tichau, “in his feeling for truth and justice,” might once again express such sentiments himself. See “Für Frieden in Oberschlesien,” 11 May 1920; Kapica’s response (under the same title), 15 May 1920. 41 Skowronek to Kopp, 6 December 1905, AP Lorenz Pucher, AAK. 42 Skowronek to General-Vikariats-Amt, 26 January 1919, AP Lorenz Pucher, AAK. 43 “Oxen” comment from postcard from Grund to Górnoślązak, included in letter from Seyda to Kopp, 4 May 1904, I.A.25.k.130, AAW; Tygodnik Katolicki: Announcement from Zentrale des Oberschl. Klerus, 16 February 1912, Syg128, Zespół RB Oppeln, APO. 44 Flier printed by the Social Democratic Volkswille; letter from Weiss to editors of the Schlesische Volkszeitung, 23 March 1921, I.A.25.h.28, AAW. 45 Oberschlesische Kurier, 22 May 1920, reprinted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 66–67. 46 Grund to Fb. G.V.A., 26 March 1920, AP Josef Grund, AAK. 47 Grund to Fb. G.V.A., 15 June 1920; Landjäger Brigade to the Landrat of Gr. Strehlitz (report on Grund speech), 24 August 1920, AP Josef Grund, AAK. 48 Oberschlesische Grenzzeitung, 22 May 1920, in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 67–68. 49 Lewek, 51. 50 For a thorough and unrelentingly critical account of Nieborowski’s later evolution, see Hitze, 540–42, 607–17. 51 Ulitzka was a member of the three main groups that shared responsibility for coordinating German propaganda efforts: the Silesian Commitee, a Breslau-based group headed by former Landrat Hans Lukaschek; the Kattowitz-based Plebiscite Commission, headed by Rossberg mayor Kurt Urbanek; and the League of True-to-Their-Homeland Upper Silesians (Verband heimattreuer Oberschlesier), headed by Adolf Kaschny (Hitze, 270–72). 52 Hitze, 150–51, 590–92. 53 Police state references from “Aus dem Industriebezirk: Der sozialistische Polizeistaat Oberschlesien,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 9 July 1919, supplement; Hakatism references from “Gemeindewahlen,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 13 November 1919, supplement. 54 Katolik, no. 72 (1919), in Gesamtüberblick, 497. 55 When the conservative Schlesische Zeitung in Breslau reported that Polish insurgents were crucifying German soldiers, the Oberschlesische Kurier quickly denounced such rumors as “dreadful lies” produced by the “hate-filled, perverse mind of a Pole-baiter” (24 August 1919, in Die Greuel, 19), a repudiation that Polish publicists were happy to repeat. 56 “Die oberschlesische Erzpriester für eine sofortige und weitherzige Amnestie,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 25 September 1919, supplement. 57 “Drei 9 November,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 21 October 1919, supplement. 58 “Kommunalwalhen in OS u. die kathol. Volkspartei,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 4 November 1919, supplement. 59 Hitze, 245. 60 Ergebnis der Gemeinderatswahlen. 61 “Gemeindewahlen,” 13 November 1919, supplement; “Die Gemeindewahlen in religiöser Beleuchtung,” 16 November 1919, 1st supplement. 62 Hitze, 273–76. 63 Acquisition of Volksstimme described in Vogel, 41. In the second half of 1920, the Volksstimme was one of the most important outlets for articles produced by the Silesian Committee, publishing them more regularly than many German-national newspapers (86). 64 Alfred Adamietz, Obershlesien als Freistaat, eine kritische Studie (Gleiwitz: Druck u. Verlage “Oberschlesische Volksstimme”), 1920.

65 Hitze, 496. 66 “Z rozmyla nieduchownych X. Ulitzki, Kocynder, no. 12 (1920), printed in Sląski Kogel-Mogel czyli wybór karykatur, satyr i dowcipów politycznych oraz takich sobie głównie z okresu powstań śląskich , (Opole: Instytut Śląski, 1982), 19, 75–76. 67 Pfarrer Ulitzka—Ratibor über die OS-Frage, Bund/Związek, 21 May 1920, 2. 68 “Armes Oberschlesien,” Bund/Związek, 14 November 1920, supplement, 1. 69 Vogel refers to the Upper Silesian Industrialists’ League (Berg- und Hüttenmännische Verein) as providing the funds for the ambitious publicity efforts of the League of Upper Silesians (40), but he also notes that general directors tended to operate on their own initiative rather than under a common leadership (49). Given the hostility of many industrialists to the separatist movement, it seems likely that the chief financial support for the League of Upper Silesians was coming from the Center-affiliated Schaffgotsch and Ballestrem companies. 70 Vogel, 39–40. 71 Ibid., 112–13. 72 Den Oberschlesiern zur Aufklärung, 14. 73 “Randglossen zur Frage: Katholischer Klerus und Nationalpolitik in Oberschlesien,” Der Oberschlesier, 22 May 1920, 6. 74 Michatz to Kapica, 13 May 1922, Książeco-Biskupia Delegatura dla Górnego Śląska (1920–22), vol. 4, AAK. 75 “Die katholische Geistlichkeit in Oberschlesien,” Gazeta Ludowa, 1 January 1920, in Gesamtüberblick, 11. 76 Dziennik Poznański, 16 January 1920, in Gesamtüberblick, 119. 77 Lewek, 51. 78 Wilk to Hlond, 4 March 1923, AP Karl Wilk, AAK. 79 Reginek, Die oberschlesische, 102. Reginek does not refer to the individual priests by name, but his characterizations can be easily cross-referenced with the Handbuch des Bisthums Breslau for 1921 (57). 80 Wanda Musialik, “Duchowieństwo katolickie wobec aspiracji narodowych Górnoślązaków,” Studia Śląskie 53 (1993): 145. 81 Skowronek to Bertram, 12 December 1920, I.A.25.h.28, AAW. 82 Parish council (Miedzna) to Bertram, 30 September 1920, I.A.25.o.29, AAW. 83 Myslowitz case outlined in letter of Ratti to Bertram, 10 October 1920, I.A.25.o.29, AAW. 84 Bertram to Ratti, 9 October 1920, Bertram Nachlass, I.A.25.o.29, AAW. 85 Wagner (Landjäger) to Verband-Heimattretuer Oberschlesier (copy), 27 October 1920, AP Edward Mende, AAK. 86 Skowronek to G.V.A., 2 September 1920, AP Ludwig Skowronek, AAK; Skowronek to Bertram, 12 December 1920, I.A.25.h.28, AAW. 87 Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 153–54. 88 See the biography of Potempa in Pater, Słownik, 329–30. 89 Reports from, respectively, Halemba (23 November 1920) and Königshütte-St. Barbara (13 December 1920), AV Königshütte, vol. 2, AAK. 90 “Kirchliche Statistik aus Oberschlesien,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 19 October 1919, Sonntagsfeier, 1. 91 See, for example, report from Schlesiengrube (21 October 1920), AV Königshütte, vol. 2; reports from Domb (15 February 1921) and Kattowitz—Peter and Paul (16 December 1920), AV Myslowitz, vol. 12, AAK. The Easter communion rate in the deanery of Myslowitz actually rose slightly from 43 percent in 1918 to 45 percent in 1920, and it held steady in the deanery of Könighsütte (53 percent). This might be taken as a de facto decline, since rates might have been expected to rise as troops returned from the front. It was, nonetheless, a more encouraging pattern than in the Ruhr, where communion rates declined outright (e.g., from 50 to 47 percent in the deanery of Essen). See Handbuch des Katholische, 1918/19 and 1921/22. 92 Ewald Latacz, Oberschlesier, rettet Euch selbst! Eine Streitschrift für eom freies und unteilbares Oberschlesien (n.d.), 15. 93 Stadtrat Dr. Gornik, “Nachdenkliches zum Abstimmungskampf in OS,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 27 February 1920, supplement, 1. 94 “Für ein neutrales Oberschlesien,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 31 January 1920, supplement, 1.

