Page - 106 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

106 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 Latin university to create “a center for German scholarliness in Prague” or whether Karel IV was motivated by a love of Czech literature, “which was nearest to his heart.”70 The impossibility of deciding whom the university belonged to finally led to the division of the Charles-Ferdinand University. Both universities created in this way were legal successors of the Charles- Ferdinand University and retained its name, with the addition of “Czech” or “German.”71 In the twentieth century, this decision led to further disputes. In 1920 the famous Mareš Law (Lex Mareš) stated that the Czech university was the only legal successor of the ancient Charles-Ferdinand University. In 1934, when the German University in Prague refused to hand over the insignia (the symbol of historical continuity) to the Czech University, street fights called the Insigniáda (the fight over insignia) broke out.72 Further, statistics proved prone to different readings. Discussing Ruthenian scholarship in the 1860s, Dietl criticized that official statistics equated religion and nationality, and commented sarcastically on the rapid growth in the number of Ruthenian students in 1856–57, stating that “what was in 1856 still a Pole remade itself in 1857—or rather was remade.”73 In the following years, Czechs and Ruthenians used census statistics to support their rights to have new institutions of higher education.74 The counterargument, used by supporters of dominant groups, derived from the statistics on students attending gymnasia or on the nationality of university students, which in their view confirmed the cultural inequality.75 This was a double-edged sword: for German nationalist statisticians in 1913, who compared the numbers of students with the provinces’ contributions to the state budget, the same statistics showed that “the non-German intelligentsia was nursed at the cost of Germans.”76 In the end, neither a Ruthenian university nor a second Czech one was created, the only concession in Cisleithania being the Alma Mater Francisco Josephina Czernovicensia,77 established in 1875 in a city whose name, if one takes the statistics seriously, should be written ץיוואָנרעשט.78 To illustrate the mythical (and mythologized) multiculturalism of Chernivtsi: the university, with German as the medium of instruction, was hailed as an oasis of civi- lization and a German outpost in Slavic “Half-Asia,”79 a Ruthenian refuge from the Polonization of the University of L’viv,80 and the only university for the Romanian minority in Bukovina. The Greek Orthodox theological faculty was placed in the residence of the Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Bukovina, a masterpiece built by the Czech architect Josef Hlávka, a prominent philanthropist, whose support was decisive in the establishment