Seite - 121 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 3 ♦  121 it even started. A letter concerning such permission was to be enclosed in every habilitation proposal. Although no instances of such a refusal were noted, this certainly supported the trend of habilitating under one’s own teacher, as other professors might oppose younger competitors’ access to materials, instruments, and research aids they had gathered, especially if they had assistants striving for a career as well. In one case, the withdrawal of the right to use an institute’s facilities led to the exclusion of a scholar from the university, effectively ending his academic career: in 1905 the archaeologist Arthur Mahler was forbidden from using the facilities at the ar- chaeological institute directed by Wilhelm Klein in Prague. The reasons had, as the rector wrote, to do neither with the person [of Mahler], nor with his scientific or teaching activity. The reasons [for forbidding Mahler to use facilities of the archaeological institute] are caused by special139 conditions at the University of Prague, which have been hard or impossible to eliminate. Professor Klein saw it as his duty to ascertain that poten- tial conflicts among students over the question whether a docent of a non-German nationality is acceptable or unacceptable at the German University in Prague are not carried out in the presence of his pre- cious collections.140 It is clear in spite of the veiled terminology that Klein’s denial of access resulted from the protests and even assaults by German-national students on Mahler, a politically active Zionist intellectual. I return to the influence of street conflicts on universities in more detail in chapter 6; for now it should be clear that professors could end the careers of Privatdozenten if they wished, as Klein obviously did in the case of the unfortunate Mahler. Most habilitation records are very short and formal and refer to para- graphs of the law in cases of rejection; the reason for rejection was usually the poor quality of the candidate’s scientific publications or his lack of suit- ability for teaching. Seldom are the reasons more thoroughly explained. For example, in the case of the Tyrolean inventor Anton Nagy, his paper on the therapeutic use of a combustion turbine and his wording in the documents moved the referents to conclude that the applicant was not a “mentally nor- mal person.”141 The dry style prevailing in documents sent to the ministry points to another feature of the habilitation system, which was its gradual profes- sionalization and, hence, the importance of personal connections. Those