Seite - 276 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

276 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 by international scholarly organizations immediately after the war.16 Still, many scholars teaching in Czechoslovakia and Poland wrote in German, and it remained the language of intellectual communication. At the same time, the persistence and role of micro-imperial languages (Polish in the eastern part of the Republic of Poland and Czech in Czechoslovakia) led to conflicts with Ukrainians and Lithuanians, on one hand, and Slovaks, on the other. This shift in the understanding of the language/university debate went hand in hand with changes in public perception, historical commemora- tion, and collective memory concerning universities. It also affected the way in which universities and their scholars participated in the political public sphere. Johannes Feichtinger, a historian of Habsburg scholarship, has called German-speaking Habsburg and Austrian scholars “relatively autonomous,” meaning that they were proposing political changes without actively participating in politics; they instead expressed these sentiments in scholarly books and articles.17 If one wants to apply this to Hungarian or Slavic scholars, one has to distinguish between nationalist politics and politics in a narrower sense. Scholars working in L’viv, Pest, or Prague took a stance for the na- tionalist cause in a variety of ways, beginning by signaling national unity through activities in science and culture. This could be as simple as writing in a language other than German, Latin, or French. The staging of culture— its extent and its productivity—was already a political issue, although this politicization had different manifestations and various intensities. In the late nineteenth century, the decision to publish in a particular language of publication was a career choice, and many academics would have simply accepted this as a strategic act and not a political one. In the historical memory of the new states during the post-1918 period, scholars who had not openly participated in political activities during the Habsburg period were forgotten. Because of this, they are underrepresented in historical writing as well, supporting a narrative that academics jointly and actively supported the national struggle for cultural autonomy. This nar- rative contains a kernel of truth, albeit a small one: scholars participated in national projects and thus strengthened them, but not through open patriotic support or zeal. It was not really a viable option for scholars to completely back away from national projects and, for instance, write only in German throughout their career, although one finds as many politically silent Slavic or Hungarian scholars as politically active German-language scholars. Looking at the language changes in the Habsburg Empire brings an- other facet to the debate on language and scholarship to the fore. It shows,