‘Scoundrels’ and desperate mothers: gendering German and Polish propaganda in the Upper Silesian plebiscite, 1919–1921

Abstract

Upper Silesia lies at the crossroads of Germanic and Slavic Europe. A part of the Polish kingdom in the Middle Ages, the territory spent much of the early modern period under Habsburg rule, falling to Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century. Like nearly all of Central Europe at the time, the region was ethnically mixed; the population was comprised mainly of German-and Polish-speakers, who nonetheless considered themselves to be simply Silesian. That is, for much of its history, and even continuing into the present day, Upper Silesians’ identity resided at the local/regional level, and not at the national. In the age of political nationalism and cultural nation-building, however, it seemed that such regional identities might be swept away by the rising tide of the nation. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the region experienced not one but two intense nation-building projects – one German, one Polish. These initiatives reached their climax on 21 March 1921, when a plebiscitegave Upper Silesians the chance to choose whether they would be Germans or Poles – or, more accurately, whether they would be citizens of the newly reorganized Germany or the newly reconstituted Poland. Ordered by the victorious Allied Powers in the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, the plebiscite in Upper Silesia was to determine whether the territory – and by extension her nearly 2.3 million inhabitants – would remain German or become a part of Poland. The Treaty gave the nascent German and Polish governments nearly two full years to inundate the region with various forms of propaganda. It is in this context that the two booklets quoted from above were produced.Both were published before the plebiscite (1921 and 1920, respectively), andproduced in the capitals of their respective nations (Warsaw and Berlin). Both authors stressed that the region was ‘naturally’ a part of either Germany or Poland and had been so for centuries. To recognize only the ethnic/historical arguments of these works, however, is to overlook their second, equally important argument – that of the economic and social situations in both nations. In the years before the plebiscite, German and Polish propaganda initiatives highlighted the economic stability of their nations, while labeling the other as poor andweak. This was largely accomplished by images that were highly gendered – a feature of plebiscite propaganda that has been greatly overlooked. While the analysis of the broad variety of visual and textual propagandamaterial used in the plebiscite campaigns, such as posters, caricatures, booklets, pamphlets, leaflets and newspaper articles, is important for our understanding of the overall propaganda project of both the German and Polish governments and nationalist groups, this chapter will focus mainly on the most visible aspect of the propaganda, the posters and leaflets produced in the two years prior to the March 1921 plebiscite. It will analyze the interplay of different rhetorical strategies, ethnic and national, economic and social, as well as cultural, and explore especially the importance of the constructed differences of class and gender in the propaganda. The paper addresses two main questions: First, what iconographic, visual and rhetorical strategies did German and Polish propagandists use to convince Upper Silesians to vote for either Germany or Poland? Second, what role did gender and class play in the propaganda? The approach of this study reflects the recent development in the scholarshipon nation and nationalism, particularly in East Central Europe. Until the early 1980s scholars had mostly interpreted nationalism as a political and social phenomenon of modernity. Since than, however, they increasingly followed the ‘cultural and linguistic turn’, adopted a cultural approach3 and conceptualized the nation as, to use Benedict Anderson’s oft-quoted term, an ‘imagined community’.4 Drawing primarily, though not exclusively, on examples from East Central Europe, the work of Miroslav Hroch stressed the developmental stages of nationalism in smaller nations: first, ‘the period of scholarly interest’; second, ‘the period of patriotic agitation’; and third, the period of ‘the rise of a mass national movement’. He also emphasized the importance of the social basis of nationalism.5