95 Rogowski story in “Bluttat eines Geistlichen,” 3 October 1919, supplement, 2; Tylla story in “Kennt die Verhetzen keine Schranke mehr?” 2 May 1920, supplement, 1. 96 Górnoślązak, 6 July 1920, translated in Gesamtüberblick, 825. 97 Pl-Kommissariat für Deutschland (Urbanek) to Fb. G.V.A., 11 May 1920, AP Theodor Kubina, AAK. 98 Thomas Reginek, “Ein Beitrag zum Martyrium der deutschen Katholiken in Polnisch-Oberschlesien,” printed in Thomas Szczeponik, Die Gewissensnot der deutschen Katho-liken in Polen (Kattowitz: Eugen Franz, 1927), 116. 99 See accounts in Der Augustaufstand in Oberschlesien. 100 See the biography of Ruda in Pater, Słownik, 356–57. 101 Hitze, 305. 102 Maser, 46. 103 Situation report by A. Zgrzebniok, 1 February 1920, in Źródła, 2:37. 104 “Upper Silesia Polling,” Times (London), 21 March 1921, 12; results from Wambaugh, 250. 105 In both Allenstein and Marienwerder, over 90 percent of voters had opted for Germany, even though Polish speakers constituted a bare majority of inhabitants in the former region. In Carinthia as well, almost 60 percent of voters had chosen Germany, although less than a third spoke German as their mother tongue. See Wambaugh, 133–34, 198–200. 106 Karol (Charles) Firich, The Polish Character of Upper Silesia (Warsaw: Central Polish Plebiscite Commission, 1921), 17. 107 “Fixing the German Frontier,” Times (London), 22 March 1921, 10. 108 Tooley, National Identity, 237. 109 Wahlbeeinflusung im Oberschlesischen Abstimmungsgebiet [1921], 14, 19. 110 Wambaugh, 249. 111 Blanke, “Upper Silesia,” 255. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., 247. 114 “Was wollen denn eigentlich die Polen?” Der Oberschlesier, 7 November 1919. 115 Vogel, 113–14. 116 Was wollen denn eigentlich die Polen?” Der Oberschlesier, 7 November 1919. 117 K. S., “Wie kann man denn ein Pole sein?” Der Oberschlesier, 20 November 1920. 118 J. P., “Ist OS für Preussen nur Kolonialland?” Oberschlesische Kurier, 3 October 1919, supplement, 1. 119 Frank Mocha, “Choices in War and Peace,” Modern Age, Summer/Fall 1986, 226–27. 120 Vogel, 39–41; Waldemar Grosch, Deutsche und Polnische Propaganda während der Volksabstimmung in Oberschlesien, 1919–1921 (Dortmund: Forschunsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 2002), 133–35. 121 Situation report by J. Kowalewski, 29 March 1921, in Źródła, 3:275–76. 122 Hatzfeldt to Prussian Interior Ministry, 6 April 1920, in Źródła, 2:122–23. 123 Oberschlesische Kurier, 12 January 1921, supplement. 124 Situation report by J. Kowalewski, 29 March 1921, in Źródła, 3:274. 125 The huge audience for a Volkspartei women’s assembly, for example, was diplomatically described by the National Democratic Gazeta Ludowa as “German-speaking” women and girls who had not previously been involved in Polish organizations (25 February 1921, in Gesamtüberblick, 210). 126 Prince Hatzfeldt to Prussian interior minister, 6 April 1920, in Źródła, 2:122; situation report of POW, no. 24 (17 April 1920), in Źródła, 2:130. 127 Orzechowski, Wojciech, 217–18. 128 Quantitative analysis from Grosch, 406; see also full bibliography, 440–53. 129 “German Propaganda against Poland, Silesian Plebiscite Campaign,” Times (London), 15 January 1921, 7. 130 23 July 1920, quoted in Gesamtüberblick, 903. 131 Oberschlesische Kurier, 25 June 1919, supplement. 132 Since the league did not require payment of dues from members or keep detailed membership lists, it is difficult to assess the validity of its self-reported membership figures. See Piotr Dobrowolski, Ugrupowania i kierunki separatystyczne na Górnym śląsku i w Cieszyńskim w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw and Kraków: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1972), 98–99.

133 “Abstimmungsfragen: Zwei Fragen u. drei Antworten,” Oberschlesische Kurier, 2 March 1920, supplement, 1. 134 “An das OS Volk” Bund/Związek, 20 March 1921, 1. 135 On the diplomatic negotiations among the Allied powers, see Patricia Gajda, Postscript to Victory: British Policy and the German-Polish Borderlands, 1919–1925 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982); Karsten Eichner, Briten, Franzosen und Italiener in Oberschlesien, 1920–1922 (St. Katharinen: Scripta Marcaturae Verlag, 2002). 136 Negotiations between the Upper Silesian separatists and Napieralski were reported in situation report no. 15 of Oddzia l II Sztabu Inspektoratu Armii, in Źródła, 3:324–25. Napieralski repudiated any separatist aspirations in Katolik, 12 April 1921, in Źródła, 3:326–27. 137 Vladimir Sacharczewski, “Autonomy for Upper Silesia,” in The Problem of Upper Silesia, ed. Sidney Osborne (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921), 145–80 (quotes from 165–66 and 173). 138 Harold Stuart, the British representative to the Allied Commission, was dismissive of proposals for a British-sponsored free state in Upper Silesia. Major General Heneker, the head of the British military contingent, was somewhat more respectful a few months later, writing that the movement “appears to be gaining ground” (Stuart to Earl Curzon, 1 July 1921; Heneker to Marquess Curzon, 1 September 1921, docs. 217 and 267 in British Documents on Foreign Affairs, part 2, ser. F, vol. 32, 251–52, 313–15). 139 For a representative Polish view of the Third Silesian Uprising, see Wałcaw Ryżewski, “Trzecie powstanie śląskie. Węzłowe problemy walk zbrojnych,” in Rechowicz, 145–82; for a German view, more evenhanded than earlier versions but still exhibiting a certain national partisanship, see Hitze, 377–440. 140 Hitze, 433 n. 1218. 141 Text of Ogno Serra’s circular printed (in Polish) in Lewek, 65–67. 142 Text of telegram to the Vatican printed in Lewek, 36. 143 These are the figures cited by the Katowice cathedral chapter several years later in Die Wahrheit über das Martyrium der deutschen Katholiken in Polen, printed in Szczeponik, 86–87. Lewek (37) gives essentially the same statistics. See also Micha l Piela, “Duchowieństwo śląskie wobec plebiscytu i powstań, ” Kwartalnik Opolski 1–2 (1991):15. 144 Szramek, “Ks. Aleksander,” 161. 145 30 June 1921, Stanis l aw Kottysch to Fb. G.V.A., AP Carl Arndt, AAK. 146 Kopiec and Myszor, 116–19. 147 Sołtys and various association leaders (Rydułtowy) to Kapica, 15 December 1921, Książeco-Biskupia Delegatura dla Górnego Śląska (1920–22), vol. 1, AAK. 148 Marginal note of Bertram to Kapica in letter to Father Mende (Königshütte, St. Barbara), 4 November 1921, Książeco-Biskupia Delegatura dla Górnego Śląska (1920–22), vol. 1, AAK. 149 Zientek to Bertram, 25 July 1922; Bertram to Zientek, 2 August 1922, AP Josef Zientek, AAK. 150 Calculations of migrating priests from Henryk Olszar, Duchowieństwo katolickie diecezji śląskiej (katowickiej) w Drugiej Rzeczypospolite (Katowice: Kurii Archidiecezjalnej, 2000), 74–80. To reconcile Olszar’s figures with the statistics for priests engaged in strictly pastoral activities (see n. 32 in the present chapter), I have subtracted the number of clergy serving in a teaching capacity (three of the migrating Polish priests, nine of the migrating German priests). 151 A Polish government report claimed that only five pro-Polish priests remained in German Silesia after 1922 (cited in Piela, 15), while Olszar (203) gives a figure of fifty-eight German priests working in the diocese of Katowice in 1926. Given the ambiguities of national orientations, these figures are best taken as rough estimates. 152 Calculated from cross-referencing list of emigrants in Szczeponik, 145–47, and Handbuch des Bisthums Breslau, 1921, 57–58, 69–71. 153 AL Rosdzin and AP Josef Zientek, AAK. 154 Myszor, Historia, 30. 155 Ibid., 84. 156 Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1993), 245. This estimate of the “German” population in 1921 is calculated by taking the 225,000 votes for Germany, subtracting 50,000 votes cast by nonresidents, and multiplying the remainder by two to take into account those under voting age.

