Page - 136 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

136 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 developments within the whole state were more frequently held within the local organizations of teachers of higher education than within Habsburg organizations. The local organizations included university instructors and were clearly determined by linguistic boundaries, both in their legal status and in the language used for publishing.195 This cemented discussion groups with shared interests even though cooperation in the legal initiatives men- tioned above and meetings of representatives were still taking place.  The Schillerfeier (Schiller Celebration) of Friday, 11 November 1859, was, for students at the universities, a day of political demonstrations and the re- iteration of demands for the abolition of neoabsolutism after the Habsburgs had been defeated in Sardinia; the freedom of student associations was on the agenda. While it was, as the Czech legend says, the last shared rally of Czech and German students in Prague, on the same day the Polish patriot and German-speaking Jew Moritz Rappaport lauded Schiller at the University of L’viv.196 To this, another Jewish Polish nationalist, Ludwik Gumplowicz, bluntly commented, referring to Rappaport, “He’s such a prick!”197 At the same time, the German nationalist Tobias Wildauer in Innsbruck spoke viv- idly: “From his [Franz Joseph’s] hand the German spirit gained complete freedom across all the parts of the vast Reich. It will march through them and accomplish the mission that the spirit of history so doubtlessly assigned it.”198 The polysemy of “the German poet” in Innsbruck and L’viv, separated by a thousand kilometers (almost the width of the monarchy), can be taken as a symbol of the variety of cultural loyalties and nationalization projects at the time. The failure of the idea of empire-uniting German Habsburg loyalty is obvious, even if one can find remnants of it in Chernivtsi. German as a sym- bolically hegemonic language was hardly practicable in an empire in which nationalists had more and more say. Here, Habsburg governments practiced different policies than both the German and Russian Empires, which at the time were strengthening language-led state unification processes and remov- ing the last bits of autonomy that linguistic minorities had cherished until the 1860s. While in the Habsburg Empire the languages of education were proliferating in order to secure subjects’ loyalty, in other empires subjects were channeled toward monolingualism to create unity.