Our Elsewheres: Excerpt From Karl-Markus Gauß’s In The Forest Of Metropoles

• The actuality was that since the Middle Ages many inhabitants of Silesia did not regard themselves to be either German or Polish and did not consider German or Polish their mother tongue.

• The Schlonsaks did not feel they had their own nationality. While all those around them were discovering their nationalities, the Schlonsaks saw themselves as pre-national, as descendants of a territory that they did not consider as a borderland of one or the other national states.

• Silesia, European heartland in the middle of the continent, had always been pushed to the margin and treated as a kind of inner colony expected to provide raw material.

Now things get a bit complicated. What I wrote about the results of the 1910 census in Upper Silesia which showed that the great majority of inhabitants of Opole identified themselves with either only the German or only the Polish language is true. However, to infer from this that such Silesians actually existed—despite the fact that the myth of them persists to this day—would be premature. Namely, the census itself distorted reality. The findings were the consequence of a grim nationality policy executed in Prussian Silesia under Bismarck. Bismarck and his men disrupted an age-old Silesian actuality which they tried to eliminate in the face of thousands of combative schoolteachers and supporters of ethnic traditions. The actuality was that since the Middle Ages many inhabitants of Silesia did not regard themselves to be either German or Polish and did not consider German or Polish their mother tongue.

The language spoken by these unreliable citizens—given that they were not fully cognizant of their nationality—was Schlonsak, pejoratively called Wasserpolnisch, or watered-down Polish, by the German authorities. The fact that Schlonsak was called Lachian by the Silesians who did not live in Prussia but a few kilometres south in the Austro-Hungarian Empire does not clarify the situation. I know this sounds unreasonably complicated, but I am not the one who is making the terminology unnecessarily confusing. This, rather, is part of the sad fate of the Schlonsaks, Wasserpolaks or Lachs because they themselves had never been completely aware of their history and those now trying to recall it must appeal to legends.

It is true that in the Silesian regions the population formed that numbered in the hundreds of thousands and developed a language with various dialects that blended elements of Polish, Czech, Slovak and German. This language is still spoken today. Its grammar follows Polish, its vocabulary is influenced by German and it includes elements of Czech and Slovak.

In the nineteenth century, when nationalism began to exert historical influence and was also exported to Silesia as the ideological cargo of modernization, those who identified nationally with Germans and their Polish counterparts began looking at the Silesians’ age-old common language with equal contempt as an impure commingling that needed to be ethnically cleansed with draconian measures. They therefore designated this language, which was probably spoken by two or three million Silesians as Wasserpolnisch and banned it as a kind of diluted Polish from which the Germans as well as the Poles needed to be saved. And this banned Silesian language—Šlonsko godka / Schlonsak—was not even offered as an option in the 1910 linguistic national affiliation census. German and Polish were the only choices. The Schlonsaks did not feel they had their own nationality. While all those around them were discovering their nationalities, the Schlonsaks saw themselves as pre-national, as descendants of a territory that they did not consider as a borderland of one or the other national states. When they revolted, something the Silesian miners often did, their cause was freedom, not national unity. They did not want to become German or Polish; they wanted to remain Schlonsaks, to keep for themselves some of the wealth they were always digging out of the earth for others and to continue speaking their mother tongue. In a paper on linguistics, I recently found this example sentence of Schlonsak in which the German words are beautifully integrated into Polish grammar: ‘Moj junge se szlecht auffiruje, ani se sztyfli nie wixowal’—Mein Junge führt sich schlecht auf, nicht einmal seine Stiefel putzt er. (My boy conducts himself poorly; he doesn’t even clean his boots.)

Readers will laugh at this sentence and wonder if such a dialect—which furthermore differed from city to city—could ever have developed its own normal, so to speak, standard written language? Why not? Languages are flowing streams, not standing water, and over the course of Europe’s history, countless dialects were lost whereas others became the foundations of major national languages. When Garibaldi unified Italy, no more than 10 per cent of these eventual Italians actually spoke Italian. What did they speak if not Italian? Well, Friulian and Sardinian, Greek and Sicilian, Neapolitan and Venetian; today’s Standard Italian is based on a Florentine dialect of Tuscan, indeed the language of Dante and Petrarch. That large languages are formed when one of their regional dialects is declared the norm is not an unreasonable process; and that there are 50 or 60 larger languages rather than 500 or 600 smaller ones in Europe today is in general neither good nor bad. Still, that one day there might be only five or six is not something I would hope for and don’t believe I need to fear.

[. . .]

In closing my Polish trip, I passed once more through Opole then continued south along the Oder River for 70 or 80 kilometres to Racibórz, near the Czech border. I had been given the names of Schlonsak activists in Wrocław. I had grown so confused about Silesian matters that I wanted to hear from experts what the situation was with the Schlonsak Renaissance and Silesian regionalism.

I don’t have much to say about Racibórz, called Ratibor until 1945. I was only there for an afternoon. Across from the train station entrance, on a small mound of gravel and sand, stands an old locomotive painted a glowing shade of green. It looks like it had been brought here from an oversized child’s room. Apparently, it is the first locomotive that had run between Ratibor and Gliwice. [. . .]

I met the Schlonsak activists in a chic tavern on the square. The Schlonsaks are a gloomy people, as the legend goes, who were put on the defensive by the modernization of the nineteenth century which formed the national states as well as secluded provincials whom history passed over. They have always had to labour for foreign rulers—for the House of Habsburg under its rotting feudal system, for the rapid industrialization of Prussia under the Hohenzollern, for the Polish Communists who raised a vast heavy industry around Katowice, Zabrze and Bytom, which in winter turned the snow black with coal soot while children were born sick in that classless society. But the activist were not gloomy, they were furious and did not look part as champions of discarded traditions. Quite the contrary, they were stylishly dressed and, with a worldly demeanour, they praised the advantages of modernization, which the hardworking Silesians advanced much more efficiently than the lazy Poles. However, all the wealth generated in Silesia, they claimed, had always flowed to others—the Austrians, the Prussians, then the communist and now the capitalist Poles.

From what I knew of the history of Silesia, I could not contradict them, but the longer I listened to them, the uneasier I felt. Their complaints were justified. Silesia, European heartland in the middle of the continent, had always been pushed to the margin and treated as a kind of inner colony expected to provide raw material. Still, the two activists did not look like exploited proletarians but like clever profiteers of societal change who were outraged that they, so competent, industrious and smart, had to pay taxes for people they considered incompetent, lazy and stupid. If we hadn’t been sitting in Upper Silesia, in Racibórz, close to the Czech border, we could have been having the same discussion in Mantua, Turin or Como, in a cafe frequented by the perpetually incensed members of Lega Nord, or anywhere else in Europe where the rabid regionalists always consider themselves the truly disadvantaged, even when they are obviously among the privileged.

We took no real pleasure in each other’s company; our resentments were too different for us to have become accomplices in them. And so we soon parted with friendly expressions of sympathy. How strange, I thought, I just met two Poles who didn’t like either the Germans or the Poles but would most like to fabricate a Silesian nation and found a Silesian state to gain a measure of imperial immediacy so that they could negotiate directly with Brussels and avoid any detour through the government in Warsaw. Schlonsak, yes, that’s what their language is called, but only their grandmas could really speak it any more.

A cultural travelogue uncovering the overlooked peoples, places, and humanist traditions of Europe’s periphery, Karl-Markus Gauß’s In the Forest of Metropoles reveals how these fragile, often-forgotten cultures shaped the continent’s past and present.