On the frontier questions denoting Silesia and Lesser Poland in the interwar period

Jolanta Kwiatek

Uniwersytet Opolski, Instytut Nauk Pedagogicznych
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4812-1330

Aleksander Kwiatek

Uniwersytet Opolski, Instytut Politologii
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3489-1249

Abstract

The aim of the article is an attempt to present the connections of Upper Silesia with Lesser Poland and Cracow in the mid-war period. This association can be perceived from different perspectives: the economic, the social and the cultural ones. The presented article touches upon their fraction only, i.e. the frontier question in regards to Silesia and Lesser Poland, which had been the feature between both centres of the political environment in the context of the leadership and the supremacy in the area of Southern Poland. The basic source material for the article is the press, mainly that of Cracow, Warsaw and Silesia, which up to that moment had never been covered to the degree. Whereas the main theme of this study could be put into a sentence of what the rise of the reasons for the indicated matter was, what factors were responsible for its growth tendency, then – whether or not the question itself was justified and what outcome it could evoke. The article definitely disproves the idea that had already been accepted by the Polish and German historiography as if the Second Polish Republic might have become disinterested in the fate of Silesia.

Keywords:

the autonomy of Silesia, frontier question, Cracow as a cultural centre of Southern Poland, Katowice as an economic centre of Second Republic of Poland