Page - 266 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

266 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 scholars fleeing nationalism and communism. Vienna, which in the interwar period still had the allure of its former glory, while scholars working there remembered and perpetuated the habitus of one of the foremost German- speaking universities, retained its intellectual capacity, but by reorienting itself toward Germany and the German Kulturraum (cultural space), it began progressing toward the self-conscious provincialism that it inflicted on itself after 1945, when the university failed to reappoint scholars who had fled during the 1930s.112 Some things did not change at all, however. Catholicism and national- ism, prevailing ideologies before the war, became more radical, even though many intellectuals still clung to prewar tolerance. The Liberal Democrat Hans Kelsen tends to be named as an example of an Austrian liberal scholar, but one often forgets to add that in Vienna it was Othmar Spann, a völkisch Austrofascist anti-Semite, and his circle who had more influence at the uni- versity.113 Scholars of the Mosaic faith, Ukrainians in Poland, and, to certain extent, Slovaks all similarly retained their subordinate positions, even given all the uncertainties and ambiguities such subscriptions included. One final chapter of the Habsburg/central European experience was its globalization, which took place gradually during the 1920s and 1930s. This process began with the emigration from Hungary of scholars escap- ing the right-wing regime of Miklós Horthy. Austrian scholars followed from the late 1920s, leaving their country in larger numbers after the Austrian fascists seized power. Interwar anti-Semitism also forced scholars from Slavic countries to move away, although in nothing like the same num- bers as from Germany and Austria. After 1939 National Socialism and, to a lesser extent, Soviet occupation resulted in another wave of migration. Sonderaktion Krakau, the massacre of L’viv professors, Theresienstadt, and the other atrocities of World War II put an end to the once-blooming Habsburg intellectual landscape.114