Seite - 109 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  109 most numerous group in the region, thus was not represented among the university professorship. The existence of different chairs for language and literature facilitated the later creation of various national organizations, in which intellectuals played an important role. The growth of associations such as the Romanian Arboroasa (The Woodland), the Ruthenian Січ (Sich), the German Verein der christlichen Deutschen (Society of Christian Germans), and the Jewish German-speaking Hasmonäa meant, on the one hand, nationalist/religious mobilization across imagined boundaries but, on the other, the beginning of modern nationalist movements in Bukovina. Ruthenian and Romanian professors were active in the creation of these organizations and attracted nationalist students as well as German ones; the Jewish organizations were linked more to the former L’viv Privatdozent Lazar Elias Igel (at the time the chief rabbi of Bukovina).89 Chernivtsi was indeed an appealing place for professors to train as public intellectuals. Not every group welcomed German as the medium of instruction. Since the university tried never to favor any national group, nationalist activists in- creasingly regarded it as a foreign body and a source of German nationalism. It was, for example, the only university that rejected the Ruthenian students who left the University of L’viv in 1901 because of a yearlong Ruthenian boycott of the Eastern Galician university.90 But opposition outside of the province was also active: the anti-Semitic press in Vienna bemoaned the cre- ation of a university in a far corner of the empire where most of the adherents of German culture were Jews.91 O Trieste, o nulla! The Italian University Question Although the Slav question remained the most important national issue in the late Habsburg Empire, western Cisleithania did not remain immune to cultural tensions. While in Galicia the “Tyroleans of the East” struggled for their university, in Tyrol German nationalists imagined the Welschtiroler (Italians, or “Welsch-Tyroleans”) as Slavs who wanted to challenge German cultural boundaries in the province.92 After the cities of Pavia and Padua freed themselves from the Habsburg Empire, Italian-speaking Habsburg citizens could study only at the University of Innsbruck. In particular, the importance of Italian legal studies was dis- cussed throughout the nineteenth century; serious proposals for the creation of a law academy or faculty in Trieste remained unresolved (its creation was