Page - 61 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 2 ♦  61 Uniting through German: Cracow In the early 1850s, the Jagiellonian University found itself at the center of attention because it openly supported Polishness among its faculty. The sit- uation was aggravated in 1851 when the professors greeted Emperor Franz Joseph during his visit there in their traditional togas instead of the official Habsburg uniforms worn by all civil servants. Wearing of the official uniform had not been legally required but was made law shortly after the emperor’s visit.62 Following local government reports on the revolutionary sympathies of some professors, the provincial government of Galicia ordered that Polish professors at the university be supervised, suspecting them of propagating political separatism.63 These suspicions led to the disciplinary discharge of Antoni Helcel, Józefat Zielonacki, Wincenty Pol, and Antoni Małecki in January 1853; in addition, Franz Joseph revoked the university’s autonomy and also ordered the appointment of a curator.64 In the Ministerkonferenz (Ministerial Conference), Thun-Hohenstein, confronted with the suspension of autonomy, which had taken place without his knowledge, unsuccessfully defended the equality of languages, which in his eyes encouraged Polish loyalty. He succeeded, however, despite opposition from centralists such as Alexander Bach and the minister of justice Karl Krauß, in securing his preferred candidate for the office of curator, Piotr Bartynowski, the president of the k.k. Oberlandesgericht (Higher Provincial Court) in Cracow and a professor of Roman law, whom conservatives in the government regarded with skepticism as a “national Pole” (Nationalpole).65 At the same time, the situation also changed in Cracow. The newly appointed professor of German literature, František Tomáš Bratranek, him- self a bilingual Moravian, penned in early 1853 a pium desiderium (pious wish) for the introduction of German as a language of instruction. Bratranek wrote that the university, the smallest in the empire, could not, for politi- cal reasons, host the best Polish-speaking professors and that all students already spoke fluent German after attending the gymnasium. He therefore considered it to be “in the students’ interest” that “already from the next semester all matters which are in any way connected to their competence for the civil service should be instructed at our university in the German language.”66 Bartynowski, together with the deans who had likewise been installed without taking the faculties’ wishes into account, seems to have supported Bratranek’s petition, as did some of the faculty.67