Seite - 254 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

254 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 fifty-fifty division, the new rules stated that the German University would receive one-sixth of the cadavers.50 Fearing a loss of influence, the German University seriously considered moving to a region more densely popu- lated by German speakers and started discussions with the city councils of Litoměřice/Leitmeritz, Ústí nad Labem/Aussig, Cheb/Eger, and Teplice/ Teplitz. However, although the government and President Masaryk seemed to support this development, it ultimately failed for financial reasons.51 While scholars at the German University were certainly not satisfied with the developments there in the immediate aftermath of the war, they hesitantly took the loyalty oath to the new state. Only a few had left Prague after 1918, moving to Vienna, clearly an act of refusal to swear the oath to the new state, since such scholars received only a Privatdozentur in the Austrian capital. Since at least one of the émigrés, Anton Lampa, had been a full professor and could have remained at the German University, political protest is the inevitable conclusion.52 The nominations in Prague seemed to continue as usual during and after the war, as if the new boundaries were no problem, although some rectors in the 1920s did challenge the citizenship rules for professors as prevent- ing the German University from recruiting the best people. However, the structure of appointments changed in comparison with the Habsburg period. According to Ota Konrád, of the thirty-eight newly appointed professors in the philosophical faculty of the German University in Prague between 1921 and 1937, nineteen were promoted from within the Prague staff, and sixteen were foreigners. Konrád considers scholars from both Austria and Germany as foreigners, however. While twenty-three of the fifty-nine teaching staff in this period had been born in Bohemia or Moravia, taught there, and mostly spent their whole careers there, those appointed from abroad remained in Bohemia relatively briefly.53 In addition to several possible cultural reasons, such as foreigner status and the peripheral nature of the German University in Prague, financial reasons were certainly important, since Czechoslovak salaries were not competitive with German ones.54 Even so, the university successfully retained some professors who received calls from German universities. For financial reasons, new appointees for full professors had mostly previously held positions as associate professors and Privatdozenten, which was characteristic of in-between universities, as outlined in the previous chapters. While the German University in Prague was certainly not a top- notch German-language institution, it was still one of the largest in terms of