Page - 22 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

22 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 Wilde denounced what the German-Austrian scientific landscape lacked in comparison to international (here, British) standards. First, despite the existence of scientific productivity, this was not channeled through journals under the auspices of a centralized academy that could place its stamp of approval on them. Nor was it possible to coordinate the work of different institutions. For example, there were no meetings for “mutual instruction” by scholars, where they could exchange ideas and steer joint projects.10 Second, Wilde saw Habsburg scholarship as an outcome of networks of scholars from the varying cultures, which he called races. Vienna, a symbol of German culture in the empire and thus of the German Confederation, lagged, in this Briton’s eyes, behind Pest, Prague, Milan, and Venice in intellectual pro- ductivity. For observers trained in the British Empire, by 1843 the Habsburg Empire was already characterized by ongoing conflict among clearly defined cultures rather than being a multicultural ensemble embodying peaceful cooperation. Wilde clearly grasped some of the main characteristics of the empire, in which multiple languages coexisted but scientific communication was limited by scholars’ lack of linguistic skills. The ongoing development of national bibliographies and dictionaries, and the growing scholarly and liter- ary production in national languages, prevented an overview of the empire’s cultural production as a whole; this production was attributed to the different linguistic groups, not to the empire. But the problem was not the growing number of publications in Slavic languages but the hegemonic structure of language competence. While Slavic scholars read and used German (among other languages), German scholars could read French, Italian, or English but rarely the other languages of the empire. In 1830 the influential journalist Franz Sartori criticized this German-centrism of the empire, reminding his colleagues that “the German language is not the sole language in the Austrian Empire”11 and arguing for cultural cooperation and the overcoming of linguistic boundaries. Although the idea of the Gesammt­ Monarchie (lit., Whole-Monarchy, i.e., a unified monarchy) was supported in various ways, this rarely went so far as to include educational multilingualism; there was no acknowledgment of the multitude of literary languages suitable for higher education. Sartori was also unique in showing an interest in the cultural life of the periphery while himself being part of the political center; he stressed the Habsburg ideals of cultural autonomy and productivity to his German-speaking readers. Most scholars preferred to look toward other centers, France or the other