Psychological Trauma versus Cultural Trauma

According to the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013), trauma refers to an event that goes beyond normal human experience, thereby exhausting the individual resources of the person who goes through such experiences. As a result of living through single episodes (e.g., rape, motor-vehicle accident) or prolonged experiences (e.g., war, ongoing sexual abuse), children and adults can develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; American Psychiatric Association 2013). Consisting of a broad spectrum of symptoms, PTSD involves: ruminating about and reexperiencing flashbacks related to the traumatic experience (including intrusive thoughts), hypervigilance, difficulty sleeping, lowered mood, and persistent avoidance of stimuli related to the traumatic event (people, places, thoughts, feelings; (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) refers to a clinical impairment following a prolonged trauma—lasting months or years—and is associated with a loss of control over one’s life as well as the inability to escape or make autonomous decisions (Herman Reference Herman1992). Psychological problems resulting from humancentric trauma (e.g., war, abuse) are associated with longer-lasting and more severe presentations than the psychological changes observed following traumatic experiences caused by nonhuman factors (e.g., natural disasters; Charuvastra and Cloitre Reference Charuvastra and Cloitre2008). Research also indicates that PTSD and C-PTSD often co-exist with mental health challenges such as depression and/or anxiety disorders (Flory and Yehuda, Reference Flory and Yehuda2015; Puetz, Youngstedt, and Herring, Reference Puetz, Youngstedt and Herring2015), alcohol or substance addictions (María-Ríos and Morrow, Reference María-Ríos and Morrow2020), and/or problematic internalizing behaviors (e.g., guilt or shame; (Lee, Scragg, and Turner Reference Lee, Scragg and Turner2011). Many individuals living with PTSD may also experience social isolation, stigmatization or self-stigmatization, and/or social bonding disorders (Bonfils et al. Reference Bonfils, Lysaker, Yanos, Siegel, Leonhardt, James, Brustuen, Luedtke and Davis2018; Charuvastra and Cloitre Reference Charuvastra and Cloitre2008).

According to Alexander (Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, cultural trauma occurs when a community is subjected to a traumatic event that transcends previous experience and resources, thereby significantly and irrevocably changing the group’s identity. Alexander refers to the concept of trauma in psychoanalytic terms, although it is noteworthy that the criteria he described follow the clinical picture of PTSD, with the exception that cultural trauma affects a larger group, not merely individuals within that group (Braveheart-Jordan and DeBruyn Reference Braveheart-Jordan, DeBruyn, Adleman and Enguidanos-Clark1995). Cultural trauma is cumulative and emotional, and it is cognitive suffering of many individuals that lasts for years and transfers to subsequent generations. Because of their shared experience, Braveheart-Jordan and DeBruyn (Reference Braveheart-Jordan, DeBruyn, Adleman and Enguidanos-Clark1995) point out that it can be more difficult for a community to explicitly work through grief and cope with trauma—the multifaceted nature of individuals’ experiences can prevent recovery. These difficulties are further exacerbated by a belief that “good people face something bad” (Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004b). It is worthwhile to refer to Lerner’s (Reference Lerner1980) concept of a just world, which assumes the existence of a cognitive error related to the attribution of experienced suffering: good people should encounter good things, so the suffering and evil experienced may imply a deserved punishment for bad behavior. Research indicates that individuals with strong beliefs about the justice of the world are more likely to place blame on the victims, not on the tormentor. This way of interpreting events by the community can result in persistent feelings of guilt, catastrophic thoughts, and ruminations related to the trauma experienced, all of which can result in the development and prolongation of PTSD (Lee et al. Reference Lee, Scragg and Turner2011).

