The question of how to categorize and study science in multicultural empires has in recent years increasingly occupied historians of science and of empires.Footnote 1 Issues of intercultural mediation, brokerage, or cultural translation have been particularly influential in the study of science in colonial empires. However, the question for continental empires was about science as a reaction to pluricultural reality. Ernest Gellner, Deborah Coen, and Johannes Feichtinger,Footnote 2 among others, have taken a similar approach to the Habsburg monarchy, which notwithstanding its legal status as a monarchy shared several characteristics of an empire.Footnote 3 These reactions to empire also included nationalisms, which, as recent publications have shown, largely defined the shape of the late-nineteenth-century scientific landscape in Central Europe.Footnote 4 In this article, I want to look at the imperial scientific landscape from yet another perspective, concentrating on itinerant scholars and the circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. In my view, this constitutes an imperial culture of its own that has not yet been thoroughly analyzed.
Although imperial space is the necessary starting point, the duality of empire as both a state and a homeland of communities whose languages extended beyond political borders cannot be overlooked. Ironically, from a sociohistorical point of view, of those linguistic communities that developed a significant amount of scholarship, only the Czech-Bohemian and Hungarian ones can be conceived of as purely Habsburg. German-Austrian, Polish, and Ruthenian communities were parts of larger, linguistically defined communication networks, which gradually became their lived spaces—èspaces vecus, to borrow the expression from Armand Frémont.Footnote 5 This expression should be read on two levels in the context of this study. Firstly, Habsburg scholars lived in a state whose space was shaped through the neoabsolutism of the 1850s but was later modified by linguistic changes at the university, the liberal constitution of 1867, and the opening of the borders to foreign scholars. These were, however, only preconditions that allowed for the possibility of academic mobility. Secondly, the structure of the academic field of the Habsburg monarchy—its centers and peripheries—was similarly not an outcome of regulations but rather of the way people used them. There were, of course, the various interests of the institutions and scholars themselves: state-nationalism, linguistic-nationalism, the search for the most prominent scholars versus local scholars, and financial reasons. By the end of the nineteenth century, Berlin would become the place of reference for Austrian scholars, Warsaw for Polish Galicians, and Kiev for Ruthenians, a development by no means obvious in the 1850s, and this evolution happened to a large extent against the will of both central and provincial governments. Although academic appointments shaped this structure, the media of publication and cross-references mirrored this reorientation.
Although these communities shared languages with their neighbors, they developed unique approaches to science and scholarship defined by sociopolitical situations, state ideology, and the management of scientific institutions, religious and philosophical tradition, among other factors. In contrast to linguistic cultures of knowledge, I define them as spatial cultures of knowledge. From these, only Austrian scholarship as independent from the German tradition, and recently Galician-Ruthenian scholarship as distinct from Romanov-Ukrainian, has found its way onto the pages of the historiography of science: the former as part of a national narrative, the latter in the context of west-Ukrainian-Galician regionalism. Polish language scholarship developed in Galicia is usually seen through the broader context of “Polish science,” with the exceptions of few small-scale studies concentrated on local developments.
In this paper, I want to move beyond narratives confined to linguistic and spatial cultures and rather propose to look at Habsburg science through the prism of scholarly contacts and the circulation of knowledge. Through a pan-Habsburg policy of academic appointments, a strong scientific center in Vienna, or simply for financial reasons, scholarly careers were inherently mobile, not only in the sense of stipends, peregrinations, or academic travels, but also in terms of more permanent relocations. In the nineteenth century, this mobility was not only a movement in space, but increasingly across language communities, which can be seen here as new linguistic cultures of knowledge that replaced earlier regional, plurilingual ones.Footnote 6 Although these new cultures of knowledge transgressed and seriously contested the viability of the imperial Habsburg one in the late nineteenth century, they did not nullify the latter. Cultures of knowledge should be understood here as networks of creation and diffusion of knowledge, the participants in which need not belong to the same national or linguistic culture. What is important here are the shared media or institutions that enabled intensive communication, which in turn shaped codes of communication, scientific interests, methods, theories, and practices.Footnote 7
Although one could use here the metaphor of entanglement and disentanglement, I claim that Habsburg science in the nineteenth century was not “entangled,”Footnote 8 because this concept denotes the existence of prior differences between components that were intertwined. Rather, new differences and differentiations along linguistic and ethnic lines were constructed, contesting and reinterpreting previously existing, long-standing togetherness.Footnote 9 This applies not only to the historically Habsburg provinces, but also to Galicia, as its modern scientific organizations, such as the Ossolineum Institute and L'viv University, were established after the partition of Poland-Lithuania and thus were imperial products. This does not apply fully, however, to Cracow, which became part of Galicia in 1846. The Habsburg scholarly community was an entity held together by common space, reproduced through scholarly mobility and scholarly contacts, and at least partially determined by political decisions. It drew together people from different provinces and various linguistic cultures, not only across languages but also between empires and their cultures of knowledge. The mobility of people and knowledge can thus be seen as a factor reinforcing pan-Habsburg imperial culture, with linguistic cultures as one part of the kaleidoscope.
Support for this claim is provided by manifold examples of difference found in trans-imperial cultures usually understood and described through the prism of one nation. Tatjana Buklijas, Deborah Coen, Johannes Feichtinger, and Barry Smith have highlighted some of these “local” Habsburg-Austrian developments, which distinguished Habsburg-Austrian approaches from the German ones in different disciplines such as medicine, history, social sciences, and philosophy.Footnote 10 Although one of the key figures in the narratives about a distinct field of Habsburg humanities, Franz Brentano, came from abroad, Habsburg philosophy and psychology developed a unique approach under his influence, differing from that of the German Empire. Such interimperial differences can also be seen between the Habsburg and Romanov empires. For example, “Ukrainian” historiography in Galicia and Russian-Ukraine developed differently until the nomination of Mykhailo Hrushevsky to L'viv in 1894. Even if Hrushevsky's narrative was influential in the long run, his vision of Ukrainian nationalism lost influence in Galicia after 1913.Footnote 11 To draw another example, Darwinism or positivism developed rapidly in Congress Poland and the Duchy of Posen and was imported to Galicia with great difficulties, even though both places used the same language and shared scholarly media.Footnote 12
In what follows, I do not propose a Habsburg science built from the remnants of nationalisms, nor a science seen through the prism of a nonethnic category and nationally indifferent actors. What I am more interested in are the structures that traversed different languages or ethnicities: local Habsburg traditions and approaches that traveled through the monarchy. Habsburg science is similar to “Habsburg Lemberg,”Footnote 13 that is, defined by the space where it developed and not by the communities that could claim exclusive ownership. This space is manifoldly brokered, defined by reciprocity and circulation, and at the same time the science communicated in it is intrinsically local in its diffusion. As Tatjana Buklijas has argued, such processes defined the Viennese Medical School, the representatives of which shaped medicine throughout Austro-Hungary.Footnote 14 Mobility left its mark on other disciplines and research agendas, which are discussed below.
