Between a “bleeding” frontier and a “Greening” border. Recurring nature around the Polish-German interwar border in Upper Silesia (1921–1939)

The following paper poses the question of whether the interwar period border between Germany and Poland in Upper Silesia that was established during the 1920s and lasted until 1939 had a notable effect on the highly industrialised and economically exploited environment surrounding it. This idea was inspired by previous works by Peter Coates and Astrid Eckert, that showed contested border regions with reduced human activity to be beneficial for other species. On examination, however, the border situation in Upper Silesia differed greatly from those examples by promoting cross‑border mobility rather than limiting it. The paper looks at a wide array of contemporary Polish and German speaking publications concerned with the border region for clues about changes in the environment.