It is important to note that social support is an important protective factor against developing PTSD, especially receiving help from others. One central factor of trauma therapy is the ability to talk about what happened, to confront it, and to work through it (Schwartz Reference Schwartz2016). As van der Kolk (Reference Van der Kolk2015) highlights, some people “forget their tongue” after experiencing a traumatic event, making it is difficult to verbally describe events evoking powerful feelings of anxiety or fear. Immediately after the event, and even years after the trauma has occurred, individuals may lose the ability to describe the event when they recall it. In fact, neuroimaging evidence demonstrates decreased activation in Broca’s area (one of primary speech centers responsible for naming thoughts and emotions) following emotional trauma. This issue deprives the individual of the ability to communicate their feelings and perspective of events, disrupts memory consolidation and recall, and prevents the trauma from being worked through. This is even more important in the case of cultural trauma, where collective memory is a primary carrier not only for the trauma itself but also for how it will be passed on to future generations, an inheritance that leads to the collective experience and reliving (reproducing) the trauma. On the contrary, there is some evidence to suggest that physiology rather than cultural transmission and collective memory may better explain the generational transference of PTSD. For example, a genetic susceptibility to the presence of reduced cortisol levels has been found to be related to the appearance of trauma symptoms in children of Holocaust survivors or war veterans (Yehuda and Seckel Reference Yehuda and Seckl2011).

Walters and Simoni (Reference Walters and Simoni2002) proposed a model of trauma, coping, and health that accounts for cultural factors in Native American women. This model shows that cultural indicators such as identification-related attitudes, acculturation, or culturally derived coping styles are important mediators in the relationship between trauma experience and mental/physical health. Consistent with van der Kolk’s (Reference Van der Kolk2015) assumptions that the key to trauma development is the context in which it occurs, Walters and Simoni’s (Reference Walters and Simoni2002) model clearly points to the relevance of cultural processes for dealing with trauma. Along these lines, it should be further emphasized that when a given community’s culture is treated as undesirable or stigmatizing, the risk of developing PTSD is increased. Thus, it is the event itself and the environmental context in which the event occurs that contributes to traumatization. Therefore, it seems reasonable to apply this model more broadly, considering the culture not only of Native American women but also of other minority cultural groups in other regions around the world.

The Concept of Cultural Trauma

Psychology research in the 1990s laid the foundations for the “discourse of trauma” (Sztompka Reference Sztompka2000, 16). The notion of trauma, which previously only functioned primarily in the field of psychology, became increasingly used by other social sciences and humanities fields during this time, including sociology (Caruth, Reference Caruth1995, Reference Caruth1996; LaCapra, Reference LaCapra1994; Maruyama, Reference Maruyama1996; Neal, Reference Neal1998; Sztompka, Reference Sztompka2000). In particular, the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, provided a significant contribution to the discourse, stating, “trauma is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by society […] when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander, Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a). It should be noted, however, that “events are not inherently traumatic. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution. The attribution may be made in real time, as an event unfolds; it may also be made before the event occurs, as an adumbration, or after the event has concluded, as a post-hoc reconstruction” (Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, 8). For trauma to emerge, members of the group must either experience the suffering directly or share a sense of suffering through symbolic extension and self-identity (Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004b, 199). Trauma occurs by “this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity. Collectivity actors ‘decide’ to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go” (Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, 10).

Therefore, certain events may be traumatic at one point in history and not at another, so the sociocultural context is pivotal here (Smelser Reference Smelser, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004). In this line, we can assume that cultural trauma is being referenced when (a) a memory is acknowledged, accepted, and publicly affirmed by the relevant group or (b) a community is triggered by an event or situation that is loaded with negative consequences, represented as unmovable, and treated as threatening to the existence of society or violating one or more of its basic cultural assumptions (Smelser Reference Smelser, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004).

It is crucial for this group “to build a convincing framework for cultural classification” (Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, 12) and to construct a new story that convinces the group they have experienced trauma. It can be a struggle to define the situation and impose it on the group (Eyerman, Reference Eyerman, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004). According to Alexander (Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, 13–15), waging such a battle, and the subsequent emergence of a collective imaginary, depends on answering questions about

1. (a) the nature of the suffering (what happened to the group or wider community?)

2. (b) the nature of the victim (what group of people was affected by the trauma?)

3. (c) the relationship between victims of trauma and the wider community (what is the relationship between the community and the repressed group?)

4. (d) assigning responsibility for the trauma (who hurt the victim?)

Next, we attempt to show how the individual tragedies of Silesians serving in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War transformed into a story about the experience of cultural trauma experienced by the Silesian community. Here, we understand the Silesian community as a group of people for whom identification with Silesianness is an important element of their identity. This concept is independent of the existence and intensity of their national identification (Polish, German, Silesian).

