Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everybody.
I decided actually to give you some great news coming from Poland regarding actually the issue of same reasons and minorities.
So before before Professor Paul Verts will introduce with the speaker that I have the first the first piece of news is that the words fact,
which is apparently the publication of the CIA as of today, classified the same year as an ethnic minority in Poland.
So in a way, this is actually a huge good thing for them because this is what the what the movement for the autonomy of,
say, Egypt has been consistently. They are campaigning for another news which is somehow more gruesome, actually considers the case of Dieter Shivaji,
who is a member of a small cell you jumped out of was just so it said I believe that this is in the in the Apollo
region but I'm not really sure about this was apparently his body was apparently found in his garage today.
Even this morning, there was apparently the case of a gruesome murder.
And Bernard Gaidar, who is the chair of the Union of German Associations in Poland,
made a public appeal to the Polish government to put close monitoring for the investigation into the crime,
which obviously because of the whole barrage of comments regarding the German minority as well as solutions in Polish and police must move through it.
Okay. Okay, very good. It's my great pleasure to share this seminar tonight and the program on my college here in Oxford.
I am told that some, especially from 20th century Germany, we have two speakers tonight.
I'll go ahead and start by introducing our main speaker. We also then have a commentator.
First is Jim. Europe is one of the leading Polish historians in the UK.
He's senior lecturer in the history department at King's College in London, where we're working since 2005.
He's taught at a range of other American universities before arriving in the UK, including Notre Dame.
Rice and Colgate has held postdoctoral fellowship at Georgetown and Cornell University.
He's the author of an award winning book. I'm sure many of you know of it,
neither German nor whole Catholicism in actual national indifference in the Central
European Borderlands that was published by University of Michigan in 2008.
And his current research is on the kind of local, national and transnational dimensions of Catholicism after the Second World War.
So you see, that's the title of his talk today and we're lucky situation in which we then have Dr. Hugo Service,
who's a departmental lecturer here officer.
Before he joined the faculty in 2012, he was a postdoctoral fellowship at the British Academy in Cambridge.
Just last summer he published his first book entitled Germans to Poles Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing.
After the Second World War, we studied the population transfers and cultural transformations in Poland's Western territories,
and he himself is now working on a project on Upper Silesia during and after the Second World War.
So we'll go ahead and turn it over to Jim then for about 45 minutes, and then [INAUDIBLE] go, then we'll respond in 15 minutes.
So after then we'll open up for general discussion. Okay.
Well, thanks very much, Bob, for the kind introduction and many thanks to Mick Ski and Paul Betts for your hospitality today.
Very kind invitation to come to speak to you today.
And also thanks to the PICO Service for agreeing to do the commentary, as Paul indicated,
especially well-informed commentary since he gets out of work as in bulk up his solution.
When the details of the Polish census of 2011 were released in 2012, they were not, for the most part, stuff of newspaper headlines.
But there was at least one result that was truly attention grabbing, certainly in Poland,
but also at least some more discerning circles and English speaking world.
A total of 847,000 people had declared themselves to be ethno nationally Sunni-Shia and more
than four times the number who had declared citizen nationality in the previous census in 2002.
Many of those who attended what identified as solution had declared this as a second nationality alongside Polish,
a few cases alongside German as well.
But even the smaller number of Polish citizens who were declared solution as their sole ethno national ID about 376,000.
Even that figure was double the countless lesions from nine years earlier already.
Largest self-declared national minority in 2000,
two selections now made up a hefty majority of all of those identifying with and ethnicity other than Polish.
This was certainly not excuse that was driven by migration or differential birthrates rates,
and these solutions were much more likely to be emigrating from it than immigrating to Poland.
Instead, this was clearly the result of changes in people's subjective identification.
Hundreds of thousands of people who had declared themselves of Polish nationality and 22 were declaring themselves now of solution ethno nationality.
In 2011 and a slight drop between the two censuses and the number of self-declared Germans,
about 152,000 248,000 suggests that there is also likely at least a very small number of Polish citizens
who had shifted from a primarily German have no national ID to a primarily the U.S. identification.
This striking shift in form of ethnic national affiliation both reflected and as further spurred
the efforts of activists to cultivate a social and cultural awakening and to achieve dissolution.
Political autonomy. The Union of People with Solution Nationality co-sponsored with most of the other proposals from CEA, which was founded in 1996,
engaged in a very long legal campaign through Poland and eventually Europe through Polish and eventually European courts,
to gain official recognition of selection as the nationality.
It apparently has had a breakthrough with the CIA very recently and a separate but related political party, a movement for solution autonomy.
The Europe got to know each stop and in 1990 had something of a breakthrough electoral result in the most recent regional elections and Solution 2010,
winning eight and a half percent of the total vote in the province that would sweep shot up from 4.3% in the previous regional elections.
Instead, the movement, the autonomy movement, went on to joining the Coalition Government and the regional parliament as a junior partner,
which is a platform the leading party in Poland's current overall governing coalition
after the Autonomy movement recently last spring left the coalition some solution.
This, in short, has become something of a hot topic in the past four years, most obviously within Silesia regionally,
but really across Poland more generally is because is pointing to and some people in this
room are very aware Israeli and it comes up quite regularly in the Polish press as a whole.
Leading Polish politicians and cultural figures have been weighing in on the phenomenon
and whether solution self-assertion represents a threat to Polish national identity,
perhaps even to the integrity of the Polish state, or instead represents a welcome and overdue manifestation of Poland's internal cultural diversity.
Now, my talk today is only going to be touching tangentially on these more forward looking policy questions,
which are central to these current day debates.
Should Silesia gain for administrative autonomy? Should some used to gain outright independence under both the current Scottish bid for independence?
To what extent should solution language and culture be cultivated as simply distinct from Polish language and culture?
And despite having put myself in bits of the largest city institution for for quite a while, almost two years,
I can't really claim to be enough of a stakeholder in these debates or to be followed all the detailed twists and turns over the past 20 years.
So little modesty and humility in those questions is appropriate, I think.
But what my talk will be focus instead is the question of what these recent quite dramatic changes in ethno national identification mean.
I want to start briefly by discussing two approaches this question each familiar but also very different,
and neither of which I would argue really quite get at the heart of what has been involved in this case.
When people have shifted from one national category to another, now according to first approach,
which might be described as a kind of cultural realist approach, the nationality,
especially the ethnicity of any given person,
should be able should be derivable from observable characteristics with language often seen as through the political characteristic.
Ethno national identification is then a matter of accurate categorisation.
First and foremost, something one can get right or one can get wrong.
Now, those sympathetic to submission nationhood often invoke this kind of understanding
in arguing that the particular Slavic speech prevalent in upper sleeve shot,
which is most certainly described as a form of polish. Polish from.
The solution dialect implicitly a polish that that speech is in fact a distinctive language or ethnic line or a set of related networks in too much.
Hermosillo, the historian, probably social scientist, very multidisciplinary, who teaches up north at St Andrews,
has written most systematically in describing Swansea as a distinctive language prevalent across formally Russian,
obviously Russia, and is identified with a somewhat distinct but related national exhibitions up in the southeastern border that's in the south west.
Just part is this general orientation for those who do not abandon sleep and the light green area in the south.
This might. So this is the reason what we are focusing on today.
And this is going to be both in terms of the coding here as well as the shading and gets that these ongoing
debates about exactly where to draw the line and how thick a line between forms of polish and sleeves.
And this particular chart does kind of separate out solutions from what our more
firmly described as kind of dialects of greater or lesser pole instruments,
OPM, but as a certain kind of continuum of Slavic linguistic practice dating to the Czechoslovak lands as well.
It's worth noting this makes him, he said he was threatened by the the shift here.
How could we be talking more about Upper Silesia, which for most intents and purposes it's really a synonym for.
So we use and it might seem about slippage, but especially since the Second World War was related to the fact it's light green areas,
there are areas that were really largely repopulated wholesale after the war.
