Page - 60 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

60 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 seen as paramount, rather than its symbolic value.58 After 1848 this issue polarized scholars, but nationalist activists, fueled by the 1848 congress, regarded questioning the level of a language’s linguistic development as an antinational act. In the first three years after the 1848 revolution, the idea of language’s significance for the cohesion of the educational system was pushed to the background. Of the universities touched by the language ques- tion, Cracow employed the most scholars lecturing in a local language, in this case Polish. Prague had several lecturers capable of teaching in Czech, while L’viv and Olomouc had almost no instructors teaching in local lan- guages (Polish or Ruthenian in L’viv and Czech in Olomouc).59 In most appointments, Thun-Hohenstein looked for scholars with knowledge of provincial languages. This was, however, not always possible because of the changed curricula, which required the minister to search for candidates in non-Habsburg parts of the German Confederation. For Cracow and L’viv, most of the qualified scholars who knew Polish or Ruthenian were living abroad and/or could not be hired for political reasons. In 1852–53 the political atmosphere in the monarchy concerning mul- tilingualism changed. German was reinstated as the language of secondary schooling and bureaucracy. This measure also influenced the universities. Their links with gymnasia and the civil service meant that non-German-language universities would produce highly educated officials who were not conversant in German, the language they now had to use in their professional careers. Given that historians regard the language change of 1853 as a symbolic act, the uncertainty about the reasons behind it may be surprising. The widespread story of a forced Germanization is full of flaws. For Prague, there is no single document confirming that the government or the ministry forbade Czech as a medium of instruction. More plausible is the thesis that individual scholars’ decision to cease teaching in Czech was purely pragmatic: there were sim- ply not enough students who spoke Czech and no established terminology, especially in the sciences and medicine.60 In a petition in 1864 arguing for Czech lectures at the university, Czech students pointed out that these had been abolished in 1852 owing to an “unfavorable time” (Ungunst der Zeit).61 For Cracow, the acts concerning the language change are missing from the university archive, and the documents related to the process allow divergent interpretations. The following discussion of the proceedings at this university will illustrate not only this “unfavorable time” in the early 1850s but also the changes in the understanding of science and scholarship during this period.