Page - 172 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

172 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 German-speaking academics, however. While it included those from the German Empire, it left Galician and Czech Prague scholars out of the dis- cussions. Those with a confirmed knowledge of German and a Viennese educational background were exceptions, but only a handful of them found their way into proposals.72 The story of the dissolution of the empire, which commonly states that the Magyars and Slavs turned away from Vienna, can thus be told in a different way. Well before German nationalism seriously influenced polit- ical and academic discourse, German-speaking Habsburg universities had stopped considering Slavic or Magyar scholars as possible appointees and showed much more interest in exchanges with the German Empire. One could speculate that this was an outcome of stereotyping non-Germans in the Habsburg Empire as underdeveloped in scholarship, and the German Empire as a cluster of excellence. Alternatively, Hungarians and Slavs might have disappeared from the radar by publishing less in German. That faculty com- missions were also gradually turning toward their own linguistic networks is likewise indubitable. Scholars born and academically socialized outside of the empire were on the commissions, and they also frequently turned to their networks for advice on future nominations. Thus, ironically, the autonomy of the universities and the right to search freely for professorial candidates pro- moted the nationalization of the universities. For Privatdozenten, however, the boundaries were much blurrier, especially in Vienna, where scholars from throughout the empire studied and habilitated. Nevertheless, the na- tionalization processes influenced the universities in Pest and L’viv at the same rate as those in Vienna and Graz: as the first two became Magyar and Polish, respectively, Vienna and, in particular, Graz increasingly became German, with Habsburg culture being replaced in all cases. At the same time, the few non-German scholars who had made careers in Vienna or Graz were valued, and they participated fully in faculty and academic life, regardless of whether they saw themselves as culturally other or whether they were seen as such in the faculty or by the press. As the number of multilingual scholars increased, ethnic stereotypes had a limited, but growing, influence on academic practice. Often historians exaggerate the influence of such stereotypes, however, using categories not yet valid in the nineteenth century.73 Some such stories were written by the scholars themselves. When Władysław Natanson failed his habilitation in Graz, he attributed it to provincial German nationalism and anti-Semitism, since he could not openly admit scholarly failure.74 This is not to say that there