And so lower selection is kind of out there in ethnic categories, simply lapses at that point.
I think it's that's fair to say. So there is in this somewhat confusing slippage between Silesia and Upper Solution is basically
referring to exactly the same people now transforming spoken idioms into standardised vernaculars.
So that's elevating them for dialect. Language is a well-known plot point in the script of nation building.
Miroslav Krock, in his famous analysis of the awakening of small nations in Europe in the 19th century,
described consolidation of a literary language as an essential first step of stage a in that process.
But I am truly sceptical that this leaves an ethno national self-assertion that we see today really hinges on that kind of linguistic question.
Every people here today with better ground dealing with sticks as such, and yet it's not an issue.
I'll getting into great detail about the linguistic analysis of these distinctions.
But the timing of Stage A in the cases that Prof was analysing that timing very but it was always
either on the eve of or at the latest in the early stages of establishment of mass media.
And that was the threshold that upper speech across more than 150 years ago.
As for standardised polish in the mid-19th century and then standard German after 1863 became the regional school language.
So ever since not only Polish and German nationalist, but also those advocating some form of solution regionalism.
If we worked with the assumption that standard German and standard Polish were the two alternatives that local people had to choose from in reading,
writing and even to some extent speaking in formal settings, she notes, either in terms of the southern edge of this region.
Standard literary Czech also comes into play at the very, very southern extremes of the time,
bracketing that out a bit for simplicity and good standard.
The main area from Prussian Silesia, where it really is a kind of German Polish binary.
Obviously, just Catholic clergy have been perhaps the most striking example of that tendency to conflate its with
regional sensibility with a conviction that language is a binary choice between Germany and Polish.
While most local priests were fierce opponents of Polish nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th century,
they were equally fierce defenders of providing religious instruction for Slavic speaking children in standard literary polish,
and insisted that efforts to try to draw a line between the regional dialects,
which the Germans often pejoratively refer to as foster Polish, tried to distinguish that from standard.
Polish, they argued, was simply an attempt by the German government to sabotage instruction what they view as
the children's Polish mother tongue and some representatives of the local Catholic Church,
as well as other members of local intelligentsia, really been quite consistent over the 20th century in articulating regional this
regional distinctiveness in terms of German Polish bilingualism or by nationalism,
rather than terms of mastery of a separate local language.
Now, this is not to doubt the subsequent resilience of the distinctive solution.
Ibid. Or the importance of world traditions that have certainly used this regional idiom to pass on elements of a particular local culture.
I think there's little to suggest that the recent surge in is the Russian.
Has corresponded with or has been driven by a systematic development or revival of the use of a distinctive sense of language.
I think it's revealing and she has. And she senses that to travel, nationality and language use less than a third of those to identify.
Even then, as we've seen by nationality cited solution as their primary language of domestic communication.
Former Polish citizens actually reported using English as their primary home language and report it.
And since we use them to speak to these and I think is that's the kind of lagging indicator lesion and not the primary driver of this phenomenon.
Now, second, understanding of this recent striking shift in ethno national identification could be described as a kind of interest based approach,
rather than reflecting a kind of underlying inversion in the U.S. language and culture.
The adoption of a solution self-identity as seen here as a matter of pragmatic civic identification with fellow current residents of a region.
And we all share certain desiderata and certain grievances, primarily economic.
The common portrayal of Silesia as a region of enormous mineral wealth that has been exploited by a rapacious centre.
So earlier Berlin or recently Warsaw would seem to support that kind of a view of this theme of
economic exploitation by outsiders has a very long history of incidents and regional rhetoric,
dating back at least to the language of upper stage autonomous following the First World War.
What we talk about a little bit more in a moment, and it's certainly reflected in the language of the current movement for solution autonomy today.
But looking closely at patterns of even self-identification, I think cast doubt on the central city of this kind of discourse.
The notion of Silesia as a uniquely wealth generating region rests on what today is
a bit dated equation of economic productivity with heavy industrial production.
Wealth is primarily coming from coal mining, which did work for quite a long time into the late 20th century,
but a little less so now that that kind of thinking would really imply that the entire industrial
connotation at the heart of the current province should feel the same kind of sense of economic grievance.
But in fact, the next set of maps here in the eastern part of that connotation,
that's when the region but the bulk of the east and there's really been vanishingly little
either solution for national identification or electoral support for the movement for cities.
Much time sits in this group. This is a map of the two party.
On the left of the teams in which more than 10% of the population declared a nationality or nationality other than Polish.
Several concentrations of the largest cities of citizens and the greenery to the southwest as hopefully compared to remove from that map.
It's an extraordinary recapitulation of the old Prussian district of Ohm almost precisely,
and doesn't correspond to any boundaries that existed since that time.
But it leaps out again in this map.
So very sharp boundaries seep secretly across the current way.
And so in the east. This is a map of electoral results show a darker edge and higher levels of support for this movement for a solution economy.
And again, you see a very, very sharp line as the old pre-war civil war, Russian,
German frontier and features that have been broken base and its economic terms.
It's an integrated heavy industrial centre. You sort of take a tram across the whole region.
But in terms of these kind of IDs, it very, very sharp locally, very, very well known hard boundary.
So in drawing attention to that very sharp distinction across the current wave.
So that's not to deny that more general resentment of centralist governments with feelings of economic exploitation are real,
and that some of that might not apply more broadly, including in Gambia.
But I don't think they're very persuasive explanations for, for instance, of patterns that we see patterns in identification,
Swedish and nationality, or support for citizen autonomy rather than language and culture then and rather than economic interest.
What I would argue is really defined and driven.
The recent mass adoption of solution identity has been a complicated revisiting rethinking of historical narrative.
So we take that category some typical 20th century historical events.
The creation of a solution. National community, in other words, has had less to do with identification of shared traits in the present,
and much more to do with working through an understanding of a shared past shirts and experiences.
So people voting most of the rest of the time.
Just sketching out some interesting implications of the current surge in the use of national identification for understanding solution history,
by extension for also for understanding, rethinking German and Polish histories.
Since these national histories have been partially composed of sweet and light stories.
They might be useful apologists here for those already familiar with this,
but as as a kind of foil or point of reference or screen to do a very whirlwind history of of
each based on a kind of standard Polish national narrative and how Solutia fits into that.
And this a narrative that we should stress that a lot of native solutions,
certainly past until today, would tend to adhere to themselves in this understanding.
A position was a predominantly Polish speaking land going back to time immemorial that had the misfortune of early separation from a Polish state.
So all sleeves that had become attached to the Bohemian Crown lands in the 14th century and 1740.
Almost all this new show was conquered by Frederick the Great's.
Prussia, the region's Polish inhabitants, were subsequently subjected to generations of German.
It's Asian, peaking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The imposition of German language and culture was ultimately, by the turn of the 20th century,
resisted by a home-grown force national movements with native son of woodchuck, with Fonzie serving as its most charismatic leader.
But it was only with Germany's defeat at the end of the First World War that upper solutions were given a real opportunity to end
this forced attachment to Germany and join their Polish homeland due to a variety of factors pressure from landlords in rural areas,
the impact of non-resident voters.
British perfidy of Frontier Plebiscite in 1921 did not go quite as planned, did not go as favourably to Poland as had been hoped.
Only about 40% of the electorate opted for Poland, whereas language statistics would suggest that something more like 60% should have.
But after decades of German invasion, this might still be seen as a fairly impressive result.
In any case, Polish majorities in which to the centre of the preference,
Polish majorities in the eastern part of the region led to about half of upward solution being awarded to Poland.
So between rights like green areas and eastern in the interwar period,
revisionist pressures from first by MA and then Nazi Germany complicated the integration of these streets upper solution into the new Polish state.
While the continuation of German izing trends in the western part of Upper Silesia further
eroded Polish national identification and even the everyday use of the Polish language.
The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 brought all about the use of that German rule, ushering in another even more extreme campaign of German ization.