In what follows, I begin with a cursory survey of the patterns of scholarly exchange after 1848. Although the appointment policy of Habsburg universities stands at the forefront of my argument, I consider more broadly pan-Habsburg academic mobility patterns. Although political incentives for scientific exchange lessened over time, the growing importance of new nationally coded centers did not obliterate mobility within the state boundaries. In the second part, I follow two pairs of scholars whose careers encapsulate my idea of mobility-influenced culture of knowledge as outlined above. Surgeon Eduard Albert and historian Heinrich Zeissberg represent the influence of appointment policy beyond one linguistic culture. Sociologist Ludwik Gumplowicz and linguist Theodor Gartner, on the other hand, help to demonstrate how pan-Habsburg mobility shaped their scientific approaches. Looking at the flow of peoples and the networks of the production of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire can help incorporate both spatial and linguistic cultures in one imperial narrative, which can help to analyze the complex canvas of nineteenth-century Central Europe.
Knowledge on the Move: Patterns of Scholarly MobilityFootnote 15
Habsburg scholarship often suggests that the second half of the nineteenth century was a revolutionary period. Following the Revolution of 1848, during a short thaw before the onset of neoabsolutism, the Habsburg government implemented several reforms that defined subsequent scholarly communities. The abolition of censorship and the opening of exchange with non-Habsburg countries allowed for a greater flow of information and persons between states and between Habsburg provinces, which had been limited for both students and scholars during the Metternich period. An Imperial Academy of Sciences, aimed at bringing together scholars from throughout the monarchy, was established. Most importantly, universities were reformed: fully developed philosophical faculties replaced the preparatory studies; faculties gained the right to propose professors and Privatdozenten for appointments (even if both were still subjected to the ministry's final approval); finally, freedom of teaching and learning was proclaimed. Although far-reaching, other actions undertaken to regulate scholarly exchange abroad went mostly unnoticed in the discussion of academic reforms in historiography: those included such issues as the recognition of diplomas from foreign universities, the acceptance of foreigners as students, and the nomination of foreign professors.Footnote 16
All these measures allowed the sciences and humanities, previously confined to local institutions like museums, aristocratic societies, and royal collections, to flourish. However, they also opened the door for the politicization of universities, first in the service of the court and integrative state-nationalism and later increasingly of the nationalist activists. Political implications notwithstanding, liberalization intensified scholarly mobility both among the students and distinguished scholars.
It would be, however, erroneous to say that mobility was exclusively characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century. If even to a limited extent, scholarly exchange was possible in the Vormärz as well: appointments of professors at universities and, more importantly, at the technical schools were already pan-Habsburg; similarly, scholars working at the few scholarly institutions could be appointed from throughout the empire. One could name here the Lower Styrian philologist Franc Miklošič who worked at the Imperial Library of Vienna or the young Viennese Medical School, a Habsburg panopticon with scholars from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia. Aristocratic institutions could also appoint nonlocal scholars. For example, sponsors of the Patriotic Museum in Bohemia and the Matice česká financed the well-traveled philologist Pavol Jozef Šafárik when he settled in Prague in 1833 after living in Jena, Bratislava, and Novi Sad. Finally, the functionaries at the border could be bribed, thus enabling students to leave the country for other universities.Footnote 17
As a result of legislative liberalization after 1848, scholarly mobility increased both in the number and quality of exchanges. At the very basic student level, Gustav Otruba estimated that students whose mother tongue was not German constituted almost 50 percent of the student body at universities in Vienna and Graz in 1863 (it fell to around 30 percent by 1910), and foreigners more than 20 percent in the 1890s (Vienna, Graz, Innsbruck) and 1910 (Cracow, L'viv).Footnote 18 Notwithstanding the problematic category of “mother tongue,” these statistics show how overregional Habsburg universities became. It can also help to visualize the functional division of universities: although provincial institutions (including those in Prague) were mostly shaped by local plurality, Vienna University attracted students from throughout the empire. Students could move to universities of their liking to study with whom they liked, and their choice led quite frequently to the capital city.
These students most likely returned to the regions of their origin, with their new nonlocal knowledge. If they remained, they could put their competences to good use; linguistic skills, for example, were needed almost everywhere in the monarchy.Footnote 19 A number of these students were only briefly at the university different from their local one, be it through scholarships, visiting terms, or specialist programs, the latter frequent especially among physicians and jurists. Returning to the influence of this mobility on professional scholarship, the effects of it were not limited to spreading new knowledge to the respective province, but also to changing the center itself. The above-mentioned Miklošič, a professor of Slavic languages in Vienna after 1849, relied widely on information sent to him by his students with whom he kept in contact long after they graduated; his comparative linguistic would not have been possible if not for the word lists, clarifications, books, and transcriptions of spoken languages sent to him by his former pupils, not only those who had become professors (in fact, most of the Slavicists across the monarchy), but also those active as teachers or civil servants.Footnote 20
Student exchange was conditioned by several factors and changed over time. Most important was the availability of local institutions of higher education. This, it should be noted, had little to do with the language issue, at least not in the way one might imagine. The above-quoted statistics on the mother tongue of students in Cisleithania shows that while the number of Czech students at Germanophone universities fell drastically after the opening of Czech Charles University in Prague, the percentage of Polish students at the universities in Vienna and Graz had grown by 1890 (Vienna: 6.2 percent; Graz: 2.1 percent) compared to 1863 (Vienna: 2.1 percent; Graz: 0.5 percent), although there were already two universities with Polish language of instruction.Footnote 21 There are certainly more discrete language issues at hand, such as courses in minority languages (especially Italian and Slovenian) and, more importantly, the option of taking exams in these languages, especially in the juridical and medical (midwives) faculties. With few exceptions, e.g., exams in Italian in Vienna after the abandonment of such exams in Innsbruck because of political turmoil, these factors limited mobility. One should also bear in mind that especially during the neoabsolutist period, when German was the language of administration, non-German language of instruction could prompt students to study at the Germanophone institutions. The prospect of losing Galician students was precisely the rationale with which the Jagiellonian University asked the Ministry in 1853 to return to the German language of instruction.Footnote 22 Similarly, scholars instructing in Czech at the Charles University in Prague in the 1850s, suffered from low enrollments, as young Bohemians preferred German lectures.Footnote 23
This student mobility was certainly crucial for scientific careers. In Galicia, only 30–40 percent of university instructors had studied solely at the university where they later taught; in Graz and Innsbruck, these numbers were even lower, especially as a result of Viennese graduates. Only two universities were exceptional: Prague, where 20–35 percent of the faculty were educated at nonlocal institutions, and Vienna, with 60 percent of professors who did all their studies at Vienna.
