Seite - 214 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

214 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 distanced itself, if one considers the disciplines symbolizing imperial unity: Galician faculties considered German as a foreign language and had no ha- bilitations in German literary studies and only a few in Austrian history. To illustrate the effects of this, here is an example from the Commission for the Newer History of Austria (Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Österreichs). Founded in 1896, it included several Bohemian and Moravian scholars, among them the Czechs Rezek and Goll. Although the government insisted on having a “Polish” scholar as well, an appropriate candidate was found and nominated only in 1916.187 One should not, however, confuse this change of space with dissolution. The post-neoabsolutist era was characterized by new forms of allegiance and pan-Habsburg loyalty in which diversity-in-unity was the new guiding rule, replacing earlier ideas in which German was the guarantor of cultural uni- fication. In fact, as I will argue in chapter 7, Cisleithanian universities also remained the role model for nationalizing states in the interwar period. In the late nineteenth century, new modes of communication that assured unity emerged, originating not only in the center of the empire, Vienna, but also at Slavic universities, which, for example, began to concentrate on sending young scholars to Vienna or openly promoted scholars with experience at German-language universities. It seems that the relations among scholars within the empire even improved after the centralists in Vienna ceased to prescribe German as the binding cultural element. Although the withdrawal of German scholars from Eastern Galicia led to an intensification of conflicts between Poles and Ruthenians, these followed roughly the same pattern as previous tensions between Germans and Poles. The growing political tensions at Slavic universities crossed local boundaries and connected with differing visions of nationhood. In Bohemia and Galicia alike, these conflicts were also linked with generational changes as the conservatives who had been promoted under Thun-Hohenstein and in the 1860s began to be challenged by liberal scholars in the 1870s. This trend was clearly pan-Habsburg and affected other universities as well, leading to tensions around 1900. Being an openly Darwinist or anticlerical scholar was a similar experience whether one worked in L’viv, Budapest, or Vienna. Here Thun-Hohenstein’s policy showed its long-term influence, especially because university autonomy supported the prevailing ideological positions. Finally, the norms scholars had to adhere to in order to achieve promo- tion in the university system remained similar across the empire, with one significant difference. While at the German-language universities mobility