157 Census figures for Katowice and Królewska Huta from Olszar, 196. 158 Blanke, Orphans, 34; Franciszek Serafin, ed., Województwo Śląskie (1922–1939) (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1996), 179. 159 See the estimated ranges given in Serafin, 179. 160 Roman Lutman, “Kwestja niemiecka na Śląska,” Straźnica Zachodnia 12 (1929): 19. 161 Support for the German minority parties ranged from just under 30 percent (in the 1922 elections to the Silesian Sejm) to more than 40 percent (in communal elections in 1926). See Pabisz, 385–433; Danuta Sieradzka, Samorząd Komunalny Województwa Śląskiego 1920–1939: Aspekty Politiczne i Narodowościowe, Gliwice: Politechnika Śląska, Zeszyty Naukowe, no. 1170. On the question of German minority schools, see Richard Blanke, “Polish-Speaking Germans under Polish Rule: Polish Silesia, 1922–1939,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 21, nos. 1–2 (1994): 25–32; Georges Kaeckenbeeck, The International 162 Kazimierz Śmigiel, Die statistischen Erhebungen über die deutschen Katholiken in den Bistümern Polens 1928 und 1936 (Marburg: Herder Institut, 1992). 163 1931 linguistic survey, I.A.25.e.50, AAW. 164 AV Myslowitz, vol. 11, AAK. 165 Reported in Die Wahrheit, printed in Szczeponik, 97. 166 Lech Krzyanowski, “Kośció ł katolicki wobec regionalizmu śląskiego w okresie międzywojennym,” in Regionalizm a separatyzm—historia i współczeszność (Katowice: Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1995), 71. 167 Rocznik Diecezji Katowickiej (Katowice: Nakład Kurji Diecezjalnej, 1936), 52–53, 61. 168 Calculated from the parish mass schedules printed in Szczeponik, 172–78. 169 Hitze, 1169–70. 170 Gajda to Dyrekcji Policji Król. Huta, 30 August 1926, AL Królewska Huta (Jadwiga), AAK. 171 Skowronek to Hlond, 18 January 1923, AP Ludwik Skowronek, AAK. 172 Reginek, “Ein Beitrag,” in Szczeponik, 116. 173 See Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and Nationalism in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),148–66. 174 Die Wahrheit, in Szczeponik, 87. 175 Hlond to Skowronek, 11 January 1923, AP Ludwig Skowronek, AAK. 176 Skowronek to Hlond, 18 January 1923, AP Ludwig Skowronek, AAK. 177 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, chap. 3. 178 Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Eley and Suny, 45.

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Conclusion I been thinking a long time about a white flag, but it's a funny thing, you know, you hang 'em out too soon a soldier patrol come by and string you up for a coward. It's the timing that counts. Timing's the biggest thing in life. —Horst Bienek, Earth and Fire When the results of the 2002 Polish census were released, the figures on nationality caused a stir. The largest selfdescribed minority in Poland, it turned out, was not one of the familiar, historical nationalities—Germans, Ukrainians, Belarussians—but Silesians. While many people expressed incredulity about the very existence of such a “nation,” it was perhaps even more surprising to see the role that the Catholic clergy and Catholic religious practice, ostensibly the pillars of Polish nationalism, played in articulating the distinctiveness of this newly assertive minority. The very first person to declare “Silesian” as his nationality (in 1996) was a Catholic priest: Father Arkadiusz Wuwer, a former student of the Pontifical Academy in Rome and today a lecturer at the Theological Seminary in Katowice.1 In the recent wave of popular “Silesiana” celebrating regional identity, Catholic piety has frequently been highlighted as a defining local characteristic. One author claimed that “it was unheard of that a real Silesian did not go to church” and that Silesians' insistence on attending services every Sunday, even while on vacation, raised eyebrows among (other) Poles.2 It is possible to discern in these recent celebrations of “Silesianness” the recovery of a more authentic history of this German-Polish borderland, a history that highlights the durability of regional culture and thePage 268 → centripetal power of confessional ties rather than a life-and-death ethnic conflict between Teutons and Slavs. Describing Catholic Upper Silesians as inhabiting a single community—albeit one troubled by a national family feud—dovetails nicely with the observations of social scientists who visited the region in the mid-twentieth century. In his ethnographic study of a village near Opole, the sociologist Stanislaw Ossowski found that residents considered one's “ideological fatherland” to be a rather superficial point of reference; what counted was one's “small fatherland” (mał ojczyzna). The inhabitants, he concluded, are “above all Upper Silesians in their consciousness, and, more importantly, they are always Upper Silesians and Upper Silesians since birth.”3 The notion that what Upper Silesians held in common was deep and enduring while what divided them was trivial and transitory also certainly corresponded to the self-conception that had been cultivated by the region's Roman Catholic clergy since the days of the Kulturkampf. The machinery of the German and Polish states might come and go, but the enduring rhythms of sacramental practice and devotional life betrayed the stubborn longevity of a Silesiae semper fidelis. The point of this book, of course, has not been to present such a cozy gemeinschaftlich vision of Upper Silesian Catholicism as self-evident but, rather, to investigate how, in one of the twentieth century's premiere nationalist battlegrounds, it was even imaginable. Accounting for the uncanny longevity of a milieu that seemed, in many ways, to have broken up a century ago has involved sustained rethinking of the two basic relationships that held this subculture together: the vertical relationship between clergy and laity and the horizontal relationship among parishioners. As we have seen, the myth of clerical omnipotence was punctured quite early in Upper Silesia. Nowhere else in the German Empire was the repudiation of clerical influence on electoral behavior as jarring or as emphatic as in the Upper Silesian industrial region, where ostensibly popular local pastors suddenly found themselves running third or fourth in elections to the Reichstag. Such savvy politicians as Adam Napieralski and Jan Kapica concluded that the “Catholic cause” had to be subdivided on national lines in order for the clergy to salvage any influence at all. Many clerics had difficulty accepting this transformation and continued to work for the revival of the Center-party “phalanx” of the Kulturkampf era. In some of the more rural parts of Upper Silesia that remained within Germany afterPage 269 → the 1922 partition of the region, the Center did, indeed, recover much of its earlier dominance, and something like a patriarchal “normality” could be said to have been restored. But a growing number of priests, especially in those portions of the industrial region that devolved to Poland after 1922, came to see the insistence on party-political unanimity among the Catholic clergy and laity as untenable and