All these universities have their own stories of mobility, closely linked to what I called in the introduction “lived space.” These spaces lined up at the end of nineteenth century more and more according to the languages used as the language of instruction. At the same time, the legal space of the state, as linguistically fragmented as it became, did not lose its importance, even if the exchange between universities with different languages of instruction grew scarce. This process did not begin in 1867, as one might suppose, but rather in the early 1860s when Hungarian and Polish became languages of instruction in Pest and Cracow, respectively. This triggered a wave of claims for more instruction in national languages. By 1875, there were five languages serving as primary instruction languages at universities, including technical ones: Czech, Croatian, German, Polish, and Hungarian. Ruthenian and Italian were partially allowed, and after severe conflicts separate universities with Ruthenian and Italian as languages of instruction were promised in the beginning of the 1910s. These institutions became centers of scholarship in their respective language and thus were able to recruit scholars capable of lecturing in them, frequently from abroad. Appointments of scholars who did not know the language of institution became rare, although this was legally possible if the given scholar agreed to learn the language within three years’ time. Even the German-language institutions almost never showed an interest in appointing scholars teaching at non-Germanophone universities, even if these scholars knew German.
This process of differentiation along linguistic lines was, however, gradual. Particularly during the neoabsolutist period, the intensification of pan-Habsburg mobility among scholars was state policy aimed at creating a loyal and ideologically compliant academic community. Moreover, mobility did not cease, and in absolute numbers, it even increased. This is also true for the exchange between Germanophone and Slavic institutions.
The neoabsolutist scholarly policy of the minister of religion and education, Leo Thun-Hohenstein, was significant with regard to scholarly mobility. Its foundation was the reform of philosophical studies, both in the ideological and methodic sense, linked with the “importation” of Catholic scholars from the non-Habsburg lands of the German Confederation as professors of philology, history, and law. However, the interimperial exchange also included Czech scholars teaching abroad (e.g., Jan Evangelista Purkyně and František Ladislav Čelakovsky), as well as Polish-speakers from the neighboring empires (e.g., Antoni Walewski, Antoni Małecki, and Wincenty Pol), who were nominated to provincial universities. When appointing scholars to L'viv, Pest, and Prague, the ministry turned quite often to Germanophone scholars from beyond the respective provinces. For example, in Pest twenty out of forty-nine scholars at the secular faculties had to leave the university in 1861, meaning that they were not able to lecture in Hungarian. In Cracow, however, scholars who did not speak Polish were exceptions and occupied chairs for which no politically acceptable local candidates could be found, such as zoology, mineralogy, and pathological anatomy, or for disciplines where intimate knowledge of German was essential, such as German language and literature.
Pan-Habsburg nominations of this period included scholars teaching in Galicia and Bohemia who moved to Vienna, Innsbruck, or Graz, like the chemist Friederich Rochleder or the mathematician Wilhelm Matzka. In these cases, Germanophone, non-Galician scholars constituted the majority, with two exceptions. First were scholars of Slavic languages who moved to Vienna and Prague to teach Polish and Czech. The second exception included two scholars who had been released from Cracow University in 1853 for political reasons and taught for a short time in Innsbruck before being allowed to return to Galicia: linguist Antoni Małecki and professor of Roman law Józafat Zielonacki, who also taught in Prague from 1855–1857.
Beginning with Pest in 1861, this policy of pan-Habsburg nominations changed. Scholars not speaking the language of instruction at institutions had to leave, with few exceptions for scholars who were supported by students and faculties. This triggered a new wave of mobility: outwards from the “nationalized” universities, as replacement scholars were mostly of local provenance. From the 1860s in Galicia and Hungary, and from 1882 in Prague, university faculties also decided to foster their own graduates into positions rather than allow nominations from nonnative speakers from elsewhere in the monarchy. Even when there was a clear educational need and imperative, universities’ governing bodies preferred to wait for local scholars to qualify themselves rather than accept cultural “foreigners.” Such was the case with the chair of geography in Cracow and L'viv and with forensic medicine in Cracow, where local scholars in question were given scholarships to specialize at the German-language universities to acquire the necessary qualifications.Footnote 24 The lack of competent scholars in Galicia prompted the faculties to search for candidates abroad, and as Germanophone institutions had done so since 1849, the ministry could hardly prohibit it. In 1864, the ministry even urged the Philosophical Faculty of Jagiellonian University to search for scholars abroad, a decision preempted by rector Josef Dietl's call in 1861 for Polish scholars from all regions to apply for habilitation in Cracow, which was of course to the liking of the Polish members of the faculty.Footnote 25
As alluded to before, there were quite a few exceptions from locally or even nationally oriented politics. Moreover, although the mobility of scholars who already achieved their habilitation paralleled academic linguistic geography, pre-habilitation geography was even more mobility-oriented. Here, the centrality of the Habsburg academic system and the predominance of Vienna can be best demonstrated. Approximately 370 persons habilitated at the Philosophical Faculty in Vienna after 1860, more than 20 percent were from Bohemia and Moravia, 6 percent from Hungary, and 5 percent from Galicia; at the medical faculty of 420 people, 25 percent came from Bohemia and Moravia, 9 percent from Hungary, and 2 percent from Galicia. None of the remaining universities had such regional variety. Among these cases, only a few were instances of intercultural mobility in the sense of linguistic cultures, and most remained teaching in Vienna. However, even those who remained at Germanophone institutions were frequently characterized by their multilingualism. One could mention the famous Ruthenian physicist and pioneer of roentgenology, Ivan Pulyui, and medical professors Michael Borysiekiewicz, Johann Hofmokl, and Eduard Albert. For some, habilitation at a Germanophone university enabled a career at the “national” institution: Vienna Privatdozent Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk is probably the best-known example but not the only one. The “father” of Polish analytic Philosophy and L'viv-Warsaw School of Philosophy, Kazimierz Twardowski, and famous Cracow physicist Marian Smoluchowski were both docents in Vienna at the beginning of their careers.