Upper Silesia: A Historical Problem

Within nation-states, regional histories have been subject to neglect or have been incorporated into the master narrative of the mainstream national history, becoming subordinated to the surrounding culture. Today, we are dealing with the opposite phenomenon: regions dissect their histories and attach equally legitimate stories about the history of Europe, its regions, and its national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups (Kamusella Reference Kamusella2005, 134). Postwar Poland was rebuilt with the goal of an ethnically uniform national state from which all non-Polish elements were removed; the history of Upper Silesia was no exception. In this context, the identity of the contemporary population of Upper Silesia required verification and a revelation. Regional history should help in the process of identification with a small homeland whose past is often ethnically and politically un-Polish (Kamusella Reference Kamusella2005, 135).

The word “Śląsk” (Latin for Silesia) in international terminology has meaning in relation to a geographical region and an area of historical significance. It is an area that currently lies within the borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany. The division into Upper and Lower Silesia, partly geographical but also historical and cultural, is of great importance. Upper Silesia lies in the basin of the upper Oder River and the initial course of the Vistula River occupying the southeastern part of historical Silesia. From the Historical point of view, Silesians have shaped their borders since the Middle Ages through conflicts over sovereignty between the interests of Polish and Czech princes. A significant date is 1348, when the Polish king Casimir the Great relinquished his rights to Silesia to the Czech king John of Luxemburg. From the point of view of separate history and different social and cultural experiences, this is important, because from that moment until the 20th century, Silesia was outside the territory of the Republic of Poland. The end of the First World War, and with it Poland’s regained independence, brought a great breakthrough for Upper Silesia, which was divided between Poland and Germany in 1922. “This is undoubtedly a key moment in history, which shaped most of the contemporary forms of Silesian regionalism in all its manifestations and forms […]. Looking from the social side, the crossing of Upper Silesia by the Polish-German state border was a tragedy […]. The first visible consequence was the mass resettlement of the population, who, driven by national considerations, abandoned their home areas to move to the other side of the border” (Smolorz 2012, 45–56). The Plebiscite and the Silesian Uprisings are a tragic part of the history of Upper Silesia, being a symbol of often fratricidal fights.

Again, the critical date for Upper Silesians is October 8, 1939, when after the September campaign, the Katowice Regency was incorporated into Germany and the Opole Regency was enlarged by new districts. In order to fight political opponents, to implement the Nazi racial and national policy, and to maintain maximum mobilization of the society for the war effort in the time of total war, methods of state terror including forced labor, special courts, imprisonment in concentration camps, arrests, executions of hostages, and even public executions were used against Upper Silesians (Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek, Bahlcke, Gawarecki and Kaczmarek2011, 258). Upper Silesia posed a great challenge to German nationality policy. Basing the policy on the racial division of members of the German community into “ours” and “foreign” had to assume the possibility of accepting Silesians into the German community under certain conditions due to their historical “Germanic” origin. The solution to the problem was to be the Deutsche Volksliste (DVL), the purpose of which was to divide the region’s population into four groups as the people were incorporated into the Reich: Groups 1 and 2 were politically active and passive members of the German minority who were granted German citizenship; Group 3 was constituted by other nationalities—for example, Upper Silesians who could, as an exception, be granted limited German citizenship; and after 1942, Upper Silesians were automatically granted a third group and treated temporarily as German citizens. The 4th group comprised people of German origin who were “Polonized” during the interwar period (Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek, Bahlcke, Gawarecki and Kaczmarek2011, 260). Belonging to a particular group was obligatory for the Silesian population, and a special commission decided about its classification. The remaining inhabitants of the incorporated territories were recognized either as people under the protection of the German Reich (this meant deprivation of their political and partial civil rights and economic discrimination) or as enemies of the German Reich (Jews and Gypsies—for whom this meant deportation to the east and systematic murder; Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek2010, 422). In reality, however, the needs of industry (e.g., certain positions in mining were linked to higher categories) and local considerations (such as the possibility of influencing the actions of the Commission) made it clear that the DVL had little in common with a given industry’s goals, and also said little about the actual identification of the people.

