Page - 275 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Conclusion ♦  275 themselves at the institutional level. There are, of course, not only losses but also gains from such institutions, but the form of sociability they propagate is having, and will continue to have, a crucial influence on the future shape of knowledge. Internationalisms and Their Languages In the first half of the nineteenth century, the understanding of languages and their assumed role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge changed. In the Habsburg Empire, the idea that a national language—at the same time the scholar’s mother tongue—was most apt for science prevailed and was picked up by nationalists to substantiate their political claims. The legal support for German as the lingua franca for secondary and tertiary education, a position previously reserved for Latin in the empire, was increasingly perceived as privileging one group and thus devaluing the cultural importance of other languages. As a reaction to this, teaching and publishing science in Czech, Hungarian, and Polish became an issue for local elites, which finally led to the introduction of these languages at all levels of education. Ruthenian elites acted similarly in Galicia, where the Polish language was dominant, although they did not achieve the creation of a Ruthenian university. Through a combination of political and cultural claims, education—and thus both scholarship and universities—progressively became plurilingual throughout the empire but monolingual within the walls of each university. This meant, however, the codification of a hierarchy of languages, with German as the supralanguage and with culturally defined universities now being able to use their own local language. Of course, this applied not only to Slavic universities: Innsbruck, Graz, Vienna, and the German University in Prague were single-language universities, and the banning of Italian from the University of Innsbruck in 1904 was the final step in this process. The nationalization of universities was thus a complex process involving many parties with vested interests. It was not only the Hungarian and Slavic na- tionalists who were trying to alter the empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, institutions of higher education, seen as the most important places for cultural, intellectual, and structural developments, became critical in nationalist propaganda. This led to count- less conflicts and even casualties. In 1918 a new political space emerged in which the question of language hegemony did not disappear. German suffered greatly from the dissolution of the monarchy and from sanctions