Page - 244 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

244 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 The events related by Karl Popper took place in 1934, sixteen years after the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire; they united the German Jewish cultural nationalist Heinrich Gomperz with the Czech nationalist Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, at that time the president of Czechoslovakia. Shortly after most of Europe had swung to the right, the friendship between the two Habsburg philosophers allowed Gomperz to travel to Los Angeles. Popper, who had also been forced to emigrate, propagated an Austria-rooted theory of knowl- edge in his adopted country of Great Britain.2 Popper, like many Viennese Jewish intellectuals, may have overvalued the Habsburg legacy and thus the monarchy itself.3 But Gomperz would have found like-minded scholars with a similar philosophical bent from Warsaw to L’viv to Padua. This chapter sketches the fate of Cisleithanian universities after World War I, especially focusing on those facets that transformed them from an imperial space to a multistate central European space, defined both by a common intellectual past and by a multitude of weak and strong ties. As I argue, the transformation was less a revolution than a continuation of trends the region had already been experiencing before the Great War, even if new boundaries and legal spaces meant serious changes. However, the habitus, personal networks, a similar ideological orientation, and even the Vienna- centric power structure remained in place, facilitating further contacts and, to a certain degree, unity. Since these new spaces were mostly multicultural, they inherited problems from the empire but also created solutions for deal- ing with them. The Habsburg system and the universities’ experience also proliferated into new regions, both through professorial migration and legal transfer and also because of the political changes during the 1930s, which led to a spread of their influence on a global scale. Universities at War World War I seriously disrupted the lives of universities. However, Cisleithanian academic mobility did not change dramatically during the conflict itself, even with central Europe plunged into chaos. Galician Poles even led the ministry in 1917 and 1918, an important sign of Cisleithanian unity. Similarly, nomination procedures continued, although the universi- ties encountered some problems owing to the war, notably the drafting and occasional deaths of young scholars.