One of the more tragic postwar problems for Salesians was the compulsory military service of Upper Silesians in the Wehrmacht, which resulted from granting them German citizenship and introducing the general obligation to serve in the army. The Polish resistance movement recorded in its reports that about 250,000 men were conscripted in Silesia (Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek2010, 177). Refusal to serve was directly linked to state terror and held consequences for entire Upper Silesian families, not just for individuals. The landing of the Allies in Italy and France was therefore connected with the mass desertion of Upper Silesians. Despite the liberation of Europe, together with the Polish Armed Forces in the West in the postwar reality, the history of the Upper Silesian shattered any attempt at a uniform image created after the war in the historiography of communist Poland, according to which Poles did not agree to cooperate with their Nazi occupiers. Postwar Poland was envisioned as an ethnically homogeneous nation-state, for ethnic Poles only (Linek Reference Linek1997a, 168). The approaches to ethnic homogenization of Upper Silesia were to be “population transfer” (expulsion); “national verification”; and “national resocialisation” (ennationalization), “degermanisation,” and “repolonisation” (that is, Polonization) (Linek, Reference Linek1997b; Kamusella, Reference Kamusella2004: 31). A kind of “black legend” of the Upper Silesian was created, including the stereotype of an Upper Silesian as a renegade, a personage associated in the rest of Poland with traitors in Wehrmacht uniform (Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek2010, 373). Such stereotypes were connected with the persecutions of the Silesian population after the war.

From the Trauma of War to Cultural Trauma

The Upper Silesian community felt the effects of the war long after its end. Silesians were imprisoned in German camps, miners were taken to work in Soviet Russia, civilians were displaced (regardless of their will) to Germany. There were still no men returning from the war, and Polish citizenship was not automatically regained by residents of the portion of Upper Silesia that belonged to Poland before the war. Citizenship status depended on the category of the DVL, which was assigned top-down to Silesians during the war. Many years later, this complex phenomena of degradation of the Upper Silesian community in the first years after the war became known as the “Upper Silesian Tragedy.” In addition, immediately after the war, there was a struggle against all manifestations of Germanness (Kamusella Reference Kamusella1999, Reference Kamusella2006), and later the communist authorities used the German threat as an element of control over Polish society. Therefore, until the breakthrough of 1989, it was not possible to work on the trauma caused by Silesians’ service in the German army during World War II. This was also the case in other communist countries (cf. Pušnik Reference Pušnik2019). In western European countries, the problem of the trauma of serving in the German army may have been addressed earlier (cf. Kidd Reference Kidd2005; Uhl Reference Uhl2011).

The content taught at school (Jaskulowski and Majewski Reference Jaskulowski and Majewski2017) and present in cultural texts did not take into account the wartime drama of Silesians. The dominant belief concerned the betrayal committed by Silesians who were Volksdeutsche (Szmeja Reference Szmeja2017). This led to a situation in which, as Maria Szmeja noted, the official history of the dominant Polish group remained completely different from the collective memory of Silesians (Szmeja Reference Szmeja2017). In the official version of the past, there was no place for the different fate of the Upper Silesian community. Years later, Zbigniew Rokita (Reference Rokita2020, 105), searching for his Silesian identity, wrote,

War trauma of the war persisted in the memories of the native inhabitants of Upper Silesia. Absent from school and in the media, the wartime past of Silesians was confined to family or local transmission. Admittedly, former soldiers were not always eager to tell their children and grandchildren about their past. They wanted to spare them knowledge that was inconvenient in Poland. However, during family and neighborhood gatherings, at birthday celebrations, at funeral banquets, at festive tables, those years were indeed remembered. Accounts such as the one obtained in the village of Bojszowy evidence this:

This remained the case until the turn of the 1980s, when Silesians began to make identity claims (Tilly Reference Tilly2005; Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017). There was a demand to depart from the conviction, obligatory in the People’s Republic of Poland, that Polish society lacks ethnic separateness and to notice the specificity of the Silesian identity. These actions were very much rooted in Salesian history (Eyerman Reference Eyerman, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004, 75), and their claims were formulated by groups referred to by Alexander (following Weber) as carrier groups—the collective agents of the trauma process (Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, 11). Silesian regional social organizations were established, including the largest of them, still active today, the Silesian Autonomy Movement. There also appeared intellectuals such as Kazimierz Kutz, Michał Smolorz, and Szczepan Twardoch, all of whom undertook the effort to articulate Silesian identity claims (Eyerman Reference Eyerman, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004, 63). The memory of the camps in which the Silesian people were imprisoned, the miners’ deportation to the USSR, and the murders of civilians committed by the Red Army in the winter of 1945 was restored. However, the service of Silesians in the German army was still a sensitive issue.

