Page - 1 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

1 introduction A Biography of the Academic Space Shortly before World War I, the professor of Romance languages at Innsbruck, Theodor Gartner, was completing a collection of Ladin folk songs, the outcome of an eight-year project intended to show that Ladinians are distinct from Italians.1 During his career Gartner had studied in Vienna, then worked as a professor in Chernivtsi (Bukovina) and later in Innsbruck (Tyrol), a route well trodden by Cisleithanian academics. Always interested in Ladinian, he, after arriving in Bukovina, developed an interest in both the languages spoken there, Romanian and Ruthenian, subsequently publish- ing works on their vocabulary and grammar. Through his efforts, Gartner, a German Austrian with pan-German nationalist tendencies in his later years, thus influenced three national projects.2 For Ruthenian in particular, Gartner’s cooperation with Stepan Smal’-Stoc’kyj, a fellow Vienna graduate working as a professor of Ruthenian language and literature in Chernivtsi, was of utmost importance, marking a symbolic defeat of pro-Russian lan- guage reformists.3 The ideas that they used to underscore the distinctiveness of Ruthenian from Russian were also applied to highlight the uniqueness of Ladinian: the official language was distinguished from any “contaminated dialects,” an approach that closely followed the nationalist image of what the perfect language should be.4 Gartner’s career, which led him from Vienna to Bukovina and Tyrol, was typical for the period analyzed in this book: imperial careering5 was common among Cisleithanian academics of the time. But there were also other patterns: there were hundreds of unsalaried university lecturers (Privatdozenten) who worked at only one university, and a number of early