The Question of Upper Silesia in the eyes of the English- speaking public

Abstract

Reports from Upper Silesia were often printed by the British press after 1918.
While The London Times mentioned Upper Silesia just 7 times in the first decade
of the 21st century, it did so 870 times in the 1920s. The references at that time
dealt mostly with economic issues, such as the slowdown of the German economy
after the region was joined to Poland. The conservative press sympathized with
the Polish aspirations: The Times presented the First Silesian Uprising as a result
of German provocations and sanctions, while The Tablet published a letter from
the Irish reader who compared the sanctions imposed on Polish Catholics by
German Protestants to the political tensions between British Protestants and Irish
Catholics. On the other hand, the liberal Daily Chronicle presented the events
in the way that clearly favoured the German perspective: one of the newspaper’s
Berlin correspondents visited Katowice, where he learned from almost all residents
– ranging from workers to priests – that they wished to stay in Germany. The
same view was manifest in the correspondence published in The Guardian, which
printed among others an unflattering article about Wojciech Korfanty.