It was not until the publication of the book “To byli nasi ojcowie” (They Were Our Fathers, 1999) by the Silesian writer Alojzy Lysko that the process of restoring the problem of Silesian Wehrmacht soldiers to the official discourse began. It was then that a legitimizing narrative began to take shape that would allow Silesians to change from the status of perpetrator, ascribed to them after the war, to that of traumatized victim (Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017). Lysko’s publication was followed by others, including memoir books and historical studies (cf. Lysko Reference Lysko2004, Reference Lysko2017; Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek2010, Reference Kaczmarek, Bahlcke, Gawarecki and Kaczmarek2011; Szmeja Reference Szmeja2017) that developed this narrative, claiming dignity and prestige for the Silesians in question (Luczewski 2017). The process of objectification of war trauma began. At that time, a legitimizing narrative began to emerge that would allow Silesians to change their status—from that of perpetrators, attributed to them after the war—to victims who experienced years of complex trauma (Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017). This effort was followed by subsequent press publications, exhibitions—for example, Dziadek z Wehrmachtu. Doświadczenie zapisane w pamięci (2015), prepared by Haus der Deutsch-Polnischen Zusammenarbeit-Stowarzyszenie Genius Loci—memoir books, and historical studies (cf. Lysko Reference Lysko2004, Reference Lysko2017; Szczepuła-Ponikowska Reference Szczepuła-Ponikowska2007; Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek2010; Reference Kaczmarek, Bahlcke, Gawarecki and Kaczmarek2011; Szmeja Reference Szmeja2017), which further developed a narrative reclaiming the dignity and prestige of Silesians (Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017). The process of debunking the lies about the war trauma began, and some people started to report typical symptoms of PTSD, a condition that had been denied by postwar, communist-driven narrative that was two dimensional (Polish vs. German experiences with no consideration of Silesian experiences; cf. Lysko Reference Lysko2004).

Alojzy Lysko himself experienced the trauma of war as a child. His father was drafted into the German army when he was only five weeks old. As a child, Lysko waited a long time for his return, but he never came home from the war. Then he began to look for traces of his father, who died in Wehrmacht service, and undertook activities to commemorate the inhabitants of his own village, Bojszowy. This gave rise to a book describing the collected stories (the author himself uses the expression “family legends”) of forty-seven Bojszów residents who died in the war, their service documented and illustrated with photographs of soldiers in uniform, prints of letters, and military documents. Relationships were presented in an emotional way, without scientific apparatus, and such a presentation enhanced the power of their popular influence. Lysko’s intention was expressed in the first words of the book: “my generation, as a natural human impulse, has for half a century protected the memory of their fathers killed in the Wehrmacht with all the strength of their hearts. Now, when the curtains of silence have been lifted from the painful stigmata of Silesia, and the life of my generation is coming to an end—the desire to preserve this memory for a longer time has become even stronger” (Lysko Reference Lysko1999, 7).

A year later, the Paweł Woldan and Włodzimierz Filipek film Kolumbowie w kolorze Feldgrau (2000) had its premiere. There were publications in regional and central media. Serving in the German army ceased to be something that was “talked about in hushed tones.” As one of the interviewees told us, people were experiencing “something like a revelation. What lived somewhere in individual memories was part of some larger phenomenon that affected the whole community” (W_P3).Footnote ⁴ Family memories thus blended into the history of the entire community (Eyerman Reference Eyerman, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004, 74).