Residents were required to sign up for the Deutscher Hawks list of the German nationality list.
For whom? Ethnic, racial? This a registry set up to sort people into appropriate racial categorisations.
And this resulted in the vast majority of the population being categorised as fourth straight racial Germans.
At the end of the war, Soviet and Polish forces moved into the region,
initially viewed obviously Asians simply as Germans, and many were arrested, deported or placed in labour camps.
Only over subsequent months to the Polish government set up mechanisms for the
rehabilitation or verification of Poles who had been classified as German.
Against their will. And despite these belated attempts to reintegrate upper solutions in Poland,
residual discrimination and dissatisfaction with life in communist Poland led many other solutions to
seek to emigrate with hundreds of thousands of them in the region from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
So that's the basic narrative that one can find in mainstream Polish accounts about persecution, history.
And obviously there are differences between various narratives set between
official histories from the communist era versus those of emigre historians.
But those differences tend to be fairly minor and marginal, and we mostly pivot in on differing evaluations,
that particular individual in certain secure parties acting on behalf of Poland.
The common main theme running through these narratives,
and one that took root pronounced in discussion of the late modern era of the 20th century as upper
solutions that agency inhabitants of the region are assumed to have had Polish national characteristics,
interests and sentiments that they were unable to express through word or action.
And apparently German characteristics,
interests and sentiments were in turn understood to have been fundamentally unreal to them the result of top down coercion.
So how would a more suited national understanding of sleep and history differ from this kind of the towns?
How, in other words, with someone switching from polish to more lesion self-identification come to view his or her history differently?
It's perhaps easier to see some fundamental, fundamental elements of this historical narrative that would not need to change dramatically.
In particular, the central theme of lack of agency.
Just as the theme of suppressed foolishness that dominated Polish national narratives of upper solution history,
at least through the First World War, suppressed sleaziness could now define the region's history, at least up to the fall of the communist regime.
Coercive top down polarisation was now coupled with coercive,
top down German innovation as forces that shaped up solution history while obscuring the true identities and interests of those lesions.
But the limitations of this approach can be the apparent it tends toward an upper solution history in which uppers lesions are either
silent or are only able to recite scripts written by others while they were wearing the ill fitting costumes of Germans or Poles.
Looking more closely at what were arguably the two most dramatic and traumatic moments in upper solution history.
I hope further illuminate this interesting dilemma.
The first is the plebiscite of 1921 and briefly earlier.
Now, if lack of agency had been problematic, the most about resolution solution history.
This seemed to be an occasion that offered agency in spades.
The referendum,
which is by far the largest and most contentious of several that were held after the Paris peace settlement gave residents of the region
an opportunity that few human beings have ever had to cast a ballot indicating which nation state they want their home soil to join.
Unfortunately, from the viewpoint of an obvious solution patriots the shared moment of sovereign choice.
The first and only time that upward sweeps has his way emerged as the pursuit of polity was an exercise in one person, one vote, one time.
The upper solution electorate was, after all, voting on how to dissolve itself and merge either with the German or with the Polish nation state.
The turnout of referendum was extraordinarily high, about 99% for the 99%, I think, with very few spoilt ballots.
So that meant that, strictly speaking,
almost every adult upper solution at the time did actually make a choice between affiliation with Germany or with Poland.
So how could this process, which is explicitly mean sorting out Germans from Poles, be integrated as a formal, formative moment of a shared history?
Now one obvious approach has been to highlight an alternative upper solution regionalist agenda at the time,
specifically embodied in the League of Upper Solutions,
the van der Plaisir Reference Archive, which lobbied during the run up to the plebiscite for the creation of an autonomous region,
a completely independent, upper solution free state.
The argument that up was that the League of Nations may have represented a kind of silent majority of upper solution.
Public opinion is certainly plausible. The league itself extended membership of several hundred thousand.
I did speak with comparable circulation figures for its eponymous newspaper, but the league and opposition separatism were generally.
It's an extraordinary, quirky phenomenon. It's very tough,
actually story to get a grip on its operations that had been bankrolled by several wealthy
Catholic industrialist magnates who had their own interest in an upper solution free state.
So it's difficult to interpret the movement as a kind of unmediated vox populi
rising up from below and its leaders to remain quite elusive and cryptic figures.
And some actually worked for the league for a while before turning to advocacy of the German or Polish cause,
and others really vanished into complete obscurity on the figures that tried to track myself.
And there's very, very little material on them. So with a narrative of open, widespread defiance of the plebiscite by ordinary citizens,
it's difficult to sustain that sense of really robust narrative or more plausible and subtle
approach would concede a degree of Polish or pro-German preference among many inhabitants,
but still insist on the fundamentally fratricidal nature of that disputes.
Now, that kind of interpretation fits quite nicely, actually,
with a lot of classic views of how national communities more generally managed to digest episodes of internal conflict into their histories.
I mean, the Prime Minister and all these famous formulations simultaneously remembering and forgetting them,
except with the other members St Bartholomew's Day in France that the French person so knows about,
but can kind of narrator's family feud that's been overcome.
And this also dovetails with the theories of democratisation in relation to this concept of how Family Feud has played
a central role as something that provides a framework for aggregating interest groups as competing groups in society,
but also develops mechanisms for common democratic self-rule.
So this kind of migration is not, to me really extraordinary, but there's moments of internal division,
and even episodes of Civil War can really only be assimilated to those national histories if there is some sense of the continuous,
longer shared story into which they can be absorbed.
So what might provide that kind of sense of commonality and continuity in longer narratives about of history?
Now, interestingly, and somewhat showery, I'd suggest that it's actually the experience of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath that is,
in many ways the most useful for creating a centripetal narrative about war solution history.
In other words, a narrative in which offer solutions could be seen as having shared a fate with one
another rather than with the sensible German or Polish countrymen beyond the region.
It was Nazi wartime racial policy in conjunction with the handling of the legacy of that policy by the post-war Polish state.
That I would argue, did more than anything else to solidify that sense of a regional state.
She was injured during the Second World War.
I more detail about that now. Now, what I've just said might seem like a paradoxical claim.
Both Nazi racial policy and post-war Poland's policy of national rehabilitation and verification were, after all,
and aimed at an emphatic sorting out of Germans from Poles in the lands of interwar Poland, annexed by Germany during the war,
Poles were at best treated as a subordinate race and were, in the long run,
targeted for expulsion further east and after the war with local Germans, whose ongoing presence in the region was deemed no longer tolerable.
So the understandable assumption that historians and social scientists study the impact
of these policies has been that once individuals were placed in these categories,
they were essentially stuck there. The Nazis targeted as Poles that would who had been deemed Poles before the war,
the Germans targeted by the post-war Polish government were in turn essentially in some way, the same as those of the Nazis that understood German.
But this commonsensical view is very far from what actually happened in Upper Sweden,
or just to mention a parallel case they want begins in detail in first grade year, West Prussia, which had a very similar wartime experience,
suffered SILESIA Just to dramatise the statistics,
the suddenness and universality of the switch in the last interwar census and
the part of a procedure that would pass from Germany to Portugal in 1922.
7% of the resident population was deemed to be of German nationality in a police census, carried out three months after the German invasion of 1939.
95% of the population in former Prussian territory was counted.
And the more systematic approach of folks list was carried out for a year and a half later produced very similar results.
Only 5% of the population failed to adhere to the German nationality registry, and over 90% of those who did here were categorised as racially German,
albeit subject to some significant restrictions in the case of the very large number replacing category three of the Volks list.
In the meantime encompass the German part of inter-war procedure.
In those areas, all residents continue to simply have the status of rights as German state citizens.
This was essentially from a racialized understanding under the Nazis, regardless of any Slavic linguistic background.
The only exceptions would be would have been a very tiny handful of vocal Polish activists.
And of course, Jews were systematically excluded from that definition.
So the Second World War was a moment of extraordinary, almost unprecedented unity, in a way, for the vast majority of upper subdivisions.
