Jan Surman, who completed his doctoral work at the University of Vienna and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities in Moscow, has produced a remarkable piece of scholarship, although it fails to deliver all that its title appears to promise. Common themes in the social history of universities—enrollment patterns, evolving social and gender demographics, student culture—occupy only a peripheral place in the book. The Hungarian (Transleithanian) portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire receives little attention, even for the years before the Compromise of 1867 that created the so-called Dual Monarchy.
What Surman does deliver, however, is a wide-ranging examination of the interactions between changing languages of instruction at some Austrian universities and the trajectories of professorial careers. At the heart of his concerns is what he calls the “schizophrenic tension between supposedly supranational science and national scholarship” (p. 3). German was not only the administrative language of the Austrian territories at midcentury, but was becoming the dominant international language of science. Surman records several discussions about whether Czech, Polish, or Ukrainian (known as Ruthenian at the time) even possessed the requisite vocabulary for scholarly publication. As he puts it, “From the viewpoint of cultural dominance, instruction in a national language could be allowed only if that language was sufficiently developed, whereas from the viewpoint of a national culture, only instruction in the national language would allow a national culture to develop” (p. 98).
Seven universities occupy center stage in the book. Four retained instruction in German: Vienna, Innsbruck (founded 1826), Graz (1827), and Chernivtsi (then known as Czernowitz) in the far eastern region of Bukovina, now in southern Ukraine (1875), an area of mixed Ukrainian, Romanian, Jewish, and German population. Innsbruck also served Italian speakers in the Tyrol after Austria lost Venetia's universities in 1866, but stopped all lectures in Italian in 1904. Prague had been a German-language university for centuries. In Galicia, territory that Austria gained in 1775 in the first Polish partition, a university in L'viv (then Lemberg) was established in 1817 when Cracow became a Free City; the latter city and its Jagiellonian University became Austrian again in 1846. At both institutions, lectures were in German. In Surman's view, in this era “linguistic uniformity at the faculties enabled lecturers to be mobile” (p. 35). Changes in language of instruction, however, would significantly alter this mobility. Tracing the changing fates of these institutions over seventy years led Surman to research materials in German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, French, English, Russian, and Magyar.
Surman begins his chronological coverage with the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848-49, an era of conservative, centralizing, and Germanizing rule. Under Minister of Education Leo Thun-Hohenstein, the Austrian universities rather belatedly upgraded the philosophical faculties from their position as preparatory to one of equal status with the other faculties. As he notes, this required hiring numerous professors from elsewhere in the German Confederation, especially in the humanities; in some cases, appointments even went to Protestants.
The more liberal atmosphere in Austria after 1860, in combination with the rising national consciousness among Poles and Czechs, set off major changes. The Jagiellonian University enjoyed a brief period of bilingualism from 1861 until 1870, when Polish became the sole language of instruction. L'viv switched from German to Polish and Ruthenian in 1867; as of 1882, Ruthenian lectures were allowed only with permission of the ministry. German-speaking professors who would not, or could not, adapt to the new situation left. Surman notes that “Graz profited the most from the relocated scholars, although it was rarely their first choice” (p. 92).
Czech-language scholarship during the mid-nineteenth century developed in institutions outside of the university, including societies, museums, and journals. As late as 1879, though, professors in the medical and philosophical faculties argued that allowing instruction in Czech “would show favoritism toward nationalist thinking rather than science” (p. 103). Three years later, the university divided into Czech and German parts, which began with sharing the existing facilities.
These changes led to radically altered career trajectories. Cracow and L'viv could draw on Polish-speaking scholars trained in Russia or Prussia (usually Berlin or Breslau), and even some trained at Vienna; yet both became heavily focused on not only serving students but recruiting faculty from Galicia. The Czech university in Prague attracted some ex-patriots who had been teaching in other countries in other languages, but necessarily became very inbred, granting habilitation and thus the right to become an unsalaried lecturer (Privatdozent), mostly to its own students. This situation led to calls for creating at least one more Czech university, which did not occur before 1914. Cracow, L'viv, and Prague all devoted significant attention to preparing scholars in “nation-building areas” (p. 128) such as history and literature. Their ability to innovate in other fields was limited, however, by the ministry's reluctance to create chairs or institutes elsewhere that the University of Vienna did not yet possess.
Turning to the German-language universities, Surman highlights the numerical dominance of Vienna, especially in habilitation. By 1910, its medical faculty had twenty-two of the sixty-three full professors of medicine at German-language universities, forty of eighty associate professors, and 187 of 246 Privatdozenten. For the philosophical faculties, the relevant numbers were fifty of 145, eighteen of fifty-three, and ninety-nine of 146. The many other cultural institutions, medical clinics, and private practices in the capital provided paid work for this mass of Privatdozenten—the case of Sigmund Freud comes immediately to mind. Vienna seldom promoted from within, which blocked career advancement. For many Jewish Privatdozenten, opportunities to move elsewhere were limited by the extreme reluctance of Innsbruck and Graz, cities with small Jewish populations, to hire them. Chernivtsi, which had few graduates who pursued academic careers, remained a possibility, but its remote location was a serious hindrance. Surman cites historian Theodor Mommsen discussing Habsburg scholars “sentenced to Chernivtsi, pardoned to Graz, promoted to Vienna” (p. 154).
The book's final chapter, “Habsburg Legacies,” carries the story into the interwar period. Restored Poland stocked its new universities largely with scholars from Imperial Austria. The Czech university in Prague supplied many of the faculty for new institutions in Brno and Bratislava, although the latter became Slovak. The German university in Prague, though, turned away from rump Austria and hired more scholars from the Weimar Republic. The Czech capital also became home to exile universities for Russians and Ukrainians fleeing communism or, for the latter group, the continuing discrimination in what was now known as Lvov.
Surman's book has done a great service in making available to a wide audience this complex and fascinating history of the multilingual Austrian empire. It should receive serious consideration for prizes. It is unfortunate that no reader for, or editor at, Purdue University Press caught the silly error that 1848–1918 was “a period of sixty years” (p. 3).
