Seite - 7 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Introduction ♦  7 everyday procedures, communication, and ideological networks as well as outbreaks of ceremonial patriotism.24 While these identity projects differed depending on the historical situation and the cultural implementation (for ex- ample, the resuscitation of the idea of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or pan-German ideology), their interdependent development shared a com- mon pattern subsumed under the banner of change from civic-cum-territorial to ethnocultural nationalism.25 Given its idiosyncrasies, the Habsburg Empire has recently been the subject of extensive research that has analyzed the contemporary nature of the putatively exclusive processes of state loyalty and ethnocultural nation- alism. The history of science has, however, only recently taken note of this peculiar imperio-national space, previously confined to national narratives, and it has often merely produced recollections of particular institutional pasts in its function as an archivist of local memories. While the attention has recently shifted from nation to empire,26 I argue that concentrating on the parallelism and interaction of national and imperial projects sheds more light on the sociogeographic character of knowledge in the central European “laboratory of world history” than does an either-or choice.27 This work thus focuses on the development of science and scholarship in the space between the projects of empires and the projects of nations. The mediations and ten- sions that occurred between the needs and demands of scholarship and those of education serve as an example of scientific interacademic mobility, through which such spatial ambiguities can best be visualized. Academic mobility did not stop with the end of the empires. Even if the sociocultural contexts are different, an analysis of the Habsburg schol- arly peregrinations can say much about when policies of exchange bear the most fruit and how long-term the effects of these policies are. The Erasmus mobility program and the Bologna Process have, in different ways, been acknowledged as tools for bringing Europeans together and fostering a com- mon, if not unitary, identity.28 To a large extent, these programs intend to reconcile schisms that the nineteenth century produced.29 Indeed, many parts of this book are concerned with how and why universities became national outposts, but also when they started to be international again. Contrary to historians of nationalism, I argue that the nationalization of the peripheries was itself a reaction to processes that began in Vienna, the in- tellectual center.30 Just as in the nineteenth century Slavic activists opposed the politically induced prevalence of German as the medium of education (not the traditional role of German as the language of publication), in the