This chapter examines how ordinary people in Upper Silesia adapted to “modernity” through the social and economic transformations unleashed by peasant liberation in Prussia (completed in 1850) and the expansion of mobility and labor migration. Migrants increasingly acted as autonomous agents, transferring knowledge and values, raising incomes, and weakening traditional village hierarchies by reducing dependence on large farmers and landlords—developments that strengthened the self-confidence of the rural lower classes. Adopting a micro-historical, actor-centered approach, the chapter shows how migration fostered democratization “from below” and shaped vernacular understandings of national identity, culminating in the politically decisive 1921 plebiscite on Upper Silesia’s state affiliation. It illustrates these dynamics through the biography of Franz/Franciszek Buhl (b. 1893), a Catholic, Slavic-speaking peasant whose work across Germany and Western Europe sharpened his sense of belonging and propelled his politicization; after returning home following the First World War, he became a local leader and an activist in the Polish minority movement, offering a lens into German perceptions of Slavic Catholics and their local repercussions in Upper Silesia. Buhl’s life thus illuminates how Slavic Catholics from the East were viewed by German mainstream society and how such perceptions shaped local communities in Upper Silesia.