Seite - 247 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 7 ♦  247 The German University in Prague and Chernivtsi University experi- enced the most uncertainty at the end of the war, since their teaching staff now belonged to declared national minorities. Scholars from these univer- sities openly opposed the new states and considered changing locations; in Prague the rectorate even proposed the extraterritoriality of the university (that is, the university would remain in Prague but without being subject to the Czechoslovak state), which at first fiercely rejected the Czechoslovak government.18 Although these efforts failed, both universities remained in the new states, the German University in Czechoslovakia and Chernivtsi University in Romania, but lost some of their faculty members. Habsburg Multicultural Legacies As Tara Zahra convincingly argues, schools were one of the places where nationalization processes took place,19 and universities, which had integrated nation-building and nation-imagining processes even before the schools did, played a major role here, too. Already before World War I, central European multicultural processes had been both shaping and being shaped by uni- versities, and managing the differences in the new states proved at least as problematic for the new political elites as it had been in the late Habsburg Empire. The multiplicity of languages and the issues of multinational coex- istence were some of the bequests inherited by the successor states. In the context of universities, several points are of relevance, giving insight into how the post-Habsburg universities experienced these new realities. First, universities whose faculties had been appointed during the Habsburg Empire were, after 1918, subservient to new state interests, and new curricula were implemented. The reorganization of these universities meant the renegotiation of contracts as well as of long-established schol- arly traditions and teacher-student networks. For instance, professors of German language and literature in Galicia and all professors at the German University in Prague were now members of a minority in a foreign state; indeed, particularly in Romania (Chernivtsi) and Czechoslovakia (Bratislava and Prague), many professors faced new and somewhat hostile political re- alities in 1918–19. Second, with the transfer of the Russian-language Warsaw Imperial University (Императорский Варшавский университет) to Rostov-on-Don