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

xii ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 The Habsburg Empire consisted of two halves, Cisleithania (the north- ern and western part, also called Austria) and Transleithania (the Hungarian Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen). Cisleithania comprised fifteen prov- inces (crown lands); most important for this book are, from west to east, Tyrol, Styria (capital: Graz), Lower Austria (capital: Vienna, which was also the imperial capital), Bohemia (capital: Prague), Galicia (capital: L’viv), and Bukovina. In many of these provinces, more than one language was used: Tyrol included what is now South Tyrol, populated by German speakers and Italian speakers. In Styria German and Slovenian dominated, in Bohemia Czech and German, and in Galicia Polish and Ukrainian (nowadays western Galicia is part of Poland, and eastern Galicia is part of Ukraine). Finally Bukovina, now divided between Romania and Ukraine, was a multilingual province with German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Romanian as the most pop- ular languages; it was home to Chernivtsi University. One other differentiation deserves mention here—throughout the book I use the designation Ruthenian for the language that in the twentieth century became Ukrainian, and Ruthenians for the people who used it, for several reasons. First, it was the official designation for Ukrainian in the Habsburg Empire (Рутенський, Руський in Ruthenian, Ruski in Polish, and Ruthenisch in German). Second, Ruthenian identification differed from Ukrainian iden- tification (which focused on unity with Ukrainians/Little Russians in the Russian Empire) and Russophile identification (which focused on unity with the Russian people and their religion, that is, Orthodox Christianity). Also, Polish speakers lived across all three central European empires: Habsburg, Prussian, and Russian. In the Russian Empire, they were the major pop- ulation in the semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland, which was formally stripped of its autonomy in 1867 and renamed Vistula Land. In Prussia most Polish speakers lived in the Province of Posen and in Prussian Silesia. German, Germany, and Austria are very flexible terms and are used in the text in a few context-dependent meanings. Austria is the most widespread synonym for Cisleithania, although it sometimes also meant provinces with a German-speaking majority (i.e., the western part of Cisleithania); in Czech and Polish, Austrians were mostly Habsburg Germans. Especially in Bohemia and Galicia, German-speaking Habsburg subjects were also simply called Germans (sometimes with regional designations, like Deutschböhmen [Bohemian Germans]). These ethnonyms not only differed from language to language (and also depending on the speakers’ political outlook) but also varied over time. To do justice to this complexity, but at the same time re- main understandable, was one of the major obstacles this work had to face.