Page - 87 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 2 ♦  87 ideological or not. Since many of his nominees were appointed while they were still in their twenties or early thirties, they had several decades to make their mark. Zimmermann was not pensioned until the summer of 1896, prob- ably the longest living of Thun-Hohenstein’s appointees.191 After the 1860s, when ministers put academic autonomy into practice, the scholars appointed by Thun-Hohenstein nominated their own successors, perpetuating certain traditions well into the twentieth century. Success in imitating Prussian universities was limited. Thun-Hohenstein held up this aim to his adversaries, but the commitment to achieve it was limited by finances, by the retention of Catholic values, and by support for the local traditions of scholarship. The positive figure of the Habsburg scholar who became “German” (including Czech nationalists like Purkyně and Čelakovský, who had both lived in Wrocław/Breslau until 1848)192 was not mere rhetoric but also a proclaimed aim of ministerial policy, in which “Germany” served as an idealized paradise, especially for the humanities. Since Thun-Hohenstein strove to nominate Catholics, despite looking for models in Prussia, he was importing scholars directly from Bavaria. It also became clear that the smaller universities in the monarchy, in- cluding the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, were not competitive enough with other German-language universities, in terms of both finances and research facilities. These smaller institutions offered career advances for foreign scholars, but such appointments were very often quite short-term. Newly appointed foreign professors could receive a call back to their home university, and this was clearly perceived as a threat to the universities, which was intensively discussed in subsequent decades. Indeed, most of the schol- ars Thun-Hohenstein recruited from abroad eventually left the monarchy, often achieving considerable influence at universities in the German Empire. The humanities were the field in which the ministry was most willing to invest; the sciences and medicine clearly remained secondary, with a number of rather accidental appointments because there was no clear ministerial strategy as there was in the humanities. This is something of a paradox, since those were the fields that flourished in subsequent decades. Similarly ironic is that the conscious choice of lecturers often introduced developments that contradicted the ministry’s intentions. The withdrawal from the abstract, and the corresponding turn to the concrete, as Thun-Hohenstein wrote in one of the appointment records,193 opened the door to all sorts of positiv- ist approaches in the humanities and philosophy, as the Viennese historian Johannes Feichtinger has pointed out.194 The philosophical approaches of Zimmermann and Schenach did not remain widely influential, and this led