In this way, the “game of memory” that was being played in Upper Silesia gained new dynamism. Silesians rejected the status of perpetrators ascribed to them prior to 1989 and demanded the right to be considered victims (Assmann Reference Assmann, Assmann and Frevert1999; Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017). The growing awareness of being a victimized individual was transferred to the whole Silesian community in an occurrence of the phenomenon that Jie-Hyun Lim described as victimhood nationalism (Lim Reference Lim, Assmann and Conrad2010; Łuczewski, Reference Łuczewski2017). This effort, however, was not received favorably by other participants in the memory game. To them, it was unacceptable that Silesians would change their position in the ongoing global competition for the amount of suffering endured in World War II (Polonsky and Michlic Reference Polonsky, Michlic, Polonsky and Michlic2004, 9). This is why some Polish actors in the memory game denied the Silesian community the right to change its status from perpetrator to victim. This has been especially true since the German threat was and is being used by the political forces in power in Poland since 2015, thus, the use of the information about the service of the grandfather of one of the candidates (Donald Tusk) in the Wehrmacht during the presidential campaign in 2005 and the calling the supporters of the Silesian Autonomy Movement “a hidden German option” by Jarosław Kaczyński (2011). Not surprisingly, a Christmas text that included a paragraph dedicated to the suffering of German soldiers on the Eastern Front was taken down from one of the websites. After mass protests denying the right of soldiers to suffer, the text was taken down and readers apologized (W_P3). The Silesians have no allies in this game. They can only count on some regional politicians and journalists from a few national magazines (Gazeta Wyborcza, Tygodnik Powszechny). However, both major political forces in Poland do not support the claims of the Silesians. This may be a paradox since the leader of one of them, Donald Tusk, was at the beginning of his political career associated with the Gdansk regionalists. In addition, he is a Kashubian—that is, a representative of a group similarly experienced as the Silesians.

A small role in the process of objectifying the trauma of war was played by the Polish school curriculum (Jaskułowski and Majewski 2017). The process can be described rather an instrument of symbolic violence against the Silesian community (Bourdieu and Passeron Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1970), an interpretive move that ignored regional and ethnic diversity of the Silesian people (Bartoszek et al. Reference Bartoszek, Kijonka-Niezabitowska and Nawrocki2009). The history of the region, in the sense of the term “history” used by Bourdieu and Passeron (Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1970), is thus devoid of legitimacy, a fact that resonated very strongly during our primary research interviews. The proof can be seen this statement by one of our interview subjects: “The official history course mainly concerns Polish history and deals with it in such a martyrological-patriotic way and nobody mentions the Upper Silesians or gives only perfunctory information about them. I think that this can be done by enthusiasts of what is called regional education” (W_P2).

In this situation, the family message is supported by scientific literature and fiction. Polish, Czech, and German research thus fills gaps in the Silesian collective memory. The monograph, Polacy w Wehrmachcie (Poles in Wehrmacht) by Ryszard Kaczmarek is of particular importance here. Publications of the Silesian Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance also played an important educational role.Footnote ⁵ Historical reportages have been published, as well as novels in which the problem of Silesians in the Wehrmacht appears more popular (e.g., Zaniemówienie (Lose one’s tongue) by Justyna Wydra) or more serious in tone (e.g., Królestwo (Kingdom) by Szczepan Twardoch).Footnote ⁶ The educational role of such literature was noticed by one of our interlocutors:

The importance of regional organizations cannot be overlooked either, especially the largest of them, the Silesian Autonomy Movement. This organization seems to have completely understood the importance of historical policy for the reconstruction of Silesian identity while at the same time opposing the very proposal of an official historical policy. While discussing the importance of the capital of memory, one of our interlocutors said,

Later in the same interview, this subject added, “In my opinion it is not only a matter of some social engineering. This choice is connected with some identification of real needs and real emotions that are also behind individual memories that can be combined into such an identity binder” (W_P3).

Our research shows that the experience of Upper Silesians’ service in the Wehrmacht became an important element of their identity, marked statements about that time being “a pillar of identity” (W_P3) because those “events were more important than what happened after the war” (W_P2). Endowing them with the stigma of the perpetrator led to their greater integration, “this stigma with which people lived in Polish society and what bound them in local communities was service in the Wehrmacht” (W_P3). The lack of recognition for the sacrifice of Silesians in German uniforms turned into a claim to express and acknowledge grief associated with the profanation of values associated with the sacrum, which was the death and suffering of loved ones. The demand for emotional, symbolic, and institutional reparations—combined with the reconstruction of history—has also been formulated (cf. Alexander Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a). However, the historical capital generated through this process (Ostolski Reference Ostolski2011) is not reduced exclusively to the capital of suffering. It could only fully emerge in recent years as a delayed expression of a traumatic historical experience. The harm suffered, then, requires recognition and symbolic compensation (cf. Ostolski Reference Ostolski2011; Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017), a desire for which was pointed out to us during our research:

This seems to be an important perspective, as it reemphasizes the importance of the need for self-determination and for debunking the prevailing stigmas and stereotypes about Silesians—all of which were significant in the development of the “conspiracy of silence” and which exacerbated the historical sense of trauma and exclusion.

