Seite - 72 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

72 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 The Habsburg Empire as a Conservative Space: Historiography The importance of historiography for the new narrative of the monarchy was signaled already in 1847 when Joseph Chmel gained support for his pan-Habsburg projects and began to lead the historical commission at the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in Vienna. The universities, whose main function, according to Joseph Alexander Helfert, was “the fostering of the humanities and familiarity with the institutions and history of the fatherland,”114 followed closely. Helfert, who before 1848 was a jurist and historian of church law and in 1848–60 served as Unterstaatssekretär (un- dersecretary of state) in the Ministry of Education,115 pulled the strings in the ministry throughout Thun-Hohenstein’s tenure, especially in the historical disciplines. In his eyes, a patriotic, statist direction in education was the only way to create a feeling of nonethnic national unity, an outlook Thun- Hohenstein clearly agreed with. Searching for uniting origin myths, Helfert directed historians’ attention especially toward the Middle Ages and early modern history to find common enemies of the central European populace, such as the Mongolians.116 He also embraced the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, which in his eyes created larger states that could better protect the population, as in the case of Albert II’s unification of Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia in 1438.117 Such a construction of the Habsburg monarchy as a state brought into being by a historical imperative also required writing the histories of par- ticular provinces to substantiate their development as naturally leading to the creation of “Greater Austria.”118 However, such an analysis first required the historical sources for all provinces to be collected and edited, which Helfert, in agreement with Chmel, saw as necessary before any attempt at analysis. For this purpose, the ministry created an up-to-date institute for source research, the IAHR; the preparations for this included an examination of the leading European historical institutes.119 The past was reduced to the “glorious” Middle Ages, while the more recent history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained clearly in the background.120 Despite Helfert’s declarations about the linearity of historical development, cultural memory was selective, excluding, for instance, Josephinism and empha- sizing the uniting force of Catholicism, promoted by the conservatives. In accordance with Helfert’s view of historiography as a patriotic, and thus