These last two were, in fact, quite atypical in terms of the mobility discussed above because both were actually born in Lower Austria—Twardowski in Vienna and Smoluchowski in Vorder-Brühl. One is often inclined in conventional historiography to see only “Deutsche Beamte” active in Galicia or in Hungary, but it worked the other way around as well, including provincial officials or military personnel working throughout the monarchy. Children of inner-Habsburg migrants frequently spoke not only languages of the province they were born into, but also languages spoken by their parents. One of the difficulties provincial universities faced was identifying scholars capable of speaking Polish (or Czech for Prague), which was not that obvious as German was still the primary language of publication. Eastern Galicia-born Borysiekiewicz, for example, who spent all his career in Vienna and Innsbruck, was considered a Polish speaker for a professorship in Cracow and a Ruthenian speaker for membership in Shevchenko Society and professorship at the L'viv University, although all his publications were in German.Footnote 26 Here, networks of informal contacts among faculty professors played an important role, and informants confirming the language potential of young scholars were most frequently mobile scholars themselves, like Jan/Johann Mikulicz Radecki who sent his students from Breslau to his previous place of appointment, Cracow, or Eduard Albert, described in detail below.Footnote 27
This points to a characteristic of mobility that developed after the centralist policy of neoabsolutism: mobility was put into use by the national parties and the institutions those parties claimed to be central for national cultures. It was possible not only through the autonomy of universities, whose proposals were only seldom questioned by the ministry, but also as the Habsburg ministry slowly but steadily lost influence in the provinces. The autonomous ministry of education governed Hungary, and in Galicia and later in Bohemia, the provincial government had more and more influence on appointment policy. Ironically, it seems that in the later nineteenth century, the “center” was much more influenced by the “periphery” than the other way around. First, several Slavic professors taught at Germanophone universities and influenced nominations there, helping their compatriots acquire positions in Graz or Vienna: Eduard Albert and Ludwik Gumplowicz are two such cases. After the language changes, only professors who were “German” in Galicia were chairs of German language and literature, and as a result their influence was limited. At the Czech Charles University in Prague, “Germans” were not allowed to teach. Secondly, there were three quite influential ministers from Bohemia (Josef Jireček) and Galicia (Ludwik Ćwikliński and Edward Rittner, both of whom were state secretaries for university matters prior to their appointments as ministers). Jireček was instrumental in strengthening the Czech faction at the Charles University in Prague against the will of the faculty. Rittner, on the other hand, known for his role in the Badeni-Laws, played a very influential role in Franz Brentano's resignation from his post in 1895 as Privatdozent in Vienna.Footnote 28
Thus, after the language changes, only the Germanophone universities remained under the close supervision of the ministry and developed an appointment system with its own hierarchies: Vienna was the central university with an enormous overproduction of academic offspring that were appointed to smaller universities, especially Innsbruck and Chernivtsi, mostly from the position of Privatdozent to associate or full professorship. Graz and Prague nominated scholars from these two institutions, mostly from associate to full professor. Vienna claimed the right to nominate only the best of the best: full professors from other Germanophone institutions, quite frequently also from the German Empire. Violations of this schemata were quite rare and barely discernible even at the level of faculty proposals. On one occasion, the ministry even intervened quite harshly when this hierarchy was to be violated. Chernivtsi University wanted to appoint Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, a renowned full professor of romance languages in Vienna. Even though the documents indicate Lübke was very much interested in a chair in Bukovina, the ministry's answer was the following: “it is not advisable to allow a professor of the Vienna University to transfer to a smaller university, because this would create a precedent, which would imply critical consequences for the thriving of the Vienna University.”Footnote 29
One should not get the impression that scholarly mobility was only between the “center” and “periphery.” Exchange was multilateral. Chernivtsi, Innsbruck, and Graz exchanged scholars in the above-mentioned circular way. The exchange of scholars who identified themselves with other nations was less frequent at the Slavic-language universities. Ruthenian medical chemist Ivan Horbachevs'kyi (Іван Горбачевський, Jan Horbaczewski), Slovak zoologist Josef Viktor Rohon, and Polish anatomist Andrzej (also in Czech: Ondřej) Obrzut taught at the Czech Charles University in Prague; the medical faculty tried unsuccessfully to appoint a preeminent surgeon, Ludwik Rydygier, from L'viv in 1903.Footnote 30 Physicians Pavel Ludwik Kučera and Vítězslav Chlumský, after 1919 professors in Czechoslovakia, had previously been professors in Galicia. Several Czech professors also taught in Croatia before being appointed in Prague, although this exchange ceased after 1882.
Politics certainly remained one of the reasons for mobility beyond the period of neoabsolutism, even if one disregards the relocation of scholars following language changes at institutions. A number of Czech scholars taught in Zagreb before the Czech Charles-Ferdinand University was opened; similarly, several Ruthenian scholars from Galicia were employed beyond Galicia because of a dearth of Ruthenian institutions. They moved to the newly opened local institutions, or in the Ruthenian case, those that were supposed to open in 1914. On the other hand, anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews prompted several scholars to search for positions beyond their local institutions. One of such example, Ludwik Gumplowiczs, is described below.
