Page - 15 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  15 1848, however, encountered a serious backlash because of the neoabsolutist political atmosphere. I argue in chapter 3 that the most important changes took place in the 1860s, when, after Thun-Hohenstein’s resignation, subsequent ministers practiced a much more liberal policy than had been possible during neo- absolutism. They allowed university autonomy to be implemented, which affected both scholarship and the language of instruction. The discussions over language also show how the initially imperial idea of Kultur-Bildung (culture-education) became inscribed into the national rhetoric of the German-language elites of western Cisleithania and how it was translated into national claims by other Habsburg cultures. It is precisely this process, along with the onset of liberalism in the lin- guistic subsystems of Cisleithania, that I deal with in chapters 4 and 5. All three spaces—Czech, German-Austrian, and Polish—developed in different directions over time. The German-language universities, initially included in all pan-German networks, became more isolated after the Austro-Prussian War. The empire thus grew more reliant on its own graduates, who were mostly educated in Vienna and eventually sent out to work at provincial universities. A hierarchy of universities stabilized toward the end of the nineteenth century: at the top was Vienna, overrun with Privatdozenten but appointing only well-known scholars as professors, whereas Innsbruck and Chernivtsi were at the bottom: they had almost no Privatdozenten, and professors frequently spent only a few years there before being appointed to a larger university. Galicia, however, was open to scholars from abroad from the 1870s on. Through the appointment of scholars from the Russian and German Empires as well as frequent habilitations by graduates from these two states, its universities became monolingual but multicultural. By contrast, the Czech University of Prague drew from Bohemian and Moravian institutions and, except during the period immediately after the university split into two, experienced almost no exchanges with the rest of the empire or abroad. It did, however, seek to retain international cooperation through different means. At the same time, the universities in Prague and Galicia were undergoing a process of intrafaculty differentiation across ideological lines, which grew stronger toward 1900. Importantly, the spatial processes described here were vital for shap- ing scientific advancement in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire. They led to diminishing movement of scholars across the Czech, German,