Litterarische Beilage zu den Schlesischen Provinzialblattern.

Silesia, historical region that is now in south western Poland. Silesia was originally a Polish province, which became a possession of the Bohemian crown in 1335, passed with that crown to the Austrian Habsburgs in 1526, and was taken by Prussia in 1742. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Silesia was one of the regions of German territory that was granted to Poland by the Soviet Union in compensation for land in eastern Poland that was incorporated into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. By the 9th century Silesia was exclusively inhabited by Slavic peoples: the Dziadoszanie and the Bobrzanie in the north and the Ślęzanie (from whom it got its name). All of the Silesian Piast rulers encouraged the immigration of Germans, who increased the region’s agricultural productivity, developed its coal mining and textile weaving, and populated new towns. The population thus took on an increasingly German character. By the 18th century Silesia’s flourishing mining and textile industries had made it the richest of all the Habsburgs’ Austrian provinces.