perhaps even detrimental to a more sophisticated understanding of the Catholic cause. When Cardinal Bertram issued his November 1920 decree banning unauthorized politicking by junior clergy, Father Lewek labeled as a “glaring anachronism” the claim that the clergy could not be seen as bickering because laypeople instinctively deferred to priests on political questions. Since 1903, he noted, it had been clear to everyone that “the patriarchal times of political leadership by the clergy are irrevocably gone.”4 Subsequent elections in Polish Silesia confirmed the diversity of political Catholicism in the region and the implausibility of portraying any one party as the sole voice of Catholic interests. While many germanophile, previously Centrist priests, such as Fathers Kubis and Skowronek, concluded that the new circumstances called for clerical abstention from party politics, others, such as Father Kubina, saw the need to embrace pluralism. Himself a supporter of the center-left National Workers' Party (Narodowa Partia Robotników, or NPR), Kubina stated categorically that “a consistently ‘Catholic' party, in the narrow sense of the word, is impossible, because there is no single Catholic program that is obligatory for all Catholics.”5 The result of this rather precocious abandonment of the idea of a peculiarly Catholic party (in the Netherlands, we should remember, Catholic bishops were still offering morally binding political instructions to parishioners in the 1950s) was the development in interwar Polish Silesia of a constellation of broadly proclerical parties that was much more fragmented but also far more robust. The local clergy divided their loyalties among the NPR, which had developed out of the Polish Trade Union (ZZP); Wojciech Korfanty's Christian Democrats; the various Catholic-tinged political vehicles of the Sanacja regime; and the (German) Catholic People's Party. As a result, none had the organizational clout of the Center party of earlier decades. Cumulatively, however, they dominated the political landscape, leaving the secular Left and far Right thoroughly marginalized. A similar pattern has emerged in post-1989 UpperPage 270 → Silesia: while aggressively Catholic-national parties have found little support among the region's voters, more modestly church-oriented, post-Solidarity forces have been emphatically favored over political figures and parties connected to the former communist regime.6 Political Catholicism's simultaneous strength as a broad ideological tendency and weakness as a political organization suggest that the “clericalism” that persisted in Upper Silesia through the middle and late twentieth century was not simply an extrapolation of the top-down mobilization of laypeople by the clergy during the Kulturkampf. The still-formidable social, cultural, and political influence of the local clergy in the latter decades, I would argue, rested not so much on invocations of godlike pastoral authority but, rather, on clerical agility in appealing to parishioners on a number of rhetorical registers: as part of a putatively monolithic “Catholic people”; as constituents of various social and economic interest groups; as men and women; as Germans and as Poles; even as atomized rational actors. We have seen, for example, how membership in the Berlin Verband and subscription to the proclerical Oberschlesische Kurier, for example, were simultaneously pushed as means of defending the one true church and as a means of getting “good value” for one's money. Such oscillation between moral and pragmatic appeals did not win political Catholicism a very favorable press, either among contemporaries or among later historians. David Blackbourn described the Center's reputation for being “essentially unscrupulous” as a function of combining “cynical manipulation of confessional loyalty” and “a very worldly orchestration of its supporters' material and parochial resentments.”7 But as Margaret Anderson has pointed out, critics' tone of moral censure tended to be directly proportional to fears that such “unscrupulous” politics, the “cynical commerce between grasping voters and jobbing clerics,” was alarmingly effective.8 The role of “interest” politics in buttressing the fortunes of the clerical camp has generally been conceived in terms of economics, but in Upper Silesia, language and nationality were among the issues that the clergy and their allies tended to treat as matters of modular, negotiable, disaggregatedPage 271 → interest rather than monolithic identity. The Upper Silesian clergy's own careers, after all, were constructed around the practice of linguistic “utraquism,” so their instincts here were decidedly latitudinarian. Indeed, most of the region's priests had their own traumatic experiences in failing to measure up to the linguistic standards of German—and, later, Polish— state institutions. Father Tomasz Reginek vividly recalled trying to decipher the “hieroglyphics” of written German in primary school as his teacher sneeringly remarked that Upper Silesia's backward pupils should be “packed in a glass case and sent to the World Exhibition in Paris.”9 This sense of linguistic inferiority proved to be no less acute in interwar Polish Silesia, when immigrants from other parts of Poland, particularly Galicia, set the standards for proper Polish speech and a proper Polish education. In a speech welcoming the entry of the Polish army into the region in 1922, Father Kapica had remarked (jokingly but pointedly), “[W]e Silesians will

learn from our brother Poles from other regions how to speak well, and you will learn from us how to work well.”10 Kapica's use of first-person plural here, signaling a rhetorical embrace of his working-class parishioners and a conscious distancing from the immigrant intelligentsia, suggests the importance that the clergy attached to immersing themselves in the regional community. While Upper Silesian priests certainly continued to enjoy a degree of deference from laypeople and were proud of their educational and social status, experience had taught them that the continuation of their role as shepherds often depended on a willingness to follow their sheep. If the resilience of Upper Silesia's Catholic subculture involved the evolution of more modest and more subtle varieties of clerical leadership, it also, even more importantly, required finding ways to manage and ameliorate glaring internal divisions among “the Catholic people.” Even as many (perhaps most) Upper Silesians exhibited attitudes of national ambivalence or even national indifference, this was not the same as national innocence. The various, divergent mechanisms of nationalization in which Upper Silesians participated—service in the German and Polish armies, attendance at German and Polish schools, exposure to the German and Polish literary canons, voting in German and Polish national elections—may not have produced full-blown national “identities” in the participants, but they also did not produce out-of-body experiences. They changed people,Page 272 → albeit in subtle and often unpredictable ways. To some extent, they could be understood as experiences of victimization, of passive acceptance of the inexorable force of German and Polish state power. In describing the “tragedy” of Upper Silesia, one local author recently wrote: Over the soul of a Silesian there stand, from the cradle to the grave, some demonic powers threatening with their pitchforks. Sometimes these are Polish Demons, then again German, and most often both together. They stand one on each side, bare their teeth and show their intent to strike a blow, and sooner or later they strike. More often with the haft than the prongs, but the blow falls.11 This theme of suffering and patient endurance—of always being objects, rather than subjects, of history—was also sounded by the interlocutors of the sociologist Stanislaw Ossowski in his ethnographic study of the region in the 1950s. A seventy-year-old woman wearily told him: “Let us be Poles, let us be Germans, let us be Russians, let us be Prussians, as long as we can work, as long as we have peace, as long as there is something to eat, as long as there is sugar for the children.”12 But exposure to alternating germanizing and polonizing forces cannot be seen only as a process of cumulative disempowerment that systematically shut locally born inhabitants out of the corridors of power. Nationalist competition also provided opportunities for serial adaptation and accommodation, allowing bilingual Silesians (and Silesian Catholics in particular) to operate as both Germans and Poles and thus avoid the most horrific fates meted out to groups whose categorization was less fluid. Throughout the twentieth century, the Catholic clergy would play a crucial role in negotiating those possibilities (and pursuing them themselves), thus facilitating Silesians' extraordinary record of survival but also giving them a measure of responsibility for the actions of communities that they were able, however tenuously, to join. The possibilities for reinvention that Upper Silesian Catholics had at their disposal were perhaps most spectacularly evident during the Nazi era, when Polish Silesia was reabsorbed into the German Reich. Despite thePage 273 → regime's overtly racialist understanding of who could and could not belong to the German Volk, national categorization of non-Jews in the region actually hinged on murky and arbitrary assessments of cultural and political attitudes. Almost the entire population was at least miminally literate in German and at least partially descended from German citizens, and the regime was eager to keep a skilled workforce in place, so the German “racial” community in Upper Silesia proved extraordinarily elastic. Some 70 percent of the population of Polish Silesia was pooled in category III of the Deutsche Volkliste (indicating an uncertain national orientation) while most of the rest of the population was grouped in categories I or II. Although category III “ethnic Germans” faced certain restrictions (e.g., limited possibilities for joining the Nazi party and achieving higher education), they were essentially treated as “Germans” and were very clearly distinguished from “Poles.”13 Diocesan officials in Katowice explicitly encouraged the Catholic population to subscribe to the Deutsche Volksliste and obtain as favorable a categorization as possible. While the most vocally Polish-patriotic priests did not (indeed, could not) deny this national track record, almost half of the local clergy was able to place themselves within the broad

contours of Germandom. Even many of those who did not were able to exploit personal ties to the diocese of Breslau to be “hidden” in other German dioceses. The result was the lowest casualty rate by far among Catholic clergy in Polish dioceses incorporated into the German Reich.14 Flexibility in the national categorization of Upper Catholics was again on display in the years after Poland's postwar (re)absorption of the region. While the vast majority of German Protestants and even of Polish-speaking Masurian Protestants either fled or were expelled by the end of the 1940s, almost all Upper Silesians who had adhered to the Volksliste, as well as a majority of the Reichsdeutsche in Opole Silesia, were “verified” as Polish and allowed to stay in their homes. Altogether, some two million Upper Silesians spent the war as “Germans” and entered the postwar world as “Poles.”15 As during the war, the need for a skilled industrial laborPage 274 → force certainly played a role in this relatively latitudinarian attitude. But the Catholic church's vocal endorsement of Upper Silesians' Polishness was also crucial.16 Among those Upper Silesian Catholics who remained in Poland but faced varying degrees of harassment by the communist regime, persecution could be readily reinterpreted as part of the oppression of Polska katolicka rather than the rooting out of Germanic “Crusaders.” Indeed, a recently published compendium of Polish clergy “martyred” during the Communist era seamlessly incorporates a considerable number of Silesian priests who had been accused of being German collaborators.17 Just as those Upper Silesian Catholics who stayed in place could narrate themselves into the emerging Catholic-national resistance to Communism, so many other Upper Silesian Catholics who did migrate westward immediately after the war or in subsequent decades could present themselves as members, in good standing, of the German Volk and of the Christian Abendland, entitled to the support of their conationals as well as that of “the West” more broadly.18 In a region and an age that have been defined by genocide and ethnic cleansing, this story of ongoing national reinvention provides a useful counterpoint. It reminds us that the onset of the process of nationalization, even the crystallization of an “ethnic conflict,” has not always generated a downward spiral into carnage. Alternative, nonnational understandings of community and communal boundaries sometimes coexisted with national ones for a very long time, and it was not easy to predict when certain cleavages would harden into literal battle lines and when they would soften into negotiable family feuds. The sociologist Jozef Chalasiński found how confusing this could be when he went to investigate German-Polish antagonism in a mining community in interwar Polish Silesia. On the one hand, the national question seemed to dominate public life in the community, and those who tried to move between national camps were pejoratively discussed as “scoundrels” (chachary). On the other hand, residents admitted that probably half the population consisted of suchPage 275 → “scoundrels.” The true community outsiders, it seems, were the handful of “real” Germans and “real” Poles that had acted in a nationally consistent manner over the long term.19 These apparent contradictions should make more sense after having traced Upper Silesians' formative encounters with nationalization in the first decades of the twentieth century. Residents had learned early and often that consistent national choices, while expected in principle, were nearly impossible in practice. As national inconsistencies piled up in the biographies of many Upper Silesians, Catholicism provided an important framework (though certainly not the only one) for narrating them into a consistent whole, for legitimating successive turns as patriot, provincial, or cosmopolitan. In this way, the persistence of religious practice and of engagement with the church can be seen not so much as a marker of a timeless identity but, rather, as a dynamic response to constant change.

