Page - 245 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 7 ♦  245 From November 1914, just a few months after the beginning of the war, faculty members were dying at the front.4 The total death toll among pro- fessors and Privatdozenten remained low, however, with only a few deaths directly linked to the war.5 It seems the government was hesitant to draft university members, and when it did, it did not send them directly to the front line; medics, for instance, served in military hospitals, while scholars from the law and philosophical faculties populated the intelligence offices. Some, however, volunteered and joined the soldiers at the front. The fa- mous Viennese physicist Friedrich Hasenörl, for instance, died near Trento/ Trient in 1915.6 Since universities did not report on their draftees in a consistent manner, and catalogs of lecturers were published irregularly, it is hard to pinpoint the impact on personnel. For example, at the University of Cracow, which closed for some months in 1914/15 owing to the city’s reorganization into a fortress (Festung), around 30 percent of the staff were drafted into the imperial army and 20 percent joined the Polish Legions (Legiony Polskie).7 More critically, assistants, adjuncts, demonstrators, and other young academic employees were drafted more frequently, an action that the universities consistently criticized in their reports. The frontline universities in L’viv and Chernivtsi were most affected by the war, with the professors spending most of their time in Vienna. Still, even by 1918, there was no question for the Habsburg government, and for many of the professors, that a German-language Habsburg university would remain in Bukovina after the war.8 Among German-Austrian scholars, the idea of imperial unity was widespread, which connected with older pat- terns of cultural paternalism. The University of Vienna’s rector, Emil Reisch, for instance, stated during his inauguration in 1916, with imperialistic and German nationalistic zeal, that after the war the cultural efforts of the state should be intensified through German universities and the German cultural mission (Kulturmission), with German meaning here a tight, even union- like, cooperation between the Habsburg and German Empires.9 Reisch’s speech is symptomatic of one other characteristic that began to shape the post-1914 situation. The Great War solidified national catego- ries along linguistic lines: German-Austrian, Hungarian, Polish, or Czech and Slovak. Although these categories had already existed and had al- ready shaped academic practice (as shown in earlier chapters), new power relations meant that they became part of state policies. But they did not