The classification of almost the entirety of the population as a German was,
to be sure, in many ways, the straightforward reassertion of earlier state affiliation.
It's simply in practice referred to the fact that people had been German citizens prior to 1922.
So just to which of this map of the this is the larger dao of overstatement ever since its expanded boundaries during the Second World War.
In terms of the way the folks this two words again these old boundaries the same ones
you saw earlier where the pre for pre first world war boundary of Prussia had been.
It's within those boundaries that basically the entire population is deemed racial each other and you move across that frontier.
German racial policy was completely flipped and especially to the east of that line, hardly anyone was established.
German nationality was in the south in the former Austrian areas.
It's a bit more of a mixed picture, a bit closer to the Prussian side, but not quite as systematic.
A blanket reclassification of the population.
So while in terms of what was driving the policy,
you can see the power of these or essentially state affiliations as really being a almost perfect predictor really of what status people would have
during the war and Nazi policy officially and quite dramatically reconfigured this kind of civic or state status into a racial classification.
So gone, at least officially, was the understanding that a previous groups previously prevailed during their Prussian rule
that most residents of the region were from a polish or slice Slavic speaking background,
that essentially understanding that they were ethnically Polish in some way.
Now it's easy to mock this official Nazi insistence that upper solutions were almost all German descent.
German government reports from the period are replete with complaints about how both local rights Deutsch
and the western part of the sleeves folks which in the east were routinely using Polish in daily life.
Very, very common idiom. But it's that these ostensible Germans were not really German is in many ways missing the point.
Of course, these Nazi racial classifications were fundamentally absurd in many ways,
but they were important that because they were accurate, but because they were self-fulfilling,
they ensured that upper solutions had an essentially German experience of the war,
then being enlisted into the Vermont adolescents, been recruited to the Hitler Youth for the German girls.
Adults of both sexes being forbidden to marry non Germans.
The Nazi regime's extraordinarily capacious definition of racial achievement and up their sleeve.
So again, this basically applies to Polish Pomerania as well though exactly how is applied differ in interesting ways.
That extraordinarily broad definition had a counterintuitive but implicit examination quite predictable outcome.
After the war, the wartime German status of almost every ongoing inhabitant of the region made it extraordinarily
difficult for the post-war Polish government to sort out real Germans after the war.
Now there was, to be sure,
a kind of rough and ready process of self selection as a minority of residents with little or no connection to local Slavic language or culture,
as well as those involved in the most notorious institutions of the Nazi regime, such as the SS or high ranking Nazi officials.
Those that's minority duly fled to the West and the head of the Nazis, the Soviet army, worked with at the cusp of that advance.
But since one's basic wartime status as a German and even once categories action within the
false list is category 1 to 3 or four was for reflecting descending degrees of permanence.
Since all of that was understood as a matter of top down coercion rather than free choice.
Vanishingly few applications for post-war rehabilitation for those on the false list or verification of rights,
which in Western efforts in Asia were actually rejected.
Just to take one striking example of the kind of pattern you see in this case of a verification commission in western Upper Sleep,
shot in one village and crucial county,
the verification commission found 15 former Nazi party members, but students still concluded that there were no Germans in the village.
Now, revealingly and interestingly,
one distinction that many observers had assumed might provide a way to divide the population after the war was whether they had fallen
into Category two or three of the false list of about half of the population from repression up its sleeve to have been Category three,
that 50 to 20% Category two. So they really kind of represent the bulk of the local population.
Now, during the occupation, there was a kind of intuitive sense among the Bloods,
the local residents, that this really would be decisive after the war.
In part, it was just kind of visually cued by the fact that had we wanted to fold streets,
had a different colour identity card and category three false story.
So the saying that the ubiquitous during the war was hindsight and check high rise here life here and want to run away three four and stay.
And so, again, a very understandable kind of intuition.
And right after the war, this did seem to be borne out by the fact that those in Category two were initially required.
Seek individual rehabilitation by a court or those in Category three were granted blanket administrative rehabilitation.
But they did the twos and threes had represented starkly differentiated groups under Nazi rule had always been quite an oversimplification.
It's one that continues to have a life in dance scholarship today.
A hit to pick one of its excellent discoveries. Marc Mazower But this book, Hitler's Empire, states that the threes were forbidden to marry Germans.
In other words, they were effectively viewed by the authorities as Poles in terms of the racial collegiate policing of their marriage.
In fact, exactly the opposite was the case. Category threes were forbidden to marry poles and could only marry Germans.
And this policy both reflected and had the tendency to reinforce a pattern that was observable on the ground during the war.
And at its end, one post-war commentator estimated that every upper solution in Category two had an average of four close relatives in Category three.
The fact that most Category three segments,
Category two false ratio were embedded in families in neighbourhoods that were predominantly in Category three,
seems to have contributed to this very lenient attitude toward category choose in practice.
Once the rehabilitation process ran its course, as I mentioned before,
of the petitions for rehabilitation of Category two focus groups that were just sat in the first year after the war,
only a handful resulted in rejection.
And from the summer of 1946, the legal distinction between categories two and three was abolished altogether.
So moving into the late 1940s, again,
despite the devil's complexities and quick twists and turns of both wartime Nazi racial policy and post-war Polish rehabilitation verification policy,
these policies cumulatively produce a very large,
very distinctive and fairly well-defined community the fate of roughly 2 million people
who spent the war as Germans and were reclassified as Poles after the war's end.
It's precisely those who had gone through this specific sequence of rapid,
radical traumatisation followed by rapid and radical colonisation, constituted the clear potential recruitment tool for nationalist fusions.
So how can these shared experiences be narrated into a kind of history or story of this nation?
And how would this be different of the way it could be woven into narratives of German or Polish history?
My sense is those answers remain far from clear among some self-identified solutions.
One can find attempts to try to reclaim pride in wartime experiences in ways that seem quite difficult,
actually distinguished from German nationalism, or even in some cases, outright neo-Nazi ism.
It's easy to find some places like this on some solution oriented websites.
In the comments, page, one tends to find lots of common pages.
It's sort of comments in that kind of vein that are sort of straightforwardly celebrating service in the bear market.
And other defining wartime experiences, I think can charitably be put to the side as marginal,
the exception rather than the wall among this very large group of people who have shifted toward solution self-identification.
The more common approach has really been to disavow, as we continue to disavow, any voluntary participation of the Nazi regime,
citing the coercive nature of solutions, enlistment into the force combined shock.
Now, this, of course, is only in many ways a modest variation on what became the more or less official
post-war Polish understanding of the wartime classification of solutions.
As Germans once again, lack of agency is really the central theme here,
whether people feel submerged identity was understood to have been Polish or a solution.
Categorisations German was a fiction imposed from above.
Many people in this room will also recognise this as an example of a very familiar kind of debate in post-war Europe.
To what extent, as a group's ostensible general status is victims of Nazi ism, exempt it from scrutiny as possible?
Perpetrators in these kind of debates have raged around the working class women, Austrians, Alsatians.
Recently polls in general and a plethora of other demographic groups.
And while one can still certainly find those who would take an absolutist position
that membership in a particular category must be seen as automatically exculpatory.
I think it's fair to say that most scholars have generally come to agree that this kind of
exoneration berry taxonomy is really unhelpful way of dealing with responsibility for the past.
And that would apply to solutions as much as any other group.
The problems inherent in immigration before in the immediate post-war era as an episode of straightforward,
unambiguous victimisation were apparent in accounts of what we described as, in some cases,
outright solution activists, but also with others as a discrete criterion,
cautions up the upper sleeve and tragically exactly starting revealingly in 1945 and writing over the next several years.
Now there can be no doubt about the human suffering involved in the events that that turn encompasses the immediate aftermath of the war,
tens of thousands of local inhabitants deported to the USSR or interned in the labour camps,
probably several thousand people who perished from malnourishment and maltreatment during those experiences.