Opening epigraph from comment made by the character Mazura during the entry of the Red Army into Gliwice in 1945, in Horst Bienek, Earth and Fire, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Atheneum, 1988), 167. 1 “Narodziny narodu,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 10 July 1997, 10–11. 2 Marek Szołtysek, Żywot Ślązoka poczciwego: Historia, kultura, gwara (Rybnik: Śląskie ABC, 1999), 31. 3 Stanisław Ossowski, O Ojczyźnie i Narodzie (Warsaw: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1984); quote from 115. 4 Lewek, 22. 5 Wiesław Mysłek, Kościół katolicki w Polsce w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1966),

595. 6 In the 1995 presidential election between Lech Wałęsa, a strong ally of the Catholic hierarchy, and Alexander Kwaśniewski, a former communist party official, support for Wałesa in the industrial centers of formerly Prussian Silesia ran five to ten points higher than the national average. In the neighboring Dąbrowka basin, Wałesa's vote was twenty points below that average. See Gazeta Wyborcza, Katowice edition, 21 September 1995, 2. 7 Blackbourn, Class, 237–38. 8 M. Anderson, Practicing Democracy, 145. 9 “Die Geschichte eines polnischsprechenden Oberschlesiers,” Der Oberschlesier, no. 40 (1921): 690–91. 10 Quoted in Szramek, “Ks. Jan,” 74. 11 F. Marek, Tragedia górnoślaska, 42, quoted in Wojciech Świątkiewicz, “‘Ours' and ‘Outsiders' as Categories of the Description of Social World,” in Region and Regionalism, Culture and Social Order, ed. Wojciech Świątkiewicz (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 1995), 65. 12 Ossowski, 102–3. 13 Zofia Boda-Kreżel, Sprawa Volkslisty na Górnym Ślńsku: Koncepcje likwidacji problemu I ich realizacja (Opole: Instytut Ślński, 1978). 14 For fatality rates in various Polish dioceses, see Czesław Madajczyk, Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970). On the fate of priests in the diocese of Katowice, see Myszor, Historia, 314–38. 15 Figures from Wanatowicz, Od indyferentnej, 52–53. See also Piotr Madajczyk, Niemcy polscy, 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2001). 16 The most passionate plea for mass verification of Upper Silesians as Poles came, not surprisingly, from the bishop of Katowice, who had urged residents of the diocese to “masquerade” as Germans. See Stanisaw Adamski, Pogłąd na rozwój sprawy narodowościowej w województwem śląskim w czasie okupacji niemieckiej (Katowice: Ksigarnia w. Jacka, 1946). 17 Jerzy Myszor, Leksykon duchowieństwa represjonowangeo w PRL w latach 1945–1989 (Warsaw: Verbinum, 2002). 18 Rainer Bendel, Aufbruch aus dem Glauben? Katholische Heimatvertriebene in den Gesellschaftlichen Transformationen der Nachkriegsjahre 1945–1965 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2003). 19 Jozef Chałasiński, Antagonizm polsko-niemiecki w osadzie fabrycznej “kopalnia” na Górnym Śląsku (Warsaw: Dom Książki Polskiej, 1935), 22–23, 82–83. Page 276 →

Page 277 →

Selected Bibliography Except in rare cases, only books cited more than once in the text are listed.

ARCHIVAL SOURCES Archiwum Archidiecezjalne w Katowicach (AAK) Acta lokalne (AL) Birkenthal, Bogutschütz, Chorzow, Domb, Dzietzkowitz, Lipine, Kattowitz (Maria), Kattowitz (Peter and Paul), Könighsütte (Barbara), Königshütte (Hedwig), Laurahütte, Michalkowitz, Rosdzin, Schwientocholowitz, Zalenze Acta personalne (AP) Carl Arndt, Max Elsner, Josef Grund, Josef Knossalla, Theodor Kubina, Edward Mende, Paul Michatz, Lorenz Pucher, Ludwig Skowronek, Karl Wilk, Josef Zientek Acta visitationis (AV) Deanery (archipresbyterat/dekanat) Myslowitz, vol. 5 (1891–94), vol. 6 (1895–97), vol. 7 (1898–1901), vol. 8 (1902–5), vol. 10 (1909–12), vol. 11 (1913–18), vol. 12 (1919–21); deanery (archipresbyterat/dekanat) Könighshütte, vol. 1 (1908–12), vol. 2 (1912–20) Convents-Berichte, Archipresbyterat Myslowitz Książeco-Biskupia Delegatura dla Górnego Śląska Archiwum Archidiecezjalne we Wroclawiu (AAW) Acta personalne duchowieństwa (APD) Victor Schmidt (1847), Andreas Schwider (1894) VIII.I.A.24.a.17–21 (Akten des Fb. Kopps, Sprachliche u. Politische Fragen in O/S) VIII.I.A.25.e.50 VIII.I.A.25.h.28 VIII.I.A.25.k.130 (Korfanty Prozeß) VIII.I.A.25.o.28–32 (Teiling Oberschlesiens und die Diözese Breslau) Nachlass—Felix Porsch Ib.3 (Neues Oberschlesisches) Page 278 → Archiwum Państwowe we Wrocławiu (APW) Oberpräsidium der Provinz Schlesien 352 (Parteiwesen, 1901–11) Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach (APK)

Landratsamt (LA) Kattowitz Sygnatura (Syg) 26 (Wahllisten zur Reichstags-Ersatzwahl am 12 Oktober 1905) 299 (Acta spec. betr. christliche-soziale-katholsiche Vereine) 303 (Christliche Arbeiterverein in Domb) 304 (Katholische Arbeiterverein in Domb) 311 (Acta Specialia . . . betreffend den polnischen Verein des hl. Aloysisus zu Zalenze) Archiwum Panstwowe w Opolu (APO) Regierungsbezirk (RB) Oppeln, Präsidialbureau 48–49 (Auf Anregung des Fürstbisch. von Breslau gegründeten Arbeiter u. ähnlichen Vereine) 64 (Verband der katholischer Arbeitervereine Nord- und Ostdeutschlands) 82 (Verband katholischer-polnischer Arbeitervereine Oberschlesiens, 1903–5) 100 (Zentralbureau der chr. Gewerkschaften in Kattowitz) 116 (Politisch gefährliche Personen, 1906–15) 128 (Tygodnik Katolicki, 1911–15) 219 (Wahlen zum Reichstags u. Abgeordnetenhaus [1898–1902]) 221 (Wahlen zum Reichstags u. Abgeordnetenhaus [1905–8]) 222 (Wahlen zum Reichstags u. Abgeordnetenhaus [1908–18]) 231 (Reichstagswahl Kattowitz-Zabrze 1912) 252 (Specialakten betr. Verkehr von ausländischen Geistlichen im Inlande) Archiwum Parafialne w Bogucicach (APB) Ogoszenia parafialne/Kirchenmeldungen

NEWSPAPERS/PERIODICALS Bund/Zwińzek Gazeta Katolicka Gazeta Ludowa Górnoślązak Das Katholische Deutschland Katolik

