Page - 13 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  13 This symbolic creation of a space for scholarship cannot be restricted to national spaces, however. In the first half of the nineteenth century in particular, the idea of a Slavic brotherhood united the Slavs of the Habsburg Empire. Perceiving a lack of an educated public within national spaces, several journals addressed “Slavs” as an existing public capable of reading each other’s languages. The Kwartalnik naukowy, wydawany w połączeniu prac miłośników umiejętności (Scholarly quarterly, edited in cooperation with lovers of knowledge), edited by Helcel from 1835 to 1837, included Slavic and German scholars in its board of editors. With an openly antina- tionalist viewpoint, it strove to review as many works from Slavic literature as works written in other languages.52 The Czech-language journal Krok: Weřegný spis wšenaučný pro wzdělance národu Česko-Slowanského (Krok: Public general scientific journal for the educated people of the Czech-Slav nation, 1821–40) similarly addressed a non-German space, oscillating be- tween a Czech (ethnic) space, a Czech-Slovak (language) space, and a Slavic space. It was also ironic that the Slavic space lacked a precise definition. In the introduction to the journal, Jan Svatopluk Presl defined Slavs in op- position to Germans but acknowledged that this was a foreign definition, because Slavs also differed internally.53 The term pan­ Slavic, initially as a counterpart to pan­ German, introduced another space of interaction, which was subsequently tightened to create a space reminiscent of the German Confederation. The pan-Slavic movement did not go beyond this definition; it lacked not only a mythology but also a communicative basis and, most important, regular interaction. At the first Slavic Congress of 1848, it was already visible that the nationalists’ focus on national languages threw the claim of the unity of the Slavic language into oblivion. Subsequently, pan- Slavism not only failed in practice but was criticized as a cheap substitute for internationalism;54 pan-Slavic academic interaction perhaps did not cease to exist,55 but it became of only tertiary importance, after its heyday in the Vormärz (Pre-March) period and during neoabsolutism. Despite their concentration on nationality as their primary point of reference, most Habsburg institutions retained international and thus inter- cultural components. On the one hand, this was driven by the membership of foreign (i.e., nonnational) scholars in local academies, awarded mostly to prominent scholars but also to scholars who had a particular political align- ment within the empire. For example, the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cracow nominated Heinrich Zeissberg, a former professor of history in L’viv