Page - 255 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 7 ♦  255 the number of students. In 1929 it had the second-largest German-language medical faculty behind Vienna.55 Given the constraints in Prague and the relatively low population of German speakers in Czechoslovakia, it is hardly surprising that the German University eagerly participated in “scholarly exchange with the whole German culture circle [Kulturkreis],” as Otto Grosser put it.56 This also brought criticism that foreigners were promoted more readily than the uni- versity’s own home-educated graduates; several rectors responded with harsh words about the dangers of provincialism and inbreeding (Inzucht).57 These two metaphors—of a culture circle (Kulturkreis) and inbreeding (Inzucht)—show that the new rhetoric of official university statements was heavily imbued with völkisch elements. Appellations for culture that trans- gressed state boundaries and referred to a cultural and spiritual community (Kulturgemeinschaft and Geistesgemeinschaft) were also used. One can ob- serve here a continuity with the situation before 1918: the exchanges among all the German-speaking universities in the (former) empire were aligned with the German cultural space. The element of state, previously often ap- pealed to by university officials, was now absent, however. While Habsburg scholars had always included the needs of the fatherland (Bedürfnisse des Vaterlandes), explicitly or implicitly, when talking about academic gradu- ates, Czechoslovak German Bohemians (Deutschböhmen) at the university depicted the state rather as an obstacle to their rightful needs. However, the German University was a state university. Apart from occasional boycotts, throughout the interwar period it took part in meetings of the rectors of Czechoslovak tertiary institutions and thus participated in policy-making processes on par with other universities.58 As the statistics show, the Czechoslovak government did not try to minimize the teaching staff there. The official statistics for 1929–30 list 117 full professors, 40 asso- ciate professors, and 131 Privatdozenten at the Czech University, compared to 66 full professors, 36 associate professors, and 88 Privatdozenten at the German University. Relative to the number of students (9,934 and 4,714, respectively), this gives the German University better ratios, both for the ratio of students to full professors (74:1, compared with 88:1 at the Czech University) and for the ratio of students to all instructors (25:1 versus 34:1).59 Nonetheless, both universities were underprivileged in comparison with the smaller ones in Brno (55 professors, 117 total teaching faculty, 2,933 stu- dents) and Bratislava (34 professors, 72 total teaching faculty, 1,761 students). This well-known established pattern of a low number of Privatdozenten (now