Kurjer Śląski Der Oberschlesier Oberschlesische Kurier OberschlesischeVolksstimme Oberschlesische Zeitung Polak Posłaniec Niedzielny Page 279 → Schlesische Pastoralblatt Tygodnik Katolicki Articles (including from titles above) translated in Gesamtüberblick über die Polnische Presse/Tagesliteratur

PUBLISHED PRIMARY SOURCES Bożek, Arka. Pamiętniki. Katowice: Śląsk, 1957. Ergebnis der Gemeinderatswahlen in Oberschlesien am 9. November 1919. Breslau: Stadt- und Universitätsdruckerei Graß, Barth, u. Comp. 1920. Erzberger, Matthias. Der Kampf gegen den Katholizismus in der Ostmark. Berlin: Druck und Verlag der Germania, 1908. Die Greuel des Grenzschutzes während des Augustaufstandes in Oberschlesien. Nikolai: Miarka, 1920. Handbuch der katolischen Vereine. Breslau: Verlag der Fürstbischöflichen Geh. Kanzlei, 1908. Kapica, Jan. Die Deutsche Kulturmission, der Katholizismus, und die nationale Versöhnung. Beuthen: Druck und Verlag Katolik, 1917. Kapica, Jan. Mowy—Odezwy—Kazania. Ed. Emil Szramek. Katowice: Kółko Homiletyczne Kapłanów Diecezji Katowickiej, 1933. Kirchliches Handbuch für das katholische Deutschland. Ed. H. A. Krose. Freiburg: Herdersche Verlag, various years. Kopp, Georg Kardinal. Hirtenbriefe. Breslau: R. Nischkowsky, 1887–1914. Kopp, Georg Kardinal. Hirtenbriefe des Fürstbischofes von Breslau Georg Kardinal Kopp, 1887–1912. Berlin: Verlag und Druck “Germania,” 1912. Küster, Rudolf. Die Oberschlesische Spielbewegung. Kattowitz: Gebrüder Böhm, Buch und Steindruckerei, 1909. Küster, Rudolf. Die Polnische Irredenta in West-Oberschlesien. Berlin: Hallig-Verlag G.m.b.H., 1931. Küster, Rudolf. Kulturelle Wohlfahrtspflege in Oberschlesien: Denkschrift der Königl. Regierung zu Oppeln. Kattowitz: Verlag v. Gebrüder Böhm, 1907. Mantoux, Paul. The Deliberations of the Council of Four (March 24–June 28, 1919). Vol. 2. Ed. and trans. Arthur

S. Link. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Napieralski, Adam. Der “Katolik” und das schlesische Centrum von 1889 bis 1903. Beuthen: Druck von Katolik, 1903. Den Oberschlesiern zur Aufklärung vor der Abstimmung. Von einem oberschlesischen Priester. 1921. Pamiętniki górników. Ed. Bronisaw Gołębiowski. Katowice, 1973. Precz z Centrum. Berlin: Nakład i druk Dziennika Berlinskiego, 1901. Plutyski, Antoni. Walka na Górnym Śląsku. Lwów: Skład Głowny w Tow. Wydawniczem we Lwowie, 1905. Reginek, Thomas. Die oberschlesische Frage: Ein Beitrag zu ihrer Geschichte und Lösung. [1920?]. Page 280 → Reginek, Thomas [Tomasz Dobryzyski, pseud.]. Proboszcz śląski: Wspomnienia. London, 1952. Schematismus [later Handbuch] des Bisthums Breslau und seines Delatur-Bezirks. Breslau: various years. Stenographische Berichte über die Verhandlungen des Reichstags. XII. Legislaturperiode, II. Session, Band 258. Berlin: Norddeutschen Buchdruckerei, 1910. Stephan, Stanisaw. Der Beuthener Prozeß im Lichte der Wahrheit. Königshütte: Hyacinth Druckerei, 1904. Szczeponik, Thomas. Die Gewissensnot der Deutschen Katholiken in Polen. Kattowitz: Eugen Franz, 1927. śląski Młodzież Katolicka: Historja Organizacji Polskiej Młodzieży Katolickiej na Śląsku od roku 1871 do 1926. Mikołów: Drukarnia Karola Miarka, 1927. Voltz, Hermann, ed. Handbuch des Oberschlesischen Industrebezirks. Kattowitz: Oberschlesischen Berg- und Hüttenmännischen Verein, 1913. Źródła do dziejów powstań śląskich. Ed. Kazimierz Popiołek. 3 vols. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1963–74. Związek Wzaj. Pomocy Chreściańskich robotników górnośląskich: Jego powstanie, rozwój i czynności z pierwszych 10 lat (1889–1899). Bytom: Drukarnia Katolik, 1899.

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Index Abramski, Karl, 116 Abstimmungspolizei (Apo), 218 Alojzy, St., youth associations, 59–60, 84 Alsace-Lorraine, 12, 24 Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, 22, 270 Anhalt, 242–43 Anti-Semitism, 11, 21, 24, 138, 140–41, 147, 168, 201n. 86, 233, 243, 248 Arndt, Carl, 257 Austrian Silesia, 23 Austrophile orientation, in First World War, 176–77 Balicki, Zygmunt, 80, 83 Ballestrem, Franz, Count von, 88, 135, 199n. 78, 234 Banaś, Jan, 151 Berlin, 21, 83–84, 99, 103, 137, 145, 150 Berlin Verband. See Workers organizations “Berlin wing” (in Zentrumsstreit), 169–71 Bernacki (Catholic priest), 257 Bertram, Adolf, bishop of Breslau, 182–83, 220–24, 237–38, 241, 257–58, 269 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theodor von, 180 Beuthen, city, 45, 48, 56, 67, 85, 96, 115, 137–38, 141, 163n. 117, 171n. 156, 193–94, 207, 224; county (Landkreis), 32, 171n. 156, 193, 226; deanery, 31; Gymnasium in, 198 Beuthen-Königshütte-Kattowitz, electoral district, 134 Beuthen-Tarnowitz, electoral district, 43–44, 100, 115, 210n. 112 Beuthen Trial, 110, 122–26, 182 Bienek, Horst, 267 Bilingualism, in Upper Silesia; 32–33, 102, 116–17, 130, 152–53, 171–73, 200, 202–3, 205–7, 209, 215, 234, 240, 248–49, 260–61, 273; among Catholic clergy, 33–37, 46–47, 102–3, 184, 235 Bismarck, Otto von, 21–22, 90, 228

Bitta, Josef, 167, 206, 232 Blackbourn, David, 270 Blanke, Richard, 246–48 Blaschke, Olaf, 9 Bloch, Max, 204 Bogedain, Josef, 61–62 Bogutschütz, 27, 29–30, 60, 72, 102, 104, 136, 139, 141n. 44, 158, 164, 227, 237 Bończyk, Norbert, 45–47, 56, 59 Bożek, Arka, 187, 190, 195 Brandys, Jan, 150, 184 Breslau, Central Council in, 201, 203, 205; diocese of, 16, 26, 29, 33, 68–69, 72, 220–24, 238, 257; Gymnasium in, 103; meetings in, 19, 144, 184, 203–5; publications in, 170, 190; university of, 35–36, 46, 83–84, 198 Bülow, Bernhard von, 131, 145 Bülow Bloc, 130–33, 135, 140–43, 145 Caprivi, Leo von, 79, 89–90 Catholic People’s Party (KVP), 208–11, 230–33 Page 286 → Center party, 19–23, 30, 37–39, 42–46, 48–53, 61, 63, 70, 75, 77–78, 80, 83, 85–88, 96, 98–101, 103–4, 106–7, 109–119, 126–127, 128–129, 131–140, 142–154, 156–158, 161, 163–165, 167–173, 180–185, 191, 198–202, 204, 206, 208, 225, 227–30, 232, 234, 250, 265, 268–69. See also Catholic People’s Party Chałasiński, Józef, 274 Chrząszcz, Jan, 119 Clark, Christopher, 9–10, 14 clergy, parish, recruitment and training, 33–37; national sentiments, 36–37, 224–36; party-political orientation, 44–48, 116–19; influence over lay Catholics, 120–26, 268–71. See also individual Roman Catholic priests “Cologne wing” (in Zentrumsstreit), 169–71 communion rates, annual, 124, 159–60,Easter, 27, 52n. 118, 124, 201–2n. 88, 239–40n. 91 confession (auricular), 27, 121, 159 confession and communion, instruction for, 65–70, 122, 167, 240, 261 Congress Kingdom (Russian partition of Poland), 35, 80–81, 176, 178–79 Conservatives (German Conservative Party), 79, 90, 131–32, 140, 145, 157

