Seite - 5 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  5 empire, Habsburg scholars migrated further, to universities in Ljubljana/ Leibach, Brno/Brünn, Warsaw, and Cluj/Klausenburg/Kolozsvár, as well as via Bratislava/Pozsony/Pressburg to Padua. This initial wave of academic mass mobility enlarged the network substantially and weakened its ties (a second wave followed the beginning of National Socialism and finally World War II only a few years later). The “Cisleithanization” of scholarship in central Europe, and the Habsburg legacy, with all its shortcomings and ad- vantages, forms the final point of this narrative. Intellectual Geographies Recent decades have witnessed a growth in the importance of the geography of knowledge and spaces of knowledge in the history of science. With the established eminence of science as a social endeavor, lacking the universal claims of the mid-twentieth century, a growing literature on both the local appropriation of knowledge and the local conditions of its production has led to a reconsideration of scientific space and the processes under way within it.12 Space as a new paradigm also aroused the interest of geographers. Most important, the spatial turn brought about a reevaluation of the influence of power relations in the scientific process. Concentrating on different sites where knowledge is produced, and the influence of spatial positioning on the shape of knowledge, the geography of knowledge extends the scope of the classic historiography of science and education.13 Moreover, scholars em- phasize that circulation is a site of knowledge formation, not simply a space between centers and peripheries, or between senders and receivers, that has no epistemic qualities of its own.14 Yuri (Juri) M. Lotman, for whom the pe- riphery is a space of increased intellectual productivity because it lacks the homogenizing power of the center, thus enabling cross-boundary relations impossible in the center, provided a metatheory for such conceptions of cir- culation.15 Below I privilege Lotman’s view over that put forward by Michel Foucault, for whom space was controlled by the center, while peripheries had only limited possibilities for innovation.16 One of the most important changes resulting from this approach is the notion that space is not something “out there” but an entity produced by repetitive actions that are influenced, but not determined, by social, cul- tural, and political contexts.17 For instance, the production of space through the construction of railroads united vast regions of the United States and