Seite - 16 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

16 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 and Polish subsystems and the intensification of other forms of exchange. However, spatial issues also determined the development of a disciplinary nexus in the empire, as the durable (i.e., codified) diversification of disci- plines was also hierarchical, and thus connected to the spatially determined hierarchy of universities, as were the migratory networks. With the ongoing division of academic spaces, issues of religious denom- ination, which I discuss in chapter 6, remained problematic for universities. First, Jewish scholars, although admitted as Privatdozenten, were underrep- resented in higher positions. Increasing anti-Semitism, which occasionally turned violent in Innsbruck, Graz, and Prague, inhibited the appointment of Jewish scholars from Vienna, where numerous Privatdozenten were Jewish, creating glass ceilings and “invisible ghetto walls” that hindered their careers. At the same time, Jewishness was redefined from a religious to an ethnic and cultural category. While conversion represented a possible loophole in the anti-Semitic legal policy of the 1850s, the boundaries of Jewishness were defined more in terms of ethnicity in the late nineteenth century. While being Jewish and German was hardly a contradiction for most people, the populist discourse across the empire tended toward exclu- sive definitions. World War I led to institutional disintegration and division across the intellectual landscape of central Europe. As I show in chapter 7, not only did the legacy of the empire dominate the many possible models of university education, but scholars from Cisleithanian universities shaped the institu- tions of the interwar period, with regard to both science and organization. However, this postwar Cisleithanization of central Europe, which brought forward fascinating innovative trends (e.g., analytic philosophy throughout the space in question), cannot be understood without the changes already set in motion in the Thun-Hohenstein era. Finally, I want to mention two groups who are not heroes of my story but are indeed largely touched by it. First, women’s academic careers were obstructed and made impossible for many years. It was only in 1905 that the first woman habilitated at a Habsburg university—Elise Richter. Indeed, it was precisely the atmosphere I described in chapter 6 that reinforced this exclusion.58 The second group is the geographically immobile scholars, who make up the majority of the scholars I examine when looking at career patterns.59 In the later nineteenth century, this group also faced the nega- tive effects of the mobility requirement. While I describe how this group came into being and offer a more optimistic view of their careers than their