Page - 193 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 5 ♦  193 impossible few years earlier. This change was clearly perceived outside the Galician universities as well, and the following year one of the applicants for habilitation in L’viv referred to his glorious nationalist past and participation in the uprising of 1830.79 With the institutionalization of lectures on Polish history, law, and so on, the definitions of scientific patriotism and nationalism blurred, allow- ing a renegotiation of the boundary between that which was allowed and that which was prohibited. While in the 1850s and into the 1860s nation- alism had been rejected in favor of state patriotism, Polish nationalism, in its cultural-patriotic rather than its chauvinistic or openly anti-Habsburg version, was viewed positively from the moment of Galician “autonomy.”80 Thus, it is not surprising that “Poland,” as a historical and cultural construct, came to be more clearly referred to as a nation in its own right, by both academics and the ministry. This change in political discourse clearly influenced the faculties. There were, for instance, no well-qualified young historians to teach Austrian his- tory, and the fact that the young historians who had to hold these lectures specialized in Polish history caused conflicts with the loyalist historians who had been chosen by the ministry in the 1850s and early 1860s.81 There were also only three habilitations in Austrian history until 1918, as opposed to twelve in Polish history. Similarly, German was defined as a foreign lan- guage, and interest in it was seen as merely practical. When Naphtali Sobel applied to habilitate in Old German literature in 1884, the faculty wrote that this was too narrow and that, because German was a foreign language, the university had no interest in accommodating scholars specializing in this subject.82 That same year, however, Maksymilian Kawczyński habilitated in German philology; he was the sole Polish Privatdozent in this discipline, although only briefly:83 from 1887 his interest turned toward the philology of the Romance languages, in which he earned first habilitation and then a professorship.84 He was, apart from Janota, the only Galician-born scholar acknowledged to be teaching German language and literature at the aca- demic level,85 even though ministerial scholarships for Galician scholars willing to pursue this discipline had been available since 1888.86 When, in 1913, the Jagiellonian University proposed the creation of a chair of German language and literature with Polish as the medium of instruction, the fac- ulty was unable to suggest any candidates.87 In comparison, at the Czech University in Prague, habilitation in “Habsburg disciplines” still enjoyed considerable popularity. This difference shows how Galicia detached itself