Page - 186 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

186 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 as Albert Einstein drew Czech students to lecture halls. (Although Czech students were allowed to attend lectures at the German University, they did not have the right to take the course exam; the same regulation applied to German students at the Czech University.) The legal form of the university’s division also met with criticism from scholars teaching in Prague. The prominent historian Jaroslav Goll, for in- stance, criticized the policy of “one university, one language,” pinpointing its dysfunctionality in disciplines that would need German lectures, such as Habsburg history, German language, German literature, and German law.47 Chairs of languages indeed proved to be problematic, as also in Galicia. The German University strove to enhance Slavic philology, which from 1882 was covered only by none other than Alfred Ludwig.48 Only in 1909 did the first habilitation for Czech language and literature at the German University take place, and the first associate professorship was awarded only in 1917. Conversely, for some years, the Czech University lacked a full pro- fessor and an institute for German language, achieving this only in 1894.49 However, habilitating in “German” and “Habsburg” disciplines at the Czech University in Prague was quite popular. Five scholars habilitated in German literature, five in Czech literature, and five in Austrian history, compared with only three Privatdozenten for Czech history. As I show below, here the change to Czech in the university had different effects than the change to Polish in Galicia; the Czech University retained much of the undivided university’s Habsburg character. At the German University, scholars from the Czech University were not considered as possible appointees, and vice versa, because the “specific circumstances” in Prague made cultural transgressions unfeasible, leaving a limited number of scholars from other institutions who could be appointed. In several cases, however, younger scholars cooperated with each other, for example, in German literature in a group around August Sauer.50 Sauer, how- ever, openly pleaded for a “recapturing” of Prague by German students.51 The local circumstances of the Czech University in Prague, which had fewer possibilities for academic exchange, were not only a common argu- ment for the creation of a second university but also influenced appointment procedures. Five years after the division of the Charles-Ferdinand University, the Czech faculty stated that given that Czech scholars had no possibility of being promoted to other universities, the only way to ensure sufficient high-quality habilitations was to limit appointments of scholars from out- side the university. This argument was used to respond to criticisms that a