Seite - 212 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

212 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 The breach in Czech unity came with a series of publications doubting the authenticity of Rukopis královédvorský and Rukopis zelenohorský (the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové and Manuscript of Zelená Hora), pivotal doc- uments attesting to old Czech culture and history. The conflict had played out several times from the moment of their discovery/forgery in the late 1810s, with several scholars arguing that they were clearly forgeries, while others, most notably patriotic political celebrities like Palacký and Šafárik, considered them authentic. But in the mid-1880s, the conflict enflamed anew when the young generation of scholars critically analyzed both manuscripts from many sides, which included a chemical examination, in a series of articles in the Masaryk-led journal Athenaeum, arguing that they were, in- deed, forgeries. The conflict escalated as the older generation of Prague professors criticized their younger colleagues for their doubts, given their national identity, and proposed their own analysis.179 Although the political conflict decreased around the turn of the century, the position of Masaryk and his colleagues as outsiders in the faculty was obvious; this was made known to a wider public in articles in Athenaeum and caused several serious conflicts during habilitations and professorial appointments. This also led to attempts to remove Masaryk from the uni- versity.180 Masaryk, for his part, opposed appointments of conservative scholars.181 While the older generation of scholars initially succeeded in appointing their candidates, both the composition of the faculty and the con- servative scholars’ influence in the ministry changed over time. Although Masaryk, the most polarizing figure, was appointed a full professor only in 1896, younger scholars achieved several gains, supported in Vienna by Eduard Albert and, most important, by the Prague historian Antonín Rezek, whose informal consulting position in Vienna was turned in 1896 into a Ministerialrat (secretary of the ministry), and later a Sektionschef, position in the Ministry of Education.182 With the Czech past a contentious issue, historical methodology was crucial. Here Jaroslav Goll, a proponent of the German positivist school of Georg Weitz, opposed the philosophical historical creations of the professor of Austrian history Václav Vladivoj Tomek and, later, Masaryk. The strug- gle had begun to affect the faculty by 1889, when Rezek was appointed as Tomek’s successor. Rezek was accused of antinational propaganda owing to his critique of the creation of the Franz Joseph Czech Academy for Science, Literature and Arts. Reflecting on this issue, he noted sarcastically that while he was accused of a lack of patriotism in Prague, in Vienna the ministry saw