Mobility, for whatever reason a given scholar decided to move, thus remained a feature of the Habsburg university landscape beyond its zenith during the neoabsolutist years. Ironically, although their numbers were lower, mobile scholars appear to be more productive after the 1860s. Clearly, the myth of second-class scholars coming to peripheral universities in the 1850s, in both the Hungarian and Galician cases, can be easily dismantled by looking at their achievements during this time and their later careers, such as the acquisition of collections and new literature, the construction of laboratories, and the dissemination of new learning techniques, according to a recapitulation of the 1850s written by Polish professors in 1864.Footnote 31 (This knowledge transfer became, however, lost in descriptions following the narrative of “scholarship for the nation.”) There were, however, distinct tensions: nationally oriented scholars, as well as the urban public, were inspired by the Revolution of 1848 and proposed famous scholars for chairs, e.g., František Palacký in Prague, József Eötvös in Pest, and Adam Mickiewicz in Cracow. In this situation, scholars from Vienna or the German Empire were a disappointment. Moreover, these scholars were not too eager to move to small universities and left at the first possible chance. Characteristic here are the letters of Germanophone classic philologists who were sent to Galicia and Moravia, which reflected their disappointment with their destinations and were filled with stereotypes of filth, underdevelopment, and a lack of culture and civilization.Footnote 32 In contrast to these letters, the majority of scholars coming to Slavic universities following the linguistic changes adapted and was also accepted by the faculty. One known exception to this was August Sauer, who after three years as an auxiliary professor, left L'viv University because of conflicts with Polish professors on the faculty.Footnote 33 Moreover, although professors of different national orientations taught at Germanophone universities, they were well adapted. Even if their orientation caused problems with the public, they cooperated with colleagues on the faculty. One example here would be the cofounder of Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, the Czech Eduard Weyr who was a professor of mathematics in Vienna.Footnote 34
Scholarly mobility cannot, of course, be limited only to university professors, even if they probably comprised the majority of the cases. There were several scholarly institutions that employed scholars from across the monarchy; for example, the Triester Ferdinand-Maximilan Museum of Natural History (Il Museo Civico di Storia Naturale Ferdinendo Massimiliano) was led by Szymon Syrski (also Simeone Adamo de Syrski) from Galicia for almost a decade (1866–1875). Furthermore, the Marine Institute in Trieste and the Institute of Austrian History Research in Vienna both hosted scholars from throughout the monarchy.
One should, however, beware of the trap of overestimating the role interculturally mobile scholars played. They were a minority that bridged the more and more linguistically fragmented Habsburg scholarly landscape. Their habitus and actions were, however, different from those scholars who were both socialized and worked only in one place and one language. One such feature of these mobile scholars was a more conciliatory position toward national differences.Footnote 35 Even if these scholars shared a national ideology, they saw their respective nations as part of the monarchy and of European culture, criticized romantic exclusivist nationalism, and were more in favor of intercultural exchange. Even Sauer, seemingly unable to adapt in Galicia, cooperated later in Prague with Czech scholars.Footnote 36
Below, I concentrate on the effects of the post-1860s situation, which exemplified cultural mediation in the intercultural monarchy, and the innovative potential of intercultural mobility. These are, of course, not the only effects of mobility. Scientific transfer and interlingual translation were certainly the primary ones and will accompany the additional examples, even if only in the background. They are, however, general features of all mobility. I am most interested in the particularities of the inner-Habsburg situation, which were caused by a similarity of cultural situations across the monarchy, the entanglement of political interests, and the experience and intimate knowledge of the cultural and political peculiarities of Austro-Hungary.
Intercultural Brokers: Eduard Albert and Heinrich Zeissberg
In the sixty years analyzed above, one encounters many scholars who acted as mediators between different language communities. One could even say that all mobile scholars were intercultural mediators in one way or another. In what follows, I want to examine the potential of mobility—still largely unexplored for Habsburg scholarship—with four examples. On the one hand, political and national tensions defined the careers of Eduard Albert and Heinrich Zeissber but did not hinder their intercultural brokerage and involvement in appointment policies. The careers of Ludwig Gumplowicz and Theodor Gartner, on the other hand, exemplify how mobility enabled particular forms of knowledge to emerge in the first place, specifically, scientific knowledge as a reflection of the intercultural situation of the monarchy. First, I want to turn to two scholars at the Vienna University who became symbols of their disciplines, surgery and historiography, respectively. In particular, I want to show how the politics of language and nationalism influenced their careers but did not prevent their influence on appointments at universities with languages of instruction other than the ones they taught.
Albert and Zeissberg came from different cultural backgrounds: Albert was born in Žamberk in Bohemia and moved to Vienna only to study medicine; Zeissberg was born in Vienna, where he also studied, and between 1864 and 1871, he was professor of general and Austrian history in the still German-language L'viv University. Albert's career led him from Vienna through Innsbruck and back to the Habsburg capital, where he was appointed chair of the prominent First Surgical Clinic in 1881 and became the most important representative of the “Austrian surgery.”Footnote 37 Zeissberg had to leave the L'viv University as a result of language changes in 1871, and after a year in Innsbruck, he was appointed professor of Austrian history in Vienna, where he made a remarkable career at the University and Imperial Academy of Science and was also responsible for the monumental Kronprinzenwerk.
