Seite - 108 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

108 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 for a German university.”82 This argument for the universality of German fell on fertile ground, especially after the linguistic changes in Galicia. Tobias Wildauer, the speaker of the parliamentary budgetary commission on this issue, argued that after the Galician universities “lost their universal signifi- cance and took on the character of camp establishments . . . the whole widely stretched East of the Empire lacks a universally accessible site for fostering science.”83 The minister of education and religion at that time, Karl Stremayr, who not only supported the project but also considered himself one of its driving forces, similarly saw the Austrian mission as bringing culture to the East.84 In a petition to Franz Joseph, he stressed once more the importance of German Bildung in the linguistically mixed regions, discussing, among other locations, Olomouc, Brno, Opava, and Bielsko/Bielitz/Bílsko).85 Stremayr stressed that while all these cities would profit culturally from a university, Chernivtsi had one particular asset: a university in this city would be an instrument of foreign policy. According to him, it would profit Romanians, both those living in Bukovina and those from abroad. Since the 1860s the University of Iaşi (Romania), the nearest university to Chernivtsi, had actively attracted the Romanian-speaking population of the region. Thus, with the establishment of the university in Bukovina, “espe- cially the Romanians of neighboring countries will be pulled once more strongly toward German ‘Bildung’, and thus a step will be taken toward the retrieval of the historical Austrian influence on this nation.”86 One should bear in mind that at this time Romania was still a province of the Ottoman Empire despite striving for independence and had a pro-Prussian Domnitor (hereditary ruler), Carol I (Karl von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen); the po- litical implications of asserting this “cultural significance” should not be underestimated. In the end, German was made the language of instruction and of admin- istrative affairs (except in several subjects at the Greek Orthodox faculty). Indeed, notwithstanding the presence of peoples of many allegiances in the assembly hall, the speakers at the opening ceremony clearly accentuated the superiority of German culture and the German spirit.87 While other lan- guages were also represented within the university’s walls, this was neither initially planned nor achieved in large numbers. It was only thanks to the petitions of Ruthenian and Romanian deputies that the ministry agreed to create special chairs for both languages and literatures. The Romanian chair took, however, the place of the chair of “oriental languages,” which in many cases meant Hebrew.88 The Jewish population, according to statistics the