Seite - 73 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 2 ♦  73 Catholic, activity, Thun-Hohenstein created two new chairs of history at the universities, one for general history and one for Austrian history. Interestingly, this division of chairs denoted the preferred orientation of the nominees. While the chairs of Austrian history at the various uni- versities were filled with Catholic historians born in the Habsburg Empire, Thun-Hohenstein did not hesitate to promote foreign and Protestant scholars to cover lectures in general history. The most prominent chairs, as well as the directorship of the IAHR, were clearly reserved for Catholics, including exponents of Catholic conservativism who, owing to their activism in favor of Catholic conservatism, had had to leave other universities in the German Confederation. The best known were a few members of the Görres Circle, an antiliberal movement propagating political Catholicism in Munich, who lost their positions because of their involvement in conservative Catholic protests against Ludwig I’s affair with the Irish dancer Lola Montez.121 Especially with regard to specialists in the auxiliary sciences of history, almost absent from Habsburg scholarship in the Vormärz, Thun-Hohenstein was flexible in applying the denominational rules. He was even willing to nominate Protestant scholars to the University of Vienna, which was pri- marily a Catholic institution. In 1849 he stressed that the chair of history in Vienna should be awarded to Catholics,122 but in 1857 he appointed a specialist in auxiliary sciences of history, Theodor Sickel, as an associ- ate professor and a leading member of the IAHR, even though the young scholar had been born in Prussia, was Protestant, and was even suspected of spying for France.123 One must add, however, that Sickel was not Thun- Hohenstein’s first choice and that he had been living in Vienna for a few years before his appointment, teaching paleography at the IAHR.124 Through Sickel, the IAHR became the central European institution for the critical discipline of document research, its proclaimed aim being to rebuff the teleological-philosophical approaches that had predominated in historical research before 1848. Such nominations were possible only through personal contacts and protection, something, as I show later, that was vital for developing careers in the 1850s. To ensure that candidates had the proper ideological conscious- ness, Thun-Hohenstein relied on a network of trusted sympathizers, who in turn corresponded with scholars abroad. One such person was Johann Böhmer, a famous historian working in Frankfurt am Main, known for his strong aversion to Prussian Protestantism.125