So recent historiographical investigations of those incidents are very important and commendable,
as is scrutiny of the entire vast catalogue of human suffering in Europe in the late forties that married in the immediate post-war era,
simply in terms of an upper solution, tragedy is surely missing with most striking.
In many ways, many aspects of the region's experience in this period upper solutions,
demographic persistence and what was otherwise an era of massive demographic rupture across the German Slavic frontier of Central Europe.
There was, in other words, relatively little that was uniquely upper solution about the suffering experienced in the forties.
Some of the solutions were very persecuted as pulled by the Nazis, others crudely targeted as Germans by the post-war communist government in Poland.
It was the relatively unique and fairly used the term relatively successful mass migration
between national categories that made for a kind of distinctively upper solution story,
a story that provides an explanation for the existence and place of such a
large population of potential national solutions and yet early 21st century.
So isolating the kind of discrete upper solution tragedy while usefully drawing attention to these particular local experiences,
I think unhelpfully isolates those experiences from the lobby groups and contexts possible and is sometimes also unfortunately lends itself to a
misleading notion that victimisation of other solutions was due to the machinations of foreign Bolshevik occupation and fortune in some iterations.
Sweden should listen to day a bullish Bolshevik portrayal of this occupation.
I think one only needs to look at the parallel experiences of France in dealing with
its own former Germans and its source of the daily or trial in the early 1950s.
To see that addressing this kind of legacy was inevitably a divisive, wrenching one,
as those with vastly different wartime experiences were now being asked to gather as, quote, nationals,
the tendency of solution national narratives that were to insist on absolute victimisation,
of course, recalls some familiar characteristics of Polish national narratives of the war.
But there's also a striking difference Polish narratives of the same period intense stories of acts of resistance, not just passive victimisation.
And so it provided some satisfying sense of the agency for residents of Silesia trying to engage in that narrative.
This was admittedly a kind of proxy agency since a small minority of solutions were actively participating in the Polish resistance.
But if solutions were essentially Poles, then the entire broader history of the Polish wartime resistance could be
described as their history to narration of the war in terms of a near solution.
History, by contrast, would seem to preclude this kind of proxy heroism.
So what could or should take its place where one finds sleeves and actors rather
than just sleeves and victors in what was a very pivotal moment in history?
One answer poses a wrenching but probably necessary challenge.
Accepting that historical agency might involve some degree of historical responsibility,
and that searches for heroes might just as easily turn into villains as well as across the entire spectrum of behaviour in between.
And this kind of reckoning would parallel and partially overlap with well-known debates in broader the broader Polish public recently about interwar,
wartime and post-war antisemitism. I think the most judicious and helpful recent explorations of solutions for wartime
history have refused to bracket that history from Polish history to tread separated out,
rigid, perhaps modest. Recent plots are poles in bear marked signals.
This refusal in the title, as we've seen with solutions as Pomeranians, as Poles,
and I think that's quite right and useful since subsequent Polish history was fundamentally
shaped by the decision to recognise millions of wartime Germans as post-war calls.
And while this account is to be sympathetic in many respects,
very carefully chronicles all the constraints faced by those who were compelled to subscribe to the Fox list.
Elsewhere, stories that show that some other solutions could use what little agency they had in quite deplorable ways.
Answer might be depressing. The one of most memorable individual characters to emerge from his account is Frantz,
who is the director of the famous Auschwitz Orchestra, the inmate of opposition research,
and who was actually about to leave the capital at the end of the war to join the German army and certainly be untenable,
helpful to be described as a typical upper solution.
But he did certainly represent the very real possibility of what individuals might
do with the women of natural position in which offer solutions found themselves.
Now, trying to digest these kind of difficult stories into a slice of national history might seem a tall order in practice.
After all,
can people identify with the collective story to gain inspiration or find role models rather than to painfully grapple with unmask the paths?
I think that kind of pessimistic assessment ignores an interesting comparison.
For example, just in the southwestern solution of the Czech lands on those people in the spring,
probably be familiar to varying degrees with a distinctive Czech sensibility in dealing with difficult and traumatic events.
The kind of absurdist, ironic spirit of the good soldiers like the kind of approach category in patrols in the Second World War,
such as an addiction that insults films like this, watch trains from quite a while ago and that sort of thing.
But more recently, across the divided and fall,
these accounts necessarily centre on anti-heroes rather than heroes and embrace that kind
of dark humour that seems like it should be wildly inappropriate for the subject matter.
And yet somehow it seems to work ring true.
It does seem some elements of the sensibility and obviously some literature about the war between them was Gen-X Life,
its trilogy operating in German about the late 1930 sweep of War.
Just to cite one anecdote in that vein, yet it describes a caricatured sort of delivery.
And let me put a sheet out as a kind of white flag at the end of the war, knowing that it would be struck by the Nazis,
would put it out too early, or might be shot by the Soviets and put it out too late.
He laments that he really wasn't good with this kind of timing decision, since he had actually decided to join the German Communist Party in 1933.
And that kind of black humour in accounts of upper since the war, I suspect is quite pervasive.
But the overall tradition though it's quite rare I think in terms of literary health, at least in Poland,
the more common approach of the local intelligentsia has been to frame the paradoxes about free speech and history in more earnest,
often fairly mystical terms.
That's no doubt related to the fact that the region's spokespeople have been disproportionately drawn from the Roman Catholic clergy.
So figures like Shibata, which is what theologians kind of pizza have talked about upper sleeve since internal contradictions,
generating a kind of ambition, as he put it, ambition to become the material out of which Europeans are made evident.
Many in the square might note the similarity in sensibility with classic caution that Satanism.
The constant idea of misfortune due process to.
Redemptive mission possible solution variance.
It suits you to not see what you do for your hybridity and ah, it's kind of solidarity of, of, of borderland peoples.
But that will be interesting in the future to see if that starts being translate into more Czech, the idea of irony and self-deprecation.
So just to conclude again, probably with a priest since again takes disproportionate role of early spokes piece people for a better solution.
Farther down to pizza,
Christian political and social activists who worked in Upper Solution early 20th century once asked the rhetorical question What is an upper solution?
Is the a German whole oppression simply an upper solution or simply a Catholic or perhaps just an abstract human being?
I think the question nicely captures the appeal of upper solution history for historians such as myself,
with no particular personal or institutional link to the region and spilling violently
across the national categories that usually shape and constrain scholarly inquiries.
Upper solution lives force us to constantly shift our frames of reference, asking questions, making the comparisons, new connections.
At the time the pizza was writing, in three months of the 20th century,
the queer dames her was this stimulating array of partially overlapping categories would be swamped
by a stark choice between absorption into a German or absorption into a Polish national narrative.
The recent assertion about a have no national ID and the application of that sensibility.
The past may prove helpful in overcoming this binary framework, but it also has the potential to do the opposite.
In other words, to answer competes this question with the blunt tautology that an upper solution is, of course, an upper solution.
Enough said, end of story. And that answer is both rather dull.
And I hope, as I hope I persuasively suggest in this talk, ultimately quite misleading.
The experiences in the story to offer solutions are really too rich, too interesting,
and too important to be fully contained by any national history of Germany, of Poland, or of Upper Silesia.
Thank you. Yeah.
Well, first of all, so very, very interesting.
A very complex, very rich paper.
I think what most Americans think it does is really probe into the anatomy,
the widespread sense of nationhood and widespread support inside the national movement.
I think it helps us to understand the kind of conceptual resources which hopefully
the president's been able to draw on in forming a solid national consciousness.
And you saw these in national consciousness.
He convincingly argues that it doesn't really make sense to explain this contemporary sense of size in nature.
And you're calling the movement widespread support for the economy in terms of objective and objective traits such as language.
The fact that until at least the late 1940s, a very large proportion of the citizens population spoke a distinctive southeastern Slavic dialect.
Likewise, he says, it doesn't really make sense to argue that the surge in support for the Citizen National
Movement has its roots in pragmatic economic grievances and pragmatic economic considerations.
