Page - 229 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  229 origin.” On several occasions, the ministry and the faculties addressed, di- rectly or indirectly, the issue of confession, clearly favoring the Catholic standpoint. In the faculty proposal for the chair of physiology in Innsbruck in 1904, the candidate Franz/Ferenz Tangl was described, first, as the “off- spring of a German Catholic family who had come in the eighteenth century from Thuringia to Moravia and from there to Hungary.” Next, it was noted that German was his mother tongue, followed by a presentation of his sci- entific career; only after that did the proposal give a brief description of Tangl’s ideas on physiology.63 In particular, the chairs of history and philosophy, as constituents of a broadly understood moral and national education, remained seminal in the eyes of the ministry, which did not shrink from making appointments that went against the will of the faculty. Around the turn of the century, the ministry confronted the philosophical faculty in Vienna on several oc- casions. In 1899 the Innsbruck Privatdozent Joseph Hirn was appointed to the important chair of Austrian history in Vienna, although the faculty had not considered him adequate for the chair and had not included him in their proposal. The minister of education, Arthur Bylandt-Rheidt (March 1898–October 1899), considered this omission a result of Hirn being an exponent of “conservative and Catholic historiography”64 and proposed his appointment to Franz Joseph. While most Viennese historians were Catholic, Hirn’s appointment strengthened the position of ultramontanism, as opposed to liberal Catholicism, in Vienna. Such appointments followed the pattern of appointing Catholic scholars to the chair of history in Vienna, with the Innsbruck school of Julius Ficker providing a substantial number of scholars who took the desired ideological direction. Apart from Hirn, four of Ficker’s students gained full profes- sorships in Vienna and one in Graz.65 Of the Habsburg German-language universities, only Prague developed an independent school of historiography dominated by local historians. This trend was certainly reinforced by a focus on the development of the auxiliary sciences of history, most successfully among Ficker’s students. This was important for political reasons, especially at provincial universities, from the moment Joseph Alexander Helfert pro- claimed in the early 1850s the necessity of minute historical research on the Habsburg crown lands (see chapter 2), with the ministers of education adopt- ing this view.66 However, the overall influence of Catholicism defined the general development of historiography at the universities in which Innsbruck scholars had a say.