Far Away Places: Voting on Geography (Oddity of the Week)
Created | Updated Jul 6, 2014
Let's get this straight…they live in Poland, but they want to be part of Bavaria…?
Far Away Places: Voting on Geography
Ah, far-away places. Somebody's backyard is another person's exotic locale. Take this poster. It's asking people to donate money to buy train tickets for people from Poland to come to Bavaria to vote in a plebiscite. Why? We'll get to that in a minute. Here's the Library of Congress description:
Poster shows a large group of figures in the shape of Upper Silesia and a train going past them. Text states that millions of patriotic Upper Silesians wish to vote in the upcoming election but are too poor to travel. Donations to the Bavarian Border Fund are requested and establishments accepting donations are given.
So far, so good. But why in the world are people voting about whether they're in Poland or Bavaria in 1921?
It's all Woodrow Wilson's fault.
Yep, the U.S. President was a first-class meddler. He meddled in Mexico. (Ask Pancho Villa.) He meddled in Europe. (Ask anybody.) And after World War I, he came up with those Fourteen Points. At which point the U.S. Congress told him to stop meddling, because they didn't want to join the League of Nations and defend places they couldn't spell. We wish they had stuck to that…
Anyway, thanks to Mr Wilson, Monsieur Clemenceau, and somebody named Lloyd George, the map of Europe got redrawn after the Great War. Which made a lot of people angry. Particularly if they happened to find themselves in a different country from the one they thought they belonged in.
These Versailles planners invented countries, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. You see how that turned out. And they put the Upper Silesians in Poland. Which wasn't where they wanted to be. Which is why the Bavarians were buying them train tickets.
Travel…it's interesting. People have different goals. The Upper Silesians voted to stay out of Poland. It would have been nice if that had been the end of it.
Leave the maps alone, people. Be nice to your neighbours, and take your holidays on the shore.