He makes an important point that the main conceptual resource that resides in national consciousness in
Silesian it's only a movement drawn on is a belief in a shared history of shared societies and past,
especially the shared history of the 1921 plebiscite and the shared experience of World War Two in its immediate aftermath.
So this is a really compelling explanation for how the subtleties in national movement and
silos and national sentiments have come into existence in post-communist nations like Poland.
But what I would like to get more thoughts on from Jim, perhaps, is the question of what's caused this by easy international sentiments,
especially the international movement to actually increase in the last decade or so.
But. Why did more people choose to put down so far losing their nationality in 2011, in the 2011 census than did so nine years earlier?
And why did the movement slightly on women's electoral vote increase fairly dramatically between 2006 and 2011?
I think Jim does point out one explanation for this,
which is that I think he thinks that basically the the idea that the activists behind the national,
exciting international movement have become kind of more active, more efficient in their organisation.
But I'm wondering whether something broader is going on here.
And basically I'm wondering whether essentially in the talk, as I said,
you reject the idea that these movements drawing on kind of pragmatic economic considerations,
but I'm wondering whether it's nevertheless drawing on either another form of pragmatism and political pragmatism,
where the basically the movement is of the view that the best way and the best way to articulate
political interests is in the language of nationality and in the language of nationalism,
so that this is a kind of climatic decision. And if so, I think that kind of raises questions about the extent to which in Europe today,
we're still very much living in an age of nationalism where you have to find your political interest or large parts of you.
You have to define your political interests in the language of nationalism.
Is this what this case demonstrates or does it demonstrate that about particularly post-communist countries?
And is this a kind of specifically post-communist phenomenon that it's kind of bringing up another kind of possible
explanation behind the kind of the growing prominence of the cities in national consciousness and solidarity,
nationalism, taxes. I'm wondering whether there's been an impact of Poland's entry into the European Union in 2004.
The fact that that kind of breaks down traditional.
Long, long term major nation state boundaries and an open space for this kind of regional nationalism.
So is that is that part perhaps part of the kind of the growing support for this side of measures that consciousness or are there other factors?
I don't know. Another interesting point that James Piper is.
Is the fact that and as he as he said at the start of the 2011 and the 2011 census,
you've got hundreds of thousands of people in office, either declaring both Silesian ethnic nationality and Polish ethnic nationality.
That's how I understood it. I mean, what do they. How do they understand?
What is the explanation for this?
How are they actually understanding their national identity?
I mean, do they really think that they belong to two distinct nations and that kind of collapses that that the concept of nationhood as we know it,
if they do, or are they actually not really saying that they're members of a nation that
finds a nation and actually doing that as a subgroup of the Polish nation?
I mean, it it's confusing. And I kind of think, well,
they give them the option of finding the nationality on a census doesn't necessarily mean that they think of themselves as ethno, not nationally.
So listen, I don't really know what the explosive,
but it would be interesting to get your thoughts on that and yet another thought
about this and that is that about the kind of relationship between this site,
this this relatively new studies and national movement and also the German minority movement in opposition that we heard mentioned about at the start.
What is the relationship between the two? Is there is there.
Well, the German minority would basically emerge earlier, as I understand it.
So it's kind of pretty emerging in the late eighties as things started to move towards collapse of communism.
And and then there was already like strong political support for the German minority.
And even then suddenly from the start of the 19, but relatively strong support from starting in 1994,
they really had representatives in, in the national parliament were saying from from from the start of the 1990.
So all that kind of common degree really is two separate things.
The German minority movement and the national movement always kind of felt the same thing.
Why did one emerge earlier than the other? That kind of thing.
But this kind of brings me to kind of an important essay about all these years from the early post-war period.
But this as one of the sources who went to Uppsala at the end of the second war, right at the end of the Second World War in summer 1925,
and felt that he observed two different ways in which these things distinguished themselves from the
new Polish settlers who were arriving and set up studies in the period and the police authorities.
On the one hand, he thought that some Uppsala Indians emphasise that German identity spoke well,
increasingly speaking, German in public almost as a kind of sign of defiance to the to impose.
On the other hand, they were he pointed out to some Uppsala in May were trying to emphasise a kind of leading identity.
They were declaring some kind of settlement by which officials that they were showing that the citizens rather than Poles in a way,
that's the kind of embryonic you can say this is an embryonic form of these two different movements which emerge in the post communist period.
So the question is basically about whether we should view them as part of the same thing he's saying.
I think it's socially in a way, is it giving them as part of a similar way of kind of showing estrangement from the Polish settlers in the public?
So should we see them, the post-communist version,
as well as a kind of expression of alienation from from the public's part of society and and the a person and and yeah.
The final kind of the bitter what of in the west of.
My best I want to say is that they want to kind of pose a challenge to your central point, as I understood it then,
which is that the shared capacities and experience of the Second World War and its immediate
aftermath is providing a basis for the new new studies in national consciousness to to draw.
And I just want to pose a couple of challenges to that idea.
So the first is that it has to do with this is like one big reason that you mention,
which is a territory which was joined to offer services by the Nazis in 1939 and remains part of this idea that after the Second World War,
as part of the Soviet empire, bloodshed. And although even reason that in that region people don't identify with the society,
the national movement is because this because that region is not historically viewed as part of Upper Silesia,
that it was only that it was part of the Russian partition during the 19th and early 20th century,
that it wasn't part of the Prussian Prussia and and that and that.
Q And so you can't really kind of say that a shared war two experience is enough or is a big problem.
It's an argument against saying that there's a shared World War Two or even
early post-war period as to as a crucial element of the new international order,
because the comparable basis was part of in the World War Two.
And so you see the point you're making and then, um, yeah, okay.
The second point is about, um, I would argue that actually the two halves of Upper Silesia,
the half which joins Poland's in 1922 and in Poland in the interwar period and the half,
which was part of Germany in the interwar period, that they actually had quite divergent experiences of the Second World War and post-war period.
So that kind of also that which I'll just describe,
but that also kind of goes against the idea that there was this shared experience of World War Two and only possible is, is the crucial proximity.
I mean, in basically in the same period was only an east and a possibility of the breach of policies is implemented and the majority of people
placing the butcher focuses system in eastern is eastern up of these topics was which was actually Poland in the interwar period.
Most of the people replaced the Category three and that consigned them to a category
which a form of citizenship which did expose them to a great degree of discrimination,
as I understand it then the White School of Western Publicises and then so that there is a difference in their experience of the Second World War,
I'd say because of that. And then secondly, and in the early post-war period, the Polish authorities also treated the two paths into war policy.
So using the phrase the the the verification and screening process and was implemented in Western
episode media and the rehabilitation ethnic screening process was implemented in Eastern Australia.
So that being put through a different process,
I don't think there is some distinction between the two and I would I would say that that affected their experience
and and a much larger proportion of Western Australia's population were expelled after the Second World War,
as I understand it, and I think a larger proportion fled from the Red Army.
So there are a lot of differences in this period between the two.
So yeah, that just is the basis for school for all.
Yeah. So just one. Yeah. So, so just one more point, which is just Weber.
I mean, as I understand it, this is basically concentrated or limited to present day.
So. If ownership rather than rejoining, includes part of western Pakistan rather than the whole of Slavic dialect speaking episode.
Is it so? So. And it's German one Nazi movement which represents the kind of alienation.
Identity to grab hold of in a polar void.
Gotcha. Which is where the most of Western upside territory is.
That's truth is very complicated, but that's the case.
So I would argue that these post-war administrative boundaries played a big role from 1950 onwards,
played a big role in defining this solidly national movement.
Yeah, I think I mean, given the fact that audiences were sitting patiently for an overnight escapist hold on asking those questions,
and maybe you can factor those into some of your answers to the audience.
So I hope you productions would start with mixed with I just wondered where Louis was in relation to the smaller institution in Western Europe.
They did not reach an agreement, but my sense is.
Wartime history. His greatest.
