Page - 225 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  225 religious scholars of all confessions were responsible to their church author- ities and subject to their own festivities and days of rest (which, by the way, is reported to have been taken into account at some universities, for instance, by allowing Jewish assistants a free day on Saturdays), only in the case of Catholics was this inscribed into the academic legislation, influencing all personnel. These were the main points criticized by liberal and socialist politicians. Finally, in 1907 a group of Social Democratic parliamentarians proposed the disassociation of the theological faculties from the universities and their reestablishment as private teaching institutes.37 This led to parlia- mentary controversies but not to any change in the law. Legal issues were not the only area influenced by the Catholic Church. In addition, gradual generational change continued within the universities, although conservative Catholics predominated well into the liberal era, that is, after 1861. The gradual retirement of Thun-Hohenstein’s favorites, however, combined with the growth in the number of appointments in the 1870s, gradually liberalized the professorship, although without substantial ideological changes in the most politically sensitive disciplines, such as phi- losophy and history (see below). Ludwig Wahrmund and the Culture Wars To exemplify how tightly intertwined academia and religion were, I turn now to the case of Ludwig Wahrmund, the victim of the most extreme violation of university autonomy in the post-1848 Habsburg state. This example also illustrates the fragmentary unity of the Habsburg Empire and, since the conflict itself was a reaction to events in the German Empire, confirms the Austrian leaning of the German-language community. The most important aspect of the Wahrmund affair was the papal campaign against modernism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Leo XIII and Pius X had intensified papal interest in scholar- ship and the sciences, actively promoting the development of Catholic versions of these.38 In the Habsburg Empire, the most influential act of the new papal policies was the creation in 1892 of the Leo Society, the Association for the Advancement of Science and Art on a Christian Basis (Leo-Gesellschaft, Verein zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kunst auf christlicher Grundlage). The papal interest was also evident in the grow- ing frequency of scientific topics in theological periodicals such as the Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie (Journal for Catholic theology) and