Seite - 94 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

94 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 vertical communication between professors, students, and the population of the province as a whole were stressed. In this case, the University of L’viv was included on equal terms in petitions as the “younger brother,” with clear statements that the language change at the university in the capital of the Polish-dominated region of Galicia would be as vital as that at the Jagiellonian University. The most interesting apologies for Polish were written by Józef Dietl, the former rector of the Jagiellonian University and a foremost nationalist activist, and Antoni Helcel, a legal historian, who (re)defined the nationalist narrative through the question of the educational purpose of the language of instruction.17 In both cases, the German language was clearly described as foreign, hindering schoolchildren’s and university students’ ability to master the materials taught and representing a clear turn toward the folk-based lin- guistic theories of Johann Gottfried Herder and others. With the axiom that Polish was sufficiently developed to be a learned tongue (even surpassing German in its syntactic flexibility or diversity of vocabulary), the commu- nication value of world languages was acknowledged but given secondary importance. At the same time, both scholars argued that the Ruthenians (de- rogatorily described) needed to use Polish as a language of culture; they thus turned the previously adopted position upside down and here disregarded the symbolic and educational component. Ruthenian might be accepted by rights only when it had developed sufficiently through contact and exchange with Polish, which in turn reminds one of German-speaking scholars’ argument against the equity of languages in the empire;18 Dietl did, however, argue that gymnasium pupils should be educated in both provincial languages.19 Although Dietl enlarged the scope of university education in Ruthenian to four practical subjects and included Privatdozenten, who could freely choose the language of their lectures, the contradiction between the argu- ments relating to Polish and Ruthenian is obvious. In fact, Dietl’s proposal for practical implementation was in its rhetoric not far from that written by Thun-Hohenstein in 1849 for the introduction of German in Cracow in 1853, with similar arguments about achieving peaceful coexistence and linguis- tic duality through the preponderance of one language. But now it was the Ruthenians who should have contact with scholarship through the vehicle of the Polish language, and only a few exceptionally gifted scholars could be accepted as Privatdozenten teaching in Ruthenian. In contrast to Thun- Hohenstein’s view, though, in Dietl’s narrative the aim of developing both