Both scholars’ careers were thus typical for Viennese professors: from “apprentice” at smaller universities to influential positions in the capital. At the same time, both were untypically marked by language problems. Albert knew Czech and, especially after the 1880s, took an active part in Czech cultural life as a patron and translator of poetry from Czech to German. In Vienna, he was seen and antagonized as Slav, especially in the leading medical journal of the time, Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift.Footnote 38 As a committed Czech, he never acquired a professorship at the university in Prague, although not for the lack of trying. In 1878, he was nominated by the minority of the Medical Faculty in Prague for the chair of surgery after Carl Heine. The ministry, however, decided not to appoint him because the “peaceful life of the Faculty” should not be troubled through the appointment of a scholar who “is not completely objective toward Czech national efforts.”Footnote 39 In 1880, he directly asked the ministry to transfer his appointment from Innsbruck to Prague on the occasion of the retirement of surgeon and active Czech-language scholar Josef Blažina. This time, the faculty decided with a 16 to 1 vote against him, proposing only German-speaking scholars for the position, although finally a conservative Czechophone scholar, Vilém Weiss, was appointed by the ministry.Footnote 40 The appointment the following year to Vienna can thus be seen as compensation for failure in Prague, but at the same time was supported among the faculty especially by another migrant scholar Eduard Hofmann.Footnote 41 Although marked as a Czech, Albert mostly wrote and worked in German: He published the supposedly first German textbook in surgery with Lister's antiseptic method and served on editorial boards and as editor of German-language surgery journals.Footnote 42
Zeissberg's career was also touched by politics, when he was relocated to Innsbruck after Polish became the language of instruction at the L'viv University. However, he had also antagonized Polish scholars in the faculty against him by opposing Polish lectures in history by Ksawery Liske in 1869 and the habilitation procedures in Polish of Wincenty Zakrzewski in 1871, several months before the language change in L'viv was decided.Footnote 43 Although he learned Polish, it was not enough to keep his position. First, chair of history was a politically symbolical one; second, the atmosphere in L'viv grew tense, and another Germanophone professor and philosopher Karl Barach Rappaport was even openly threatened by nationalist students.Footnote 44
Zeissberg's career in L'viv was marked by an adaptation to the social and linguistic characteristics of the province. Several years after arriving in Galicia, he included questions of Polish history in his scope of interest, writing critically acclaimed works concerning Mieszko II, Wincenty Kadłubek and his chronicles, and the Congress of Gniezno (AD 1000) and the question of crowning (or not) of Bolesław (I) Chrobry.Footnote 45 He was critically acclaimed among Polish language scholars as one of the first historians dealing with questions of the “Polish” Middle Ages and according them pivotal importance for Polish history.Footnote 46 At the same time, he remained devoted to positivistic critical source analysis, which did not always result in well-received narratives, especially as the background of his ideas was the positive role of (German-led) Christianity as the bringer of civilization, which was becoming more contested in the later nineteenth century. What is more, Zeissberg's opus magnum on Polish historiography from the Middle Ages (1872) was not only quite rapidly translated into Polish (1877), but because of this publication, he was also nominated as member of the Cracow Academy in 1874,Footnote 47 even after he left Galicia. Following his move to Innsbruck and then to Vienna, Zeissberg no longer researched the Polish past, and his contacts with Galicia weakened, although he still corresponded with some Galician scholars. Only during the preparations for the Kronprinzenwerk volume about Galicia in 1898 did this correspondence become more intensive. In a certain way, he could also use his influence as a historian and representative of politics to smooth the narrative of Galicia's history through the lenses of Polish uprisings as proposed by Galician historians.Footnote 48
What is of more importance, Zeissberg had a broad range of students who followed his positivistic, source-oriented approach to the past. Several Polish and Ruthenian historians who later acquired positions at the Galician universities or worked as researchers in Ossolineum, Shevchenko Society, and the Provincial Archives in L'viv were his former students and regarded as his followers. For two of them in particular, Aleksander Semkowicz and Anatol Lewicki, Zeissberg proved to be an important figure for their careers, as education under his direction was positively mentioned in their university appointment acts. In the case of Lewicki, nominated as a professor for Austrian history in Cracow in 1885, his experience with Zeissberg was probably decisive, as the academic commission regarded his work as rather average and criticized his lack of publications during his work as a gymnasium teacher in Przemyśl.Footnote 49
In Zeissberg's case influence on nominations is rather symbolic, although it is very probable that he was consulted by the ministry about appointments of Galician scholars while in Vienna. Albert, on the other hand, quite decisively took the opportunity of being near the ministry to take actions. As the successor of Johann Dumreicher, who was the prestigious first chair of surgery in Vienna, he became not only a successful and famous professor, but also the personal doctor of political celebrities and the emperor's family, which gave him a high status in Vienna. He did, however, retain his contacts in Prague, and his interest in the Czech Charles University's medical faculty remained intense. He wrote several Czech articles, participated in the meetings of Czech physicians, and corresponded with Czech intellectuals, supporting in particular the cultural and political vision of the Young Czechs. Through his personal contacts, he also influenced the nominations of three of his protégés to Prague, in both cases against the faculty's plans, given that they preferred to nominate graduates of the university. In 1887, through Albert's mediation directly with the ministry, Privatdozent in Vienna Karel Pawlík was appointed chair of gynecology, although the faculty did not include him in the proposal and opted for less-qualified local scholars.Footnote 50 In the case of Karel/Karl Maydl, Albert's protection was even more visible. Native in Rokytnice, Maydl studied in Prague and later in Vienna, but finally went as Albert's assistant to Innsbruck and later returned with him to the capital city, where he was appointed an associate professor of surgery. Finally, at Albert's instigation, in 1891, Maydl was appointed chair of surgery in Prague after Weiss, and he thoroughly reformed the operations there, for example introducing Lister sterilization methods, which Albert had propagated in Austria.Footnote 51 Maydl, then, was the force behind the nomination of another of Albert's protégés, embryologist Josef Rohon. Once again the faculty fiercely opposed this proposal and voted for local scholars. Rohon was born in Butin (Hungary, now Romania) to a Protestant Slovak family, studied in Vienna, and later worked in Vienna, Munich, and across the Romanov Empire, neither publishing in Czech nor participating in the Czech community.Footnote 52 Reacting to Albert's attempts to influence the nomination—the ministry consulted Albert as to Rohon's scholarly and linguistic abilities—the majority of the faculty openly criticized the violation of their autonomy and described Albert as a member of a “foreign faculty” (Mitglied fremder Fakultät) whose opinions should not be taken into account.Footnote 53
Zeissberg and Albert illustrate well how pan-Habsburg careers produced networks of influence that remained viable without regard to the national and linguistic changes at the universities. Both scholars could place their students in positions, even if informally through their vicinity to the center of political decisions in Vienna. One can even easily imagine that both were consulted by the ministry as experts who knew the relevant languages and thus were able to assess faculty proposals. Equally important, both scholars were positive examples for scholars in Bohemia and Galicia, and being among their protégés heightened the cultural capital of scholars. Ironically, although being Zeissberg's pupil was never criticized in Galicia, several older physicians on the Prague Czech medical faculty opposed Albert's students, most clearly during negotiations over Rohon's appointment. Political tensions influenced both their careers, but Albert's position as a Young Czech activist seems to have been more contested among Czechs in Prague than Zeissberg's German-ness was in Galicia. In the period around the time of language change at their respective universities, their cultural alignments and positions were controversial, but the tensions of being linguistic “other” lessened considerably once the boundaries between “us” and “them” at the universities were settled and scholarly expertise slowly gained in importance.