Cracow, 84, 87 Czech speakers, 1 Czech lands, 41–42, 46, 105, 135, 199 Częstochowa, 135, 179 Deutsche Volkliste (DVL), 273 Dmowski, Roman, 80–81, 83, 89, 176–77 Dombek, Paweł, 150 Durynek, Victor, 234 Dzietzkowitz, 26, 28, 32 Eastern Marches Society, 89–90, 142. See also Hakatists/Hakatism Elections, for Prussian Landtag (1898), 50; (1904), 111–12; (1908), 133–37; (1919), 208–10; for National Assembly (1919), 208–11; for Reichstag (1871), 21; (1893), 19, 42–48; (1898), 51–52; (1903), 98–109, 122, 265; (1905), 112–14; (1907), 118–19, 128–29, 131, 265; (1912), 128–29, 150–52, 156–57; (1918), 191–92; municipal and local (1909–10), 137–40; (1919), 231–32, 265 Erzberger, Matthias, 170, 180–81, 191 Feja, Paul, 229–30 Ferche, Josef, 236 Förster, Friedrich W., 182 France, 6, 41, 115, 216–17, 246, 254–55, 257 Free Conservatives, 21, 142 Freikorps, 195, 255–56 Freikuxgelderfond, 30 Gajda, Jan, 262–63 Gazeta Katolicka, 49, 96, 102–3, 110–11, 132, 163, 166 Gazeta Ludowa, 149–50 Gazeta Opolska, 38, 40, 87 Gazeta Robotnicza, 84, 99, 106, 149 Gellner, Ernst, 8, 126 Germanization, 32–34, 37, 89–92, 130, 142–44, 149, 152–54, 156; in religious practices, 65–75, 135, 262; in schools, 20, 60–65, 262; in voluntary associations, 92–98 Gewerkschaften (Christian). See Workers organizations

Gewerkschaftsstreit, 169–71 Giemsa, Max, 134 Giesche’s Erben, 29–31 Glowatzki, Josef, 116, 118–19 Głos Śląski, 150 Gnilka, Adolf, 236 Górnoślązak, 86–89, 96–97, 98–108, 110–12, 119, 121–24, 133, 148 Great Britain, 216, 218, 254–55 Grenzschutz, 195, 242 Grund, Józef, 227–28 Grundmann, Friedrich Wilhelm, 24, 142 Habsburg Monarchy, 6–7, 89 Hakatists/Hakatism, 89–90, 110, 114, 134, 140, 142–43, 147, 151, 166–67, 185, 228–29, 243, 249; “red” Hakatism, 230–33, 242, 265 Page 287 → Hassa, Friedrich, 257 Hatzfeldt, Hermann, Prince von, 218, 250–51 Hlond, August, 257, 263–65 Hoffmann, Adolf, 201, 206 Holtz, Ernst, 113 Hörsing, Otto, 195, 206, 216, 230–32, 242, 265 Huene, Karl von, 42 Interallied Commission. See Plebiscite Commissions, Allied Italy/Italians, 41, 216, 218, 254–55, 257 Jankowski, Theodor, 118n. 153, 150 Jews,11, 21, 24, 138, 141, 201, 243. See also Anti-Semitism Kaiser, Christoph, 9–10, 14 Kamiński, Paweł, 23–24, 142 Kandrzin, 117 Kapica, Jan, 25, 59, 70, 78, 84, 100–101n. 77, 112–13, 115–18, 125, 129, 133, 147, 151, 153–54, 169, 224–25,

227–28, 230, 241, 247–48, 252, 257–58, 268, 271 Katholikentag, 39, 47, 63 Das Katholische Deutschland, 170 Katholische Volkspartei (KVP), 208–11, 230–33 Katolik, 21–23, 33, 38–52, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 66, 69, 74–75, 77, 85–87, 97, 100–101, 106, 108, 109–12, 114–15, 118–19, 133–34, 136, 144–50, 153–54, 156–57, 163, 175–76, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 192, 194, 208, 228, 235, 241; circulation of, 22, 39n. 73, 49, 86, 149 Kattowitz, 28, 32–33, 45, 51, 72, 84, 86, 94, 105, 112, 114, 121, 134–35, 138–41, 148, 152, 158, 183, 188, 193, 195, 198, 204–5, 217, 219, 225, 232, 241, 246, 257–61 Kattowitz-Zabrze, electoral district, 44, 52, 77–78, 100, 104, 106, 115, 118–19, 126, 150–52, 168, 191, 200 Kattowitzer Zeitung, 114, 166 Klaszka, Franz, 27, 105 Konietzko, Josef, 46 Königshütte, 23, 25, 27, 32, 45, 49, 54, 63, 67, 70, 72, 84, 160, 168, 202, 233, 236, 238–39, 257–58, 260, 262 Kopp, Georg, 26, 28, 30–32, 36, 39, 42, 44, 49–50, 52–53, 55–56, 59–60, 65–68, 71–73, 101, 103–5, 112, 115, 122–23, 125, 129, 132–33, 135–36, 161, 169–70, 183, 261 Koraszewski, Bronislaw, 38, 40 Korfanty, Wojciech, 77, 83–89, 99–102, 104–9, 112–14, 119, 122–23, 126, 133–35, 139–40, 142, 144–51, 157, 171–72, 186, 190–93, 201, 212, 217, 219–20, 222, 227, 243–44, 248–49, 251, 253–55, 269 Kowalczyk, Jan, 106, 108, 112, 123 Królik, Teofil, 99n. 67, 100–101, 110, 115 Krutschek, Paul, 74–75 Kubina, Teodor, 225, 241, 269 Kubis, Josef (Oppeln), 221, 224 Kubis, Josef (Zalenze), 73, 103, 124, 158, 259, 264, 269 Kudera, Jan, 69, 226 Kulerski, Wiktor, 178, 180 Kulturkampf, 19, 21–26, 28–29, 37, 39, 54, 59, 62, 66, 70, 77, 88–89, 91, 113, 131–32, 135, 142, 163, 183, 201, 203, 209 Kupka, Teofil, 219–20, 248 Kuryer Górnośląski, 48–49, 163 Kuryer Poznański, 70

Küster, Rudolf, 185 Kutschka, Pawel, 151 Landtag, Prussian, 21, 61, 113, 132–33, 155, 190–91, 243. See also Elections Latacz, Ewald, 198–99, 204–5, 207, 240 Laurahütte, 83–84, 107–8, 122, 137 Leo XIII, Pope, 41–42, 49, 53, 162 LeRond, General Henri, 216, 220, 253–54 Letocha, Paul, 44, 100, 106, 108, Lewek, Michal, 222–23, 229, 235 Libraries, popular, German, 94–95, Polish, 94, parish, 102 Lieber, Ernst, 42 Likowski, Edward, 178 Lipine, 26–27, 72 Loebell, Friedrich Wilhelm, 187 Loss, Viktor, 49, 118 Lublinitz-Tost-Gleiwitz, electoral district, 100, 152, 191 Page 288 → Ludendorff, Erich, 180, 192 Łukaszczyk, Paul, 27, 45, 54 Maćkowski, Jan, 38–40 Mädler, Wilhelm, 178, 180 Marx, Heinrich, 165 Matheja, Jan, 154 Mende, Eduard, 238 Miarka, Karol, 21–25, 38 Michalski, Josef, 26, 46 Michatz, Paul, 234, 264 Mielżyński, Maciej, 151