But it's the canonisation of. You take questions in utero foster them and then you just take what first to
because it this house from someone else's and also I would like to do something.
So it's good for treatment because coming from Germany, I know nothing about the region, but I know about these people.
And I was and I knew I realised in the last years that some of the facts are that
these people are now going back to families and buying their holiday homes there.
I'm spending a lot of time there and my impression is that they're doing a lot for tourism and
that they're doing a lot and that they're having to break into this new national identity.
And I was just wondering what you think about, well, telling the story not only from the beach itself,
but telling this story as well from another international perspective.
What was the. We're just going to have to continue to do some good.
Here I am, of course, but mostly as it relates to background, expertise and very little or recently it sounds like to be crude a distinction.
But some of this does go back to a kind of genuine language boundary, really at the edge of the little sleeves and Upper Silesia,
and the divide between people who really do have Slavic speech and their family histories and those who don't.
It's again, obviously like any boundary persistence and fuzziness to it, but it's it's a fairly pronounced boundary.
And as you move into pretty central, obviously,
that you're dealing with the German population and it translates as mature into this
real demographic divide from areas where there's quite a lot of demographic continuity,
though not abscesses, he goes pointing to in the western parts of upper sleeves in particular.
There's quite a bit about migration,
but it's very clear that that's what polish of Eclipse readers I talk those that were were local indication in local and Slavic.
Whereas as you move west and squeezed it, you just don't have any demographic continuity.
And so this does its way. Appearance is certainly a fuzzier boundary.
I think during the Nazi period, this sense mentioning there is a certain kind of wilful denial of any kind of Slavic background
of those within the parts of obviously each of the remain German during the interwar period.
But there is that kind of background understanding of the reality of that that
difference that they there's villages where you hear people speaking the Slavic speech
everywhere for the West for you don't have that that's related just to be kind of link
here to that he goes questions about what divisions are really emphatic and decisive.
I think the race that same thing about however sapiens is how systematically the Nazis ignore its boundaries.
There's the old frontiers which have been at this maximum are almost impossible to decipher, were absolutely decisive for racial policy.
You cross that old boundary between Prussia and Russia and you move from everyone's a German to no one's a German.
It's an effort to fight over the line. Everything changes.
And so I think that it's in some ways so tried to get across.
You're absolutely right that the decisive boundaries are going back to the older period.
But what is so fascinating is this racialisation of those boundaries insistence.
Well, actually, this happens to just be that imperial frontier, but the insistence that that is an absolute racial boundary.
Everyone to the west of this line is of German stock Boston.
And again, it's a crazy policy by almost every stretch.
But it is it is self-fulfilling in a way.
It get back to the question of the Expellees ambassador to Germany.
And it is something that I was thinking about writing this topic did end up kind of leaking out how this relates
to those who don't stay in Poland and those who do believe that there are a significant number who do leave,
those who leave by the end of the war, its immediate aftermath at the end of the process,
kind of self-selection do tend to really identify more decisively as simply as
German those who migrate later on and purchase through their cultural repertoire.
Again, also,
just that experience of having lived in communist Poland or perhaps another generation or two do tend to appeal to different self-identification.
And so I think for those returning back to the region,
it is a real distinction to get into this in very fundamental everyday life terms between people who can immediately strike
up a conversation with all of the local residents because they speak Polish and those who don't understand a word of Polish,
that's a big difference. And and fairly, again, some people kind of into the borderlands of that experience.
But I think that it kind of goes to he goes virtual, too, in terms of the difference.
That's in different parts of Sydney south here at the end of the war,
really just radically different continuities and discontinuities in terms of the links between groups that are based in Germany and Poland.
I think I was sort of thinking about that in this paper.
Just don't know that much about the interplay between them.
I just read some web research that was struck to find out that there is apparently a movement for us that suits and autonomy.
That's a chapter not in the UK, in Norway, of all places.
So there is there is an internationalisation of this. But then the obvious question is how that relates to groups based in Germany.
I don't know as much about it, but I may just say I think it is also it is good.
HERBERT China is one of the leaders of German explorer organisations and he was
really diverse and was really stabilised by the communist propaganda in Poland,
particularly in the 1960s. He lived long enough for action to be awarded a decoration by local police officials in the early 1990s,
which you are currently also actually contributing some of the nation to look out to a local budget.
But I don't think that this is this is that this initiative for safety for tourism which I.
My question is about the C.I.A., right?
Or would you describe.
Clarity as the last thing. And I wonder whether this diagnosis is somewhat articulated by the fact that the government.
That, of course, agency never comes back to.
Within seconds touch. This is what is looking at the history of the site.
It's the stopped distance that's based in terms of the policies of German state towards Islam on Polish state.
But I wonder whether by locking ourselves into that dichotomy structurally, then the refugees have to stick by them.
So the perpetrator, heroes and villains, etc. while actually.
That goes to the beginning of my argument is maybe pay more attention to what's to say.
Have today identified themselves. Not necessarily throwing on the stuff, but speaking to them.
Maybe not the signals made for us, but to those listed on whatever you like basis.
I think that helps to move this binary structure in the agency more into a continuum with lots of shades of grey in between,
so that you would see the colonisation on the one hand.
That what. That. In high school.
In primary school. The moment they left.
So I think the way they identify is there would very much go down this big binary, which we tend to think of.
Um, so I think I'm paying more attention to the new ones and the fact that the inventors inside these.
I think that's more, um. On the.
The. The announcement. John.
And it just so really. I want to focus on the question somewhere.
Yes, I think it's important to stress that in secondary markets.
A very rich migration from Poland's ethnic poles to that.
That's because of data triangulation that's in place since 1964 to clarify problems that were in the market in mind.
So they would not. Suffering due to its location and seconds can be based on why it's different to be stuck in one sentence and suffering.
But in 2001, since the category of Asian countries is not.
So people who identify themselves as. They said, I do not, you know, I I'm all for it since it puts my.
First of all, that's what you have on this topic, but also other things.
And because it was so many people that are.
So this then sparked that phrase, no doubt going strong, saying that that's not also because of friends,
husbands around, or maybe it's not necessarily going to.
Things. Ten years later, so many more people felt South Africa.
To your question relate to that one. In other words, you want to take that gem for the value of your question, which is quite different.
Okay. Maybe I'll take that question too. Yeah. No, I.
I think I agree. Sorry. So I was really doing that is precisely what I would to get at is and making that leap to nationality.
It's all about these, these categories. And I think as you describe the experience, what's the size of understanding this?
And it's the full experiences and the role. The texture of everyday life is precisely that they had to work with those categories.
They couldn't simply deny them the structure, and particularly in terms of spoken language and in fact research on the local actors.
People born in the region actually served as local spokes people who provided the
kind of written record that we have of native solutions that comes through very,
very clearly that there's this sense of the impossibility of saying, I'm simply up a solution that's self-evident,
but it has to be explained and negotiated through these other categories.
And I think that it's something quite fascinating in terms of we get a sense of how those categories structure the way they live their lives,
that it doesn't just sort of happen in a separate cleaned up experience, but has to be mediated to remove that kind of constant binary referencing.
And I think I think they might say this about that.
Thank you very much. Such an interesting talk and talk to these wonderful formulations.
Joy means a lot to me, but my question actually doesn't address the issue that other schools are crushing areas.
Um. For example, it's crucial for all where I know the landscapes have been covered.
There's conservation buildings, cool stories and cute them.
That's kind of heritage.
So just thinking of, you know, this is an example, but other sort of how it might be similar at different other question periods.
East pressure. I know about this landscape and the sort of contribution that the people are missing and the springs seem to be submerged again.
Or I know very little about this. This is a genuine question to you and another area that I was thinking about this all.
Using it to try and figure out what part of the world U.S. application for.
It's not a way really recovers its Jewish past so reverberations that.
Some of these regions looked as long as a jury.
60 because in the publications coming out English North America this is.
And it's interesting comparison between these areas where there is significant demographic continuity.
