Page - 175 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

175 cHApter 5 Habsburg Slavs and Their Spaces While [people] at home consider me as a compatriot who has gone astray . . . in the ministry I am depicted as a national radical! —Antonín reZek to frAntišek MAreš, 18871 The differentiation of academic space within the empire affected schol- ars and universities of all national identifications. Scholars who considered themselves to be Czechs, Hungarians, or Poles and who pursued careers at universities were also influenced by the linguistic disintegration. German- speaking scholars had less chance of being appointed at non-German-language universities in the empire, and vice versa for their Slavic and Hungarian counterparts. To a certain extent, the latter’s appointment opportunities were worse, since there were no Polish, Czech, or Hungarian universities abroad, while universities in the German Empire offered career opportunities for German-speaking Habsburg scholars. Of course, there existed the possibil- ity of being nominated to a university with another language of instruction, but this was rare. This chapter shows how these changes conditioned the development of the Czech-Bohemian and Galician universities. In Pest the change in the language of instruction in 1860 from German to Hungarian, began a process in which the linguistic competences of scholars were equated with cultural belonging—both in the public eye and in aca- demic policy. Nevertheless, as I argue, cultural belonging was still a very fluid concept, and often a scholar’s own national identification would change de- pending on which university he was appointed to. When German became the language of instruction, most scholars remained in their positions because