Page - 23 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 1 ♦  23 lands of the German Confederation, disregarding what was happening in different languages within their own state. Habsburg scholars participated in the Congresses of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, with the twenty-first congress even taking place in Graz in 1843.12 However, there was no congress of Habsburg science to foster a common identity, as the con- gresses in other states or empires did, or even the congresses that spanned state boundaries, as in Scandinavia.13 In addition, it seems that only a few people such as Sartori even desired such a gathering. Composite Scholarship in a Composite Monarchy? With the support of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in the course of the late eighteenth century German became the primary language of the empire. This met with opposition from Magyar and Slavic language activists, who were increasingly expressing their desire for their languages to be treated on a par with German. The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw an increasing number of apologies for the Slavic languages, which aimed to reevaluate the linguistic hierarchies within the public and political spheres.14 A centralization process during the reign of Maria Theresa, intended to unite the empire, did just the opposite, instead forging patriotic identities that increasingly aligned themselves with the different languages of the prov- inces. In turn, interest in the humanities in general began to grow among the provincial elites, resulting in the creation of scholarly societies. Intending to forge interest in regional histories and languages, from the early nineteenth century the aristocracy began bringing forward and sup- porting various scholars, who, paid and partly sheltered from governmental policy by the aristocracy, could publish and travel with fewer constraints than scholars employed at the imperial institutions. This new aristocratic interest in scholarship also led to the establishment of the first scholarly societies in the Habsburg Empire. While a large number of such societies survived for less than a year, and several lingered longer, a few began to evolve into small academies of science.15 Similarly, the aristocracy founded provincial museums, such as the Patriotic Museum in Bohemia (Prague), the Hungarian National Museum (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum) in Pest, the Joanneum in Graz (Styria), the Moravian-Silesian Museum (Mährisch- Schlesisches Museum) in Brno, and the Lubomirski Museum (Muzeum Książąt Lubomirskich, a branch of the Ossoliński Scientific Institute [Zakład