"This is an interesting neighborhood tale with significant implications for reports of nationalism and nearby identities all through Europe extra generally."

---Dennis Sweeney, college of Alberta

"James Bjork has produced a finely crafted, insightful, certainly, pathbreaking examine of the interaction among spiritual and nationwide identification in overdue nineteenth-century crucial Europe."

---Anthony Steinhoff, college of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Neither German nor Pole examines how the population of 1 of Europe's such a lot densely populated commercial districts controlled to defy simple nationwide categorization, even within the heyday of nationalizing pressures on the flip of the 20 th century. As James E. Bjork argues, the "civic nationwide" undertaking of turning population of higher Silesia into Germans and the "ethnic nationwide" venture of awakening them as Poles either loved successes, yet those usually canceled each other out, exacerbating instead of removing doubts approximately people's nationwide allegiances. during this impasse, it was once a special type of identification---religion---that supplied either the ideological framework and the social house for top Silesia to navigate among German and varnish orientations. A fine-grained, microhistorical learn of ways confessional politics and the day-by-day rhythms of bilingual Roman Catholic non secular perform subverted nationwide id, Neither German nor Pole strikes past neighborhood historical past to deal with vast questions on the connection among nationalism, faith, and modernity.