Page - 269 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Conclusion ♦  269 L’viv (the only universities using this language at this time) attracted grad- uates from abroad—especially from German Empire universities—who wished to habilitate in Galicia. The number of instructors who had acquired their doctoral degrees at “foreign” (mostly German) institutions was around 45 percent in 1910 at Cracow and L’viv, while at German-speaking universi- ties in the Habsburg Empire, it dropped to near 10 percent in the same year. Because nominations in Galicia included mostly Polish scholars, Galician universities were hubs of knowledge from abroad. The resulting trend toward a mixture of research styles was further augmented by Galician scholars who had completed their habilitation process at the universities in Graz, Vienna, Innsbruck, and Chernivtsi. For example, the L’viv-Warsaw school of analytical philosophy originated through cooperation among schol- ars educated in the Habsburg Empire, the German Empire, and France. The liquefaction of oxygen, the most acclaimed chemistry-related achievement in Galicia, resulted from a combination of knowledge and materials acquired by professors of physics and chemistry during their education abroad.2 Thus, Galician universities were, in effect, more international than the Habsburg German-language universities, a finding that is particularly striking when contrasted with the stereotypes of nationalist Slavs. But it also demonstrates the shortcomings of our conceptualization of the spaces and boundaries in central Europe, which this book has addressed. The Czech University can similarly not be regarded only through a national lens. Although it remained geographically bound to Bohemia in its appointments, this geographic enclosure fueled internationalism. In the first years after the inauguration of the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University in 1882, the language change meant that the university had to open itself to scholars from beyond the empire to obtain sufficient teaching staff. This brought together a variety of scholars, who linked the scientific traditions of their respective empires. Later on, the scholarship system facilitated the circulation of students and scholars. One could even venture that Czech internationalization was a direct result of the development of a nationally defined Czech academic system, similar to what happened in Galicia, though under different geopolitical circumstances, which yielded different forms of internationalization. This internationalism led to a number of productive intellectual clashes. The most prominent Czech scholars at the beginning of the twentieth century, Jaroslav Goll and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, repre- sented two different traditions they had acquired while students, the first in Göttingen, the latter in Vienna. The explosive mixture of the conservative Ol