As we have already noted, the occurrence of cultural trauma requires, according to Alexander (Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, 12–15), the existence of four primary representations that provide answers to the questions that determine whether or not we are dealing with cultural trauma. The questions and their answers are presented below in Table 1.

Table 1.

Determinants of cultural trauma in the case of Silesians’ service in the Wehrmacht from Alexander’s (Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004a, Reference Alexander, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004b) perspective

The responses to the above questions indicate that we can speak of this moment as an incident of cultural trauma, a conclusion reinforced for years because it was not recognized by Polish society and could not be officially shown. Service in the German army became the central event in the story of Silesian identity (Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017). It has also made a significant contribution to increasing the stock of memory moral capital (Łuczewski Reference Łuczewski2017).

An attempt to symbolically recognize soldiers who fought in the Wehrmacht as victims rather than as traitors and enemies would be an opportunity to limit the traumatic effects of their experiences. This would reverse the meaning of the phenomenon of intrusion threatening the community (cf. Smelser Reference Smelser, Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka2004), thus turning Silesians in uniform from perpetrators into victims. The first steps in this direction have already been taken, but more effort is needed, as there is no room in the official Polish policy of remembrance for understanding the complex situation of Silesians during World War II.

Silesian Trauma from a Psychological Perspective

Trauma in the psychological sense does not have to be solely related to physical injury or involvement in an accident: the experience of prolonged psychological abuse, including exclusion, stigmatization, and living in constant fear of danger, can also bear the hallmarks of trauma (van der Kolk, Reference Van der Kolk2015). The described experiences of Upper Silesians in the context of World War II did not always meet the criteria of posttraumatic stress, but they were definitely related to collective suffering and exclusion, both of which were significant in the identity formation of subsequent generations of Upper Silesians and in determining their relations with other Poles (Kaczmarek Reference Kaczmarek, Bahlcke, Gawarecki and Kaczmarek2011). It is also worth noting that the work of subsequent generations—such as Lysko and Rokita—who has reconstructed those events, heretofore consciously kept silent by the participants themselves.

In the first part of Duchy won (Spirits of War), a fictionalized diary of a soldier from Silesia conscripted into the army, Lysko (Reference Lysko2008, 15) writes that “blood spilled does not cease to cry from generation to generation.” This commentary seems to be important in the context of the experiences of Upper Silesians during the war and postwar periods. Throughout his fictionalized diary, Lysko presents the trauma of war, which seems to be universal, as a devastating and dehumanizing experience. At the same time, however, he gives it an additional dimension in the form of the problem of the identity of Upper Silesians conscripted into the Wehrmacht, for whom service for the Nazi regime constituted a dissonance, or even a further traumatization of the interwar period (Lysko Reference Lysko2008). Additionally, in the volume in W sieroctwie bez skargi (Orphanhood Without Complaint), Lysko (Reference Lysko2017) points to an additional dimension of the trauma associated with the forgetting and suppression of the war years—namely the fate of the orphans of the Upper Silesian soldiers:

Orphanhood due to the loss of a parent or parents was a collective experience for hundreds of thousands of children who grew up during the postwar period (compare Mariusz Malinowski’s [2010] documentary Dzieci z Wehrmachtu—Children of the Wehrmacht in which Alojzy Lysko was the main protagonist). For the Upper Silesians, however, an additional context was important: that of the nimbus of secrecy and denial, connected with concealing or keeping silent about the participation of a parent, usually the father, in the war on the Nazi side. It is also worth remembering, nomen omen, that some of the “Upper Silesian orphans” were children who were taken away from their parents against their will and transported to the Reich during the war. In addition to stories of families being separated during the war, W sieroctwie bez skargi cites stories of people who were persecuted by Poles and Soviets because family members served in the Wehrmacht. The memory of those members who died or did not return from the war was dangerous and additionally traumatizing; therefore, nonremembrance was a form of adaptation to a reality in which even the slightest mention of collaboration with the Nazis was treated as national treason. This, in turn, threatened exclusion from the community—a community which at that time was suspicious and unfriendly toward Upper Silesians anyway. Once again, therefore, it seems that the “forgetting” of wartime was somehow imposed by the environment and had the function of adapting participants to the reality in which the cultural trauma of the Upper Silesians was repressed—both by the environment and by the people who were involved.