Mobility and Change: Ludwik Gumplowicz and Theodor Gartner
The second pair of scholars to be analyzed here demonstrate the influence of mobility on research topics and projects. To claim that scholars turn to new questions when they relocate to other places is a platitude. The new environment, as well as the material conditions of a laboratory, library, or university collections, is an all-powerful cause of epistemological changes. Transitions may occur at the level of theory and method or be induced through new subjects of intellectual inquiry. This is the case in the following two examples: linguist Theodor Gartner and social scientist Ludwik Gumplowicz used the same methods and arguments but faced new projects. Through this interplay, a new hybrid form of knowledge came into being, the origin of which cannot be explained except through the mobile careers of its creators. As I argue, changes of place and culture allowed both scholars not only to do the research for which they became known, but also to have a lasting influence on their respective branches of scholarship: (conflict) sociology in Gumplowicz's case and Ruthenian and Rhaeto-Romance linguistics in Gartner's.
The life and career of sociologist Ludwik Gumplowicz are well documented; thus, only a few words on his biography are necessary.Footnote 54 Gumplowicz was born in 1838 in Krakow into a German-language reformist Jewish family, studied in a prominent Polish-language gymnasium of Saint Anna, and then studied law in Cracow and Vienna. Upon graduation, he worked as lawyer, municipal politician, journalist and editor of Cracow's first liberal daily Kraj [Country], and widely published on Jewish history. After an unsuccessful habilitation at the Jagiellonian University and the bankruptcy of Kraj in 1874, he left Cracow and moved to Graz with the support of his former professor from Cracow, Gustav Demelius. In Graz, he established a remarkable career, publishing widely read and still-quoted books on national policy in Austria-Hungary, sociology, and the history of state theory. He never even briefly returned to Cracow, although he was apparently briefly considered for a chair of constitutional law.Footnote 55 In his private letters, he describes Cracow as a terribly clerical and conservative place and thus it was unlikely he would accept a position there.
What is interesting in Gumplowicz's biography is a change that occurred in 1875 while he was between Cracow and Graz and between his historical book on Stanisław August Reform Project for Polish Jews and a sociological brochure entitled Race and State. The first was a book for the Polish public, clearly written as part of his program of convincing Polish-Galicians about the necessity of incorporating Jews into the Polish nation that was being created. The second was written as a scholarly lecture and was Gumplowicz's first theoretical piece apart from a descriptive Habilitationsschrift for Jagiellonian University. In this lecture, the merging of cultures was not only politically advisable, as it was in his time in Galicia; it was also a law of nature that allowed nations and civilizations to rise. This did not mean, however, that he would denounce his pro-Polish position. Merging was only possible for not-yet-formed nations (something that was called Stämme or Völker in German and plemię or lud in Polish) like the Jews, but not for existing nations like the already well-formed Polish one. He thus interestingly mixed a pro-Habsburg and pro-Polish perspective, melding them into a theory: by presenting his claims as scientific and ascribing to them inevitable regularities, he clearly intended to influence the politics from the opposite viewpoint he had espoused in Cracow without actually changing the content of the argument itself.Footnote 56
In his next years in Graz, Gumplowicz developed his theory further, and his publications were translated into several languages, facilitated, and, indeed, made possible by the German language of their publication and the intercultural students in Graz where he taught. At the very least, his influence on Italian and Slovenian social thought was based on personal contacts.Footnote 57 His sociology was a reflection on Galician and Habsburg cultural tensions, which he translated into laws of society and eternal conflict between culturally defined races. Not surprisingly, this sociology of conflict, which was directed against political hegemonies and, at least in later years, against building a Habsburg cultural nation, was influential beyond the borders of the monarchy. Both the Germanophone and polonophone Habsburg communities were hostile toward his theories. In his later years, Gumplowicz wrote articles for Warsaw positivist journals, in addition to his German-language publications, and remained with few exceptions either ignored by or in conflict with the Galician media.
In Gumplowicz's case, mobility enabled his transformation from politician and journalist into a scholar. In Cracow, his habilitation was rejected because of its pronounced anticlericalism, but as a Jew, his chances for a stable position were minimal; he converted to Lutheranism, however, in Graz. This particular type of intercultural mobility, even if unofficial, was often resorted to as a recourse to acquire teaching positions in the Habsburg monarchy.
Linguist Theodor Gartner had yet another type of career, although one also shaped by mobility. Born in Vienna, he was trained as a scientist before turning to Romance philology in his late thirties, was appointed professor of Romance languages in Chernivtsi in 1885, and finished his career in Innsbruck as chair of the same subject beginning in 1899.Footnote 58 As in Gumplowicz's case, the very distinctive feature of Gartner is the constancy of his approach and ideology despite the changes to his research topics, which depended on the province in which he worked. Moreover, also not unlike the Galician sociologist, Gartner presented his deeply political research as a pure scientific endeavor and kept it clearly within the boundaries of the linguistic paradigms of his time.
In his Viennese years, Gartner worked mostly on Rhaeto-Roman, and his Romance education predestined him to focus on Romanian. His first publication after assuming the position in Bukovina was, however, concerned with Ruthenian: From 1888, he elaborated on its vernacularized grammar, and in 1893 he published a textbook on the Ruthenian language, both publications with the assistance of Ruthenian Slavicist Stepan Smal’-Stoc'kyi.Footnote 59 Although one could imagine Smal’-Stoc'kyi as the driving force behind these texts, in retrospect, the Ruthenian scholar himself described Gartner as both the one who came up with the idea and who used his political contacts to achieve it.Footnote 60 The issue was very political indeed, as both scholars proposed a phonetic alphabet for school education: it was to modernize the language, remove some Old-Slavic letters, and make the writing more like the vernacular language. At the political level, the supporters of the phonetic alphabet were attacked by the Russophiles and by the Ruthenian clergy, both of which were supporters of historical continuity with the Slavonic church and connections to Russia.Footnote 61 Because of the Ukrainophile influence in the New Era and after a bitter ideological campaign, Gartner/Smal’-Stoc'kyi's proposal was accepted as the alphabet for school instruction in Bukovina and Galicia, and although not universally applied, served as the alphabet of the literary and scientific publications of Prosvita and the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the most influential educational and scholarly institutions for Ukrainian culture in Galicia.
