Page - 3 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  3 were geographically confined within the Habsburg borders and thus man- ifested themselves politically in different ways. Pan-German thinking, in versions up to 1918, also confronted the mainline policy of monarchic loyalty inscribed into the power relations of the monarchy, whose pluricultural7 character contrasted with its politically induced monolingualism. Shifting loyalties, malleable or multiple identities, nation building, ten- sion, and conflict are the historical contexts on which this work is based. It is concerned, however, with a particular aspect of imperial reality, namely, academic institutions. More precisely, it follows the changes in the structure of academia in Cisleithania based on this region’s imperial features. The original goal of this work was to analyze a network of university instructors over a period of sixty years (1848–1918); during this time, nationalists con- fronted empires, altering the imperial cultural pattern. But while political developments forged division, scholarly developments promoted contact and communication, moving toward internationality. However, to highlight the embedded nature of these processes and their long-lasting effects, I frame them with the dawn and afterlife of what I call here the imperial academic space; thus, the narrative of this book spans from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century to the 1930s. The focus here is thus the schizophrenic tension between supposedly supranational science and national scholarship.8 This tension, one can argue, is the product of the inscription of science and scholarship into the cultural project of the nation. To a large extent, the present historiography follows the patterns developed during this time when the empire in its geographic totality was gradually becoming divided across linguistic, cultural, and his- torical entities, each following its own scientific exemplars. Viewed from the perspective of the now-dominant national historiographies, the empire became disentangled, which created loosely adhesive scientific narratives, with the prominent exception of analytic philosophy, whose analysis under- scores its multinational existence.9 At the same time, the “special conditions” characterizing the Habsburg multicultural space have gained more and more scholarly attention in recent decades, with academics tracing the patterns of the influx of cultural conflict.10 The special conditions of these conflicts, paradigmatic of the Habsburg Empire, can be found across the globe at this time, and their importance for this particular empire is a product of cultural memory. Thus, what seems to be a study of empire through the prism of schol- arship is also a study of scholarship through the prism of empire, or rather