Recovered Territory

Upper Silesia, one of Central Europes most important industrial borderlands, was at the center of heated conflict between Germany and Poland and experienced annexations and border re-drawings in 1922, 1939, and 1945. This transnational history examines these episodes of territorial re-nationalization and their cumulative impacts on the region and nations involved, as well as their use by the Nazi and postwar communist regimes to legitimate violent ethnic cleansing. In their interaction withand mutual influence onone another, political and cultural actors from both nations developed a transnational culture of territorial rivalry. Architecture, spaces of memory, films, museums, folklore, language policy, mass rallies, and archeological digs were some of the means they used to give the borderland a German/Polish face. Representative of the wider politics of twentieth-century Europe, the situation in Upper Silesia played a critical role in the making of historys most violent and uprooting eras, 19391950.