Page - 171 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 4 ♦  171 the German Empire were Privatdozenten (less often associate professors); most were appointed to the Prague and Vienna faculties, and they came from the universities in Göttingen, Munich, and Freiburg (philosophical faculties) and Heidelberg, Strasbourg, and Leipzig (medical faculties). Appointments of full professors from Germany comprised only around 30 percent of the total transfers. In philosophical faculties, such transfers were, with a few exceptions, concentrated in Prague and Vienna, and up to a third of these involved returning scholars who had been born in the Habsburg Empire. In medical faculties, as many as half of the appointed full professors who had been working in the German Empire had been born in the Habsburg Empire, and all of these appointments were to Vienna or Prague. Appointments of full professors from outside the Habsburg realms were, however, a financial burden and were seen as an affront to local scholarship; they were thus not welcomed by the ministry. Only the University of Vienna was privileged, as the principal university in the empire, whereas Prague was gradually but steadily losing status. The Prague faculties saw this as an increasing depreciation of the Charles-Ferdinand University, and the professors of the German University, in particular after 1882, expressed their discontent with Vienna’s privileges.69 In 1899, when the ministry did not appoint one of the two German Empire professors proposed as the faculty’s first and second choices, but instead a young Privatdozent from Vienna, the Bohemian fac- ulty protested loudly, seeing it as a vilification of the status of Bohemian academia.70 But this was to no avail. The relationship between the two neighboring empires that shared a language was difficult, however, not only owing to the obvious political complications, but also because the Habsburg Empire from the beginning had understood science as a cultural component of its competition with Prussia. Although higher officials advocated the unity of the two empires at an academic level on several occasions, it was the concept of competi- tion that defined academic relations. Especially in the medical sciences, both scholars and the ministry accentuated the idea that the Vienna Medical School was appreciated at German universities. Ministerial papers men- tioned not only the welcome spread of Habsburg traditions but also the fact that many young Habsburg scholars would not easily gain a satisfactory position in the Habsburg Empire,71 thus addressing financial issues related to scientific transfer. The idea of the “best possible scholars,” which one often finds in appointment proposals for the University of Vienna, referred only to