The context concerning the diversity of identity of Upper Silesians—who differed significantly from “native” Poles in terms of cultural, religious, or economic experience—and therefore the “Silesian” context of the experience of World War II and its consequences differed significantly from the Polish narrative. For the Poles, the Germans were an alien element in the form of torturers and invaders, but for a large number of Silesians they were an important point of reference in the context of their own culture and several hundred years of history. Thus, special attention should be paid to the cognitive dissonance that accompanied the generations of Silesians who lived during and after the Second World War. On one hand, after the war Silesians were forced to choose between belonging to Poland or Germany, and this choice often involved family dramas, even fratricidal conflicts, and a significant interference in the sense of constancy of their own identity. This, in turn, led to unimaginably difficult moral dilemmas when, after the start of World War II, a significant number of Upper Silesians faced the decision to accept registration on the Volkslista and take up service in the Wehrmacht, which at the time significantly increased the chances of survival for the entire family. The alternative to rejecting the assigned DVL category could have been confinement in a concentration camp. In the case of being drafted into the army, the alternative was desertion.

On the other hand, after the war, in a reality rewritten without the involvement of Upper Silesians themselves, the inhabitants of the region were stigmatized and often punished not only for serving in the Wehrmacht but also for their ethnicity in general. Those punishments came in the form of imprisonment in transit camps, in deportation to Germany for forced labor, or in general social exclusion in communist Poland. As Szmeja (Reference Szmeja2017, 21) writes, descriptions of postwar events are often very laconic for two reasons:

From the point of view of psychological functioning, the described experiences may have led to a loss of control and empowerment over one’s own life and lack of understanding of one’s own identity, as well as to the development of an autostigmatization that incorporated negative stereotypes about oneself as an element of one’s own self-narration. This seems to be important because the commonly available narrative about Upper Silesians was that they collaborated with Germans, which resulted in a strong sense of guilt and stigmatization and a lack of understanding by their fellow Poles, which left no sense that such a narrative could be changed. It is worth mentioning that this narrative has survived to some extent until today: simply mentioning a “grandfather from Wehrmacht” by Polish politicians is offensive and intended to cause social conflict. Thus, bearing in mind the experiences of Upper Silesians during and after the war, it is important to note that the coping strategy of the majority was avoidance in the form of silence, regardless of the “side” on which one stood, whether their participation was voluntary or not. In psychoanalytic jargon, it would be appropriate to use here the concept of defence mechanisms and repressed memory—that is, the semiconscious exclusion of the possibility of engaging in conversation about past experiences and the process of forgetting them—factors that contributed to further feelings of helplessness, compounding the trauma (Loftus and Ketchum Reference Loftus and Ketchum1994). However, it should also be emphasized that the lack of undertaking the subject of traumatic experiences and entering into discussion with the narration imposed by communist authorities after the end of World War II did not result from the lack of involvement of Upper Silesians. It seems that what was crucial was learned helplessness (Seligman Reference Seligman2011): for several decades of the first half of the 20th century, Upper Silesians functioned in a very unstable environment, which translated into a lack of clear rules of conduct and social expectations. The apogee was World War II and what happened to the men and women of Upper Silesia after its conclusion: a collective feeling of not belonging, a fear of being judged by other Poles, and a lack of understanding of the moral dilemmas they experienced during the war.

Of course, the context of their punishment may have been relevant to the many years of silence about the events of the war and postwar times. As Łuszczyna (Reference Łuszczyna2017) points out, Silesians who chose not to leave Polish lands after the Soviet invasion and defeat of the Germans were incarcerated in former concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were “bitten by the same lice” as prisoners incarcerated by the Nazis (Luszczyna 2017, 24). The fear that information about one’s wartime background or activities would be revealed led to concealment of that background and to a silence about wartime experiences for several generations, both of which reinforced the difficulty of coping with postwar trauma. These examples can therefore serve as models of behavior that, when copied by successive generations, led to the creation of cultural trauma among the Upper Silesians.