Seite - 76 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

76 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 The new philology, accentuating exegesis and grammar in place of the previous mechanical learning of vocabulary and translation,138 played a prominent role in the cultivation of classical values but was also an emi- nently political issue. This was not only because of the stress on researching minutia and the rejection of grand narratives. Paradigmatic here is the chair in Prague. Georg Curtius was appointed professor and director of the Philological Seminar (Philologisches Seminar), and August Schleicher was appointed shortly thereafter as an associate professor of comparative linguistics. These nominations were important for two reasons: they counter- balanced the long-serving but unproductive full professor Michael Canaval, and both newly nominated scholars worked on comparative linguistics, which owing to its emphasis on similarity and contact among languages was of political importance in the multinational monarchy. One can clearly per- ceive the political dimension of this innovation in both Schleicher’s linguistic Stammbaumtheorie (family-tree theory) and Curtius’s research on classical philology. While Schleicher promoted the close kinship of Lettish-Slavic and Germanic as Indo-Germanic “sister languages,”139 Curtius wrote that “com- parative linguistics has proven that countless centuries before the beginning of Greek and Italian history, the common ancestors of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic people, Slavs and Celts constituted one folk.”140 This vision was strongly reminiscent of the narratives of the past that historical research was to provide, according to the political imagination of the conservatives. Emphasis on the political value of philology was quite common. Curtius’s successor, Ludwig Lange, even included a version of a political program for nationalities, which sought to unite them in spite of their cultural differences in the pursuit of the higher aim of humanity. In his inaugural lecture, he described Greek and Roman ideals as a “spiritually refining force . . . in a present dampened by materialism, especially for youth, [who are] receptive to all things good and beautiful.” Moreover, he contin- ued, “we can learn from the Romans how one can remain fully national and nonetheless achieve humanity. As Romans did not become Greeks, the new nations [Völker], be they Slavs or Germans, should not dismiss their national peculiarities, if they are valuable; nationality should only be cleansed of the muck in the acid test of attempts at humanity.”141 The prominent role of comparative linguistics in the appointment policy of the 1850s was not visible only in the cases of Schleicher and Curtius; comparative studies was a popular political device for accentuating national interconnections. In particular, it highlighted the role of research on the original language of the Slavs, seen, depending on the author, as Old Church