Interest in vernacular, spoken idioms is visible in Gartner's other endeavors, such as in his Romanian grammar (1904) and, even more importantly, in his work on Rhaeto-Romance, which he conducted in Innsbruck. Although with this topic he returned to the issues that interested him before his residence in Chernivtsi, he looked at them differently. First, instead of the three disjointed Ladin dialects he saw in his early publications, Rhaeto-Romance was now a historic language differentiated into three dialects. He supported this historicization by editing Jahiam Bifrun's 1560 translation of the Bible.Footnote 62 In his search for Ladin dialects to be codified, he consciously omitted those with Italian influence, as he saw it as a recent interference that corrupted the original language.Footnote 63 This was analogous to his procedures in the Romanian and Ruthenian grammars, where he sought the “authentic” language and removed lemmas or borrowings he considered foreign. His turn to Rhaeto-Romance as a national language,Footnote 64 as he called it in later years and to whose ideologists he clearly belonged, thus demonstrates a similar transition as in Gumplowicz's case. Here, Gartner translated the Bukovinian situation of Ruthenians and Romanians to Tirol and regarded languages spoken there through the lens of national tensions in Chernivtsi. As Ruthenian was to be purged of Russian and Old-Slavic, so too was Rhaeto-Romance to be cleansed of Italian. Both were to be presented as national and historic languages. At the same time, however, his theory remained constant despite his migration, a theory now called topological linguistics.Footnote 65
Before coming to conclusions, I wish to highlight one function of mobile scholars not discussed above: they were both brokers and translators between languages. Gumplowicz not only widely quoted Polish language scholarship in his works and wrote reviews and commentaries about Galician situation, but in 1910 he also published a German translation of Jan Karol Kochanowski's sociological study of history Echa prawieku i błyskawice praw dziejowych na tle teraźniejszości [Echoes of Prehistoric Times and Flashes of Historical Laws on the Background of Today]. Footnote 66 Eduard Albert edited several volumes of Czech-language poetry, partially with his own translations. Gartner and Zeissberg reviewed publications in languages they had learned during their relocations. This cultural translation would have been impossible without their geographic mobility. Similarly, professors of German literature at Galician universities who came to Galicia not knowing Polish, such as František Tomáš Bratranek, Richard Maria Werner, and Wilhelm Creizenach, should be mentioned as they all learned Polish, published in it, and informed their respective communities about developments in other areas.
Mobility and Habsburg Scholarship: Conclusions
In an essay from Ernst Bruckmüller asked whether there was a Habsburg Society. His answer was ambivalent: in general terms, no, but there was a thin supranational pan-Habsburg society of “officers, higher bureaucrats and court nobility, alongside the national societies of the educated middle-class and petty bourgeoisie.”Footnote 67 Similarly, one can say that the above examples are exceptions. Although most scholars were in one way or another confronted with the empire, relatively few were interculturally mobile in a classical sense or “pan-Habsburg,” that is, imperial actors in Bruckmüller's sense. At the same time, their numbers were significant enough to make them a subject of inquiry on how mobility across cultures in the empire was a factor in scientific change not only in the time of neoabsolutism, but also when nationalist rhetoric and practice took the lead in the monarchy's scholarship.
The importance of scholars whose careers were pan-Habsburg or pan-Cisleithanian diminished over the years, although their numbers actually grew. This is especially striking considering scholars from Galicia who scarcely ever participated in pan-Habsburg institutions like the Institute of Austrian History Research or the commissions in the Austrian Academy of Science.
Moreover, such pan-Habsburg networks were frequent prior to the 1860s and thus far relatively unexplored in the historiography, even though the scholars of the generation born in the 1830s and early 1840s who studied or became active during the neoabsolutist period, and thus experienced pan-Habsburg networks, shaped the habitus of academia up until the late nineteenth century. Many of their younger colleagues similarly saw themselves as members of a multilingual state and intended to profit from the possibilities it gave them, even if that possibility was “only” studying or graduating at a university in the Habsburg capital.
Contacts established through intercultural mobility in many cases facilitated careers and influenced the results and language of publication. In Prague, scholars who were socialized at universities other than the Charles-Ferdinand constituted the core of Young Czech liberals who, both within the university and outside it, contested the idea of cultural seclusion proposed by local conservatives of older generations. Masaryk, and to a lesser extent the three scholars whom Albert helped achieve chairs in Prague, can be named as examples here. Such contacts could survive even World War I: the German-speaking Bohemian Leopold Adametz was a professor of animal husbandry in Cracow (1891–1898), who was later appointed to Vienna while remaining a frequent guest lecturer in Galicia until 1928 and was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by Jagiellonian University in 1931; his books were translated into Polish, and his seventieth birthday was commemorated with a special issue of the journal Yearbooks for Agricultural and Forest Sciences (Roczniki Nauk Rolniczych i Leśnych).Footnote 68 Similarly, both of the Austria-born professors of German language and literature in Galicia who taught there in 1914 remained in the Republic of Poland.
Listing all the mobile scholars and comparing their numbers and influence to those who remained in one place throughout their careers might be rewarding but was not the aim of this article. I claim that the pan-Habsburg, imperial culture of knowledge shaped by mobile scholars should be given as much attention as the linguistic and spatial cultures were given in the last decades. This culture is constituted by mobile scholars and institutions that acted as imperial ones; it is a culture that is per se multilingual and shaped through contact with different languages. It is characterized by distinct career patterns and reproduction: Demelius supported Cracow outsider Gumplowicz, who in his later years was (unsuccessfully) helping Władysław Natanson with his habilitation in Graz; the intercultural traveler Albert was supported by Prague expatriate Hofmann and in turn supported Maydl, who promoted Rohon, both of whom could not get positions in Prague otherwise.
In Pierre Bourdieu's terms, such a tightly connected community constitutes a cultural field of its own, notwithstanding the apparent lessening extent of interconnectedness as the nineteenth century progressed. Further research could show how this imperial culture influenced local and linguistic cultures of knowledge not only before but also after 1918. Even this short overview shows that the intersections were decisive, shaping such different fields as Habsburg sociology or Ladinian national ideology. The application of this concept should not be limited to the period before the end of neoabsolutism and the gradual differentiation into linguistic cultures. It also provides a more complete picture of the late-nineteenth-century monarchy as a lived space than a side-by-side comparison of different linguistic cultures.