milieu, Catholic, in Germany, 10–13; in Upper Silesia, 21, 25, 52, 60, 75–76, 78, 96, 98, 105, 126–27, 157–61 Mocha, Frank, 249 Morawski, Franciszek, 106 Müller, Edward, 21–24 Musiol, Josef, 161, 231, 233, 254 Myslowitz, city, 32, 188; deanery, 16–17, 26–29, 32–33, 35, 56, 63, 72, 124, 160, 183, 202n. 88, 258–59; parish, 27, 72, 104, 237 Napieralski, Adam, 33–34, 38–53, 55–60, 74–76, 77, 80, 82, 85–87, 89, 99–101, 109–10, 112–15, 117, 119, 129, 133, 136, 144–54, 156, 172, 175–76, 178–86, 190–92, 194, 212, 241, 257 National Democrats (Endecja, Endeks), 77, 80–89, 98–104, 108–11, 113, 120, 122–25, 127, 133, 145–46, 148–54, 157, 176–78, 181, 184, 191, 194, 197, 219, 223, 252, 265, 268 National Liberals, 90, 113, 132, 135, 138, 142, 166, 168 National Workers Party (NSR, NPR), 194, 269 Naumann, Friedrich, 181 Nehlert, Benno, 191–92 Nemes, Robert, 10 Nerlich, Leopold, 44–45, 59 New York Times, 219 Nieborowski, Paul, 224, 229–30 Nowiny Raciborskie, 38–41, 49 Nozon, Siegfried, 158 Oberschlesische Grenzzeitung, 249, 255 Oberschlesische Kurier, 163–72, 200–202, 207, 209–10, 230–32, 234, 239–40, 249–50 Oberschlesische Volkspartei, 250 Oberschlesische Volksstimme, 30, 139, 143, 163, 232–33, 250 Oberschlesische Zeitung, 163, 232 Ogno Serra, Giovanni, 222–23, 256 Oppeln, administrative district (Regierungsbezirk), 17, 30–31, 51, 61–62, 94–95, 98, 159, 185, 195, 206, 210; city, 184, 216, 218, 221–22, 243, 252, 256; county (Kreis), 198; electoral district, 100, 116; parish, 103, 221–24, 256; province (German, post-WWI), 262 Oppersdorff, Count Hans von, 133, 139, 171

Orlinski, Paul, 187 Ossowski, Stanislaw, 268, 272 Pacelli, Eugenio, 220, 223 Panewnik, 135, 166 Paris, 24, 26, 195, 214 Parnell, Charles, 43 Pater, Mieczysław, 22 Percival, Colonel, 218 Pilsudski, Józef, 176–77, 203 Pius IX, Pope, 41, 49 Pius XI. See Ratti, Achille Pius XII. See Pacelli, Eugenio Plebiscite Commissions, Allied, 216–18, 220–21, 241, 244–45, 253–54; German, 219, 234; Polish, 217, 219, 222, 234, 244, 249–50, 255 Plebiscites, general, 1; in Upper Silesia (1921), 1–4, 214–16, 244; preparation and campaign for, 216–43; results of, 244–53 Pless, county (Krieis), 210, 217, 238, 246 Pless, Prince of (Hans Heinrich XV), 237, 254 Pless-Rybnik, electoral district, 21–22, 106, 108, 168 Pohlmann, Alexander, 204–5 Polak, 125 Polish Circle (Koło Polskie—parliamentary caucus), 79, 82, 86, 145–47 Polish Circle (Kółko Polskie—student association), 36–37 Page 289 → Popławski, Jan, 80 Porsch, Felix, 19 Posen, city, 36, 74, 82, 86, 101, 148; region, 14, 38, 40, 79–81, 86–87, 90–93, 103, 145, 149, 167, 185, 190, 193, 196, 204, 252 Posen-Gnesen, diocese, 42, 160, 178 Pośpiech, Paweł, 184 Potempa, Wiktor, 239

Progressives (Left Liberals, Free-thinkers), 108, 132, 138, 140–42 Pucher, Wawrzyniec, 227, 237 Radziejewski, Stanislaw, 38–39, 54 Rassek, Richard, 68, 118, 229 Ratibor, 39, 49, 171, 184, 198, 200, 208, 230 Ratibor, Duke of, 21–22, 24 Ratti, Achille, 220, 222–23, 237 Reginek, Jan, 198–200 Reginek, Thomas, 198–200, 202, 204–5, 207, 236, 263 Reichstag, 42–44, 57, 61, 79, 87–88, 113, 132, 139–40, 142, 145–46, 180, 188. See also Elections Renan, Ernest, 214, 266 Rerum Novarum, 53–54 Ronczeck, Johan, 68 Rosdzin, 32, 68, 72, 96, 121, 188, 258–59 Ruda, Wincenty, 242 Russia/Soviet Union, 176–78, 182, 185–86, 190, 217, 251 Russian partition of Poland. See Congress Kingdom Rybnik, 137, 210, 217, 238, 246 Sapieha, Adam Stefan, 222 Schaffgotsch, Hans Ulrich, Count von, 135, 164, 199n. 78, Schirmeisen, Rudolf, 115 Schmidt, Viktor, 45, 57, 84, 105, 110, 124, 135, 169 Schools, religious education in, 60–65, 261. See also Germanization Schwerin, Friedrich Ernst von, 180 Schwider, Andreas, 107, 121 Seyda, Marian, 86, 123, 133, 137 Sichereitspolizei, 217–18 Siemianowitz, 33, 59, 83–84, 107, 121, 124n. 176

Skowronek, Heinrich, 231, 233, 254 Skowronek, Ludwig, 29–31, 102, 104, 106, 118–23, 126, 134–37, 139, 158, 164–65, 169–70, 183, 200, 227, 237, 259, 263–65, 269 Skowroński, Aleksander, 36, 51, 84, 109–10, 117–18, 184, 239, 256 Social Democratic party, German (SPD), 51–52, 84–85, 98, 103, 106, 114–15, 119, 121, 124, 128–31, 137, 139–40, 147–51, 157–58, 168, 172–73, 177, 190, 192–93, 195, 200–202, 204, 208, 210–11, 230–31; Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), 192–93, 201, 204 Socialist party, Polish (PPS), 81, 84, 98–99, 106, 108, 112–13, 114–15, 119, 147, 152, 168, 201, 250 Socialist trade unions. See Workers organizations Sohrau, 116 Sokol, 137 Sosiński, Wojciech, 150, 151–52, 167–68 Spartacist League, 193–95, 203, 213 Stablewski, Florian, 42 Stalmach, Pawel, 23 Stephan, Bernhard, 164n. 121 Stephan, Stanislaw, 34, 69, 103–4, 106–8, 110–12 Strikes, 23–24, 54–55, 155, 188–89 Studt, Konrad, 91 Szczeponik, Thomas, 236 Szmula, Julius, 43–48, 59, 100, 109 Szramek, Emil, 34–35, 52, 69 Szymański, Roman, 79–80, 82, 85 Tarnowitz, 246 Teodorowicz, Józef, 222 Tichau, 101, 117 Times (London), 245, 251 Trunkhardt, Arthur, 250 Tygodnik Katolicki, 70, 183 Tylla, Franz, 231, 236, 240, 262 Ulitzka, Carl, 184, 230–33, 249

Ultramontanism, 22, 25, 54, 88 Unions. See Workers organizations Upper Silesians’ League, 233–34, 252–53 Urbanek, Kurt, 241, 247, 251 Page 290 → Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, 110, 158, 161, 184 Volkswacht, 190, 202 Volkswille, 199 Voltz, Hans, 113, 135 Wajda, Józef, 150 Warsaw, 35, 83, 179, 196, 203, 217, 253 Warski, Adolf, 120, 127 Wenske, Fritz, 164, 168–69, 199, 201 Wilson, Woodrow, 215 Windthorst, Ludwig, 43 Workers associations, parish, 54, 56–57 Workers’ and soldiers’ councils, 192–94 Workers organizations/trade unions, Alter Verband (socialist), 51, 58, 155, 188, 190; Berlin Verband, 161–63, 169–70; Gewerkschaften (Christian), 58, 154, 161–63, 169–70, 188; HirschDuncker, 54, 155, 161, 188; Mutual Aid Association (ZWP), 54–58, 100, 154; Polish Trade Union (ZZP), 154–56, 170, 188, 193–94 World War, First, 1, 174–92, Second, 272–73 Worship services, attendance at, 28; languages used in, 71–75, 262 Wreschen, 91 Wuwer, Arkadiusz, 267 Zabrze, 152, 193, 249, 257 Zalenze, 29–31, 73, 103, 158–59, 124, 187, 259 Zentrumsstreit, 169–71 Zet (Związek Młodzieży Polskiej), 83–84 Zientek, Josef, 258–59 ZWP. See Workers organizations

ZZP. See Workers organizations