Seite - 4 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

4 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 through several prisms in the kaleidoscope of imperial memory. This pro- posed perspective therefore places a particular network in the foreground, concentrating on the several thousand careers spanning the historical mo- ments of the empire, beginning with the institutionalization of philosophical faculties at universities following the 1848 revolution. In 1848 not only were national wishes expressed, but scientific integration and regulation also be- gan. Until this time, research-based scholarship, except in medicine, had largely been excluded from the universities, finding its place in the seclusion of private or imperial institutions. The number of academies and universi- ties did not change significantly over the subsequent years; from 1849 the so-called Thun-Hohenstein reform (discussed later) provided a solid basis for higher education even beyond the empire. By regarding the universities in Cracow, Chernivtsi (established in 1875), L’viv, Graz, Innsbruck, Prague (divided into two universities in 1882), Vienna, and Olomouc (closed in 1856) not as stable sites but as intersections of networks, I want to decenter the history of scholarship in imperial Austria. While most of the examples I discuss are from the universities in Vienna, Prague, Cracow, and L’viv, I argue that much can be discovered by regarding them as nodes within more broadly defined networks, both Habsburg and central European. Academic developments in Vienna or Cracow cannot be understood without taking those in Innsbruck or Chernivtsi into account, and vice versa. With the help of networks, I present a dynamic and changing space that encompasses all of Habsburg central Europe and, especially after 1918, reaches beyond it. The intellectual distance between Munich and Vienna, or between Warsaw and Cracow, was constantly being redefined, just like the distance between Vienna and Budapest, which grew rapidly in the 1860s. The network analyzed here thus takes on a new aspect as part of a constantly changing academic structure across (at least) central Europe, closely interwoven with other empires and states that either shared cultural or linguistic traits or invited scholars from the Habsburg Empire to work at their institutions (e.g., the Principality of Bulgaria).11 This analysis is there- fore not only of an imperial space but also of a scholarly one; hence, I prefer to speak of academic space as the object of inquiry, with space defined as a social entity stretching across political boundaries and accommodating networks that supersede them. Moreover, this space was a dynamic entity; the changing relations among the state, culture, and science/education all affected the social components of the institutions examined here, which in turn influenced the exchange of knowledge. After the demise of the