That's an important point in terms of the mix of countries in this country.
Countries is also a lot of in-migration. So it is said that across the region, both with the quantum that it has the area as well as in migrants,
but how that compares to states where there is a complete demographic rupture to efforts to kind
of go back and kind of reclaim landscapes or buildings in terms of their earlier incarnations,
that sense of the civil rights group. But they just present questions of thinking that particular relationship to the Jewish past.
I think it's some of it's it's a bit more difficult in this context because so much attention is
really about these kind of communications of the experiences about the continuous population efforts.
So much attention and controversy and difficulty around that is my sense of the sense of former synagogues that this is the thing.
It is it's just no action on that front that I can see that serves those.
But I think compared to areas where there is and where that extensive rupture might be, kind of a sensitivity to categorical absence.
I think bringing in both the absence from the German expulsions, but also the different kind of accents from the Jewish queens.
Think about how that would compare. But it is. I think that the elements, demographics and heredity make it a bit different kind of dynamic.
But if you have that, it's it's it's use.
It is complete rupture in terms of the local news being destroyed and it's its members killed.
Members of group, etc. Immigration.
Yes. My name is watch movies and I'm from from Germany.
But actually I was quite close to the the region.
And I think my question is related to your first question. This I see many analogies between the same desire and the region,
but I would like to hear your opinion on the differences between between the US and the people in the Eastern people.
Do you have any evidence on the differences or the analogies between both regions?
Yeah, there's quite a lot of similarities and it's actually quite striking in terms of the most recent frame of reference.
And the second feature is that the fairly smooth forces to experience a little different mechanisms
and that in that case the characterisation of this is completely top down is a bit more accurate.
And that's the way that the Nazi administration, it really didn't engage population the way that it did in other cities.
It was just sort of by paperwork, psy ops. That entire village was declared to be full, straight shot, that the broad outcomes are quite similar.
And so the process of rehabilitation after the war is probably very, very similar.
The earlier histories as well, and one that I brought in at the end and sort of here and there,
but is much more the focus of my earlier work is on the particular role of, of everyday Catholic religious practice.
And it's a common theme in both of your solution and should be both carried out as a kind of marker
of local identity but of religious observance as being the defining protection characteristic.
Similar to that, they're three to 4 to 4 to others with more knowledge of the linguistic subtleties to the basic
but to the first slide of a dialect or ethno wax is similar to Polish that are distinct from it.
It is. It's also probably quite comparable and again, it's not suited to current day association or organisational contexts.
It was certainly a sense of having the same track records because Schuller's solution actually
was very reluctant about the specific interactions that if discursive there was a certain.
It is essential to have the best performance.
And most of the places are the people who should be actually doing it.
So in this circuit they are the minority in their life.
Because if you look at people just going across the last two questions, sorry too.
I'm curious. First, so we could start to my question relates to this.
The idea of the importance of the second of the experience for me was contemporary.
So I'm wondering whether there's any business in between that kind of memory, politics and the rest.
Who wants to know more about the Bush experience, especially in.
Establishment. Seriously. Whether there was a sense of alienation from most of them, that's not what I was coming to.
This wasn't listening to me. Think of it. It was, I guess, some time ago as well.
And to me was a series of. Actually one of the things that you use to distinguish between the reasons you paused using the.
You know, you have this logical attitude.
Basically it's reboots. It's kind of reminded me that from this book check out.
Great. So just from the negative reactions to this.
Steffen Schmidt, former student here. I'm just briefly following on this pragmatic threat from whether it would be good service, EU membership.
I wouldn't have given any thought to as to whether the evolution here,
the administrative reform that started in the late 1980s after was mandated by membership in the EU and was all about local empowerment,
regional empowerment, and whether that has played any role in the kind of grander scale of, of empowering local communities,
vocal constituencies, but perhaps most specifically in terms of providing a platform for some of the UK's most.
Thanks for this question. So taking the nice opportunity from different angles to touch on because this question really doesn't quite know for sure.
But it's a very good one. It's a peak explaining to your clients that it's it's very true that the broader European context,
as well as the Polish context, I think it's the right moment for for for regional movements.
This idea that this secret, the payment to a national classification is a particularly powerful form of claims making.
And in the Polish context that this could be plugged into a broader constituency, decentralised, ethical play, important roles.
But I do think I think especially to thinking about the unique vitality, apparently,
of the this search of solution self-identification and especially the way it's played out.
I think we see that this the reference to the Second World War is really crucial in terms of
the kind of life experiences or at this stage of life experiences of parents and grandparents,
that that's the really kind of powerful memory politics that really verges in
terms of what does this mean to talk about this experience yet it's interesting.
Find out with the latest fragments of interesting the the Warsaw uprising of thinking about that that truth microcosmic
claim that this is the part that stands in for full and that it's no coincidence that historians like Richard Kaczmarek.
I think both of these issues, the obvious thing to write about is the folks list experience.
It's this particular given the centrality of the Second World War.
It's it's just that secure,
even though I tend to be a little sceptic about kind of over psychologies explanations of the necessity of coming to terms with that.
I think there is there are clear patterns of always going back to revisit the Second World War.
And the Polish tax is a number of dimensions quite recently to the fact that there is this
incredibly distinctive Polish experience of the war that quite literally speak its name,
I think is a very, very important part of how again, this way frame this what what's the point of the fight yourself, Sweets?
What is that bringing to the surface? I think that it's what helps more than anything.
But Betsy Gold mentioned very excited and they try to teach them in terms of what combined persons and identities obscure the safe answers,
that all sorts of things that I'm sure for different people and very different than birth.
But I think one is that it's this kind of mental slippage that is important to draw to when you're talk about sort
of a german-polish border line in early periods and people automatically assume a kind of ethnic distinction,
German and Poles and a mixed identity person with intermarriage and mixed marriages.
And it was for the most part, that's not really what's going on at the turn of the century,
that people who actually are part of the same genealogical background but are kind of jointly going through a cultural transition.
I think actually today, at least in some of these cases, what you might be talking instance cases is precisely a mixed marriage where the
children are with people who are on one side or go back within Silesia for generations,
but other parts of the family. I think that gets back to the points of this migration issue.
That is that's where kind of grounded sense of ethnicity that might be why things
that you're getting at is that it's sort of an ethnically mixed background,
but some Polish sense that we've seen and there's tended to have been minorities.
I think it's quite true.
But really it's a broader question about what distinctions happen with counterpoint and that sort of splitting versus my lumping of these experiences.
It is true that it's within the blueprints for both of Poland's very,
very roughly corresponding to interwar German solution that you saw already the early 1990.
So smaller but quite substantial group identifies as true.
And there is a sequence of the Nazi critics formative, but it is in this case, the most recent German past.
And I know a anthropologist colleague of mine who did some extensive work there is that it's noticeable and telling that the
most recent kind of script of German is that they have is from the Nazi period for people in the nineties were still alive.
That's their memory. Germany was Nazi Germany.
And so it's it's a very particular to not to imply that all those identifying with the German were at the time neo-Nazi.
But it is a very particular and yet most recent point of reference that they have in mind.
And while there are some people identifying with the German or formerly in Eastern procedures, it's very, very few.
So the interesting now is that from the statistics,
they say that there's a little bit of movement within the German or I think the big upward story there is still kind of outward operation.
But I think at the margins, at least, you're getting a bit of the kind of identification solution and that broad array of
solution can occasionally reflect earlier does actually spill over into the way we spoke,
not just in this issue, but it's. Okay.
Very good. I think we're going to have to then draw things to oppose so that he gives a really nice case study interface of regional national history.
I wonder if this in the sense of a but larger issues of the separatist impulse here for the beacon echoes of Scottish a Catalan story.
This becomes part of the post-Cold War setting in which these three regional separatist influences start to stick together to play with anyway.
But I think at this point, we've we've worked too hard. I want to thank very much Jim and Hugo for a moment to thank everybody for coming.