Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe: An Introduction

  • Chapter
The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918

Abstract

Interlinked at first by politics and the common use of the German language for scientific and scholarly communication, Central Europe became in the nineteenth century the site of a scientific system in which a free flow of ideas and to a certain degree of people enabled scientific relations to flourish. This Central European ‘republic of letters’ began to break apart in the second half of the century, as national disparities and nationalistic politics displaced allegiance to a common scientific community. The shift away from German as the symbolic language of imperial power, the adoption of national languages and the corresponding pressure towards single-language nationhood proved decisive in the end. This nationalization process was highly complex and contradictory.1 Whether to remain affiliated with German-speaking ‘ Kultur ’, to create national sciences, to inter-nationalize science beyond the German-speaking realm, or to do all of these things, was a lively topic of discussion throughout the post-1848 period. This volume examines interactions between emerging national cultures and cultural institutions, on the one hand, and cultures of science and scholarship, on the other hand, in this region. We ask two questions: how did the nationalization of the sciences work in this region during this period; and did this highly complex political, social and cultural process inevitably lead to a corruption of scientific objectivity, or rather to a transformation of the very definition of science and scholarship?

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. For discussion of the shift from multi- to monolingualism see Jan Fellerer (2005) Mehrsprachigkeit im galizischen Verwaltungswesen (1772–1914). Eine historischsoziolinguistische Studie zum Polnischen und Ruthenischen (Ukrainischen) (Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau), especially 279–80;

    Google Scholar 

  2. Tomasz Kamusella (2001) ‘Language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe’, Nations and Nationalism , 7/2, 235–51;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Idem (2009) The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Ernest Gellner (1983) Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  5. Eric J. Hobsbawm (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  6. Benedict Anderson (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , rev. ed. (London: Verso). For a more traditional approach,

    Google Scholar 

  7. See also John Breuilly (1982) Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  8. For studies of nationalism as secular religion, see, for example, George L. Mosse (1975) The Nationalisation of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig);

    Google Scholar 

  9. Norbert Elias (1996) The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity Press);

    Google Scholar 

  10. Anthony D. Smith (2010 [2001]) Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Miroslav Hroch (2007) ‘National Romanticism’, in Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe 1770–1945 Vol. 2. National Romanticism: The formation of National Movements , eds. Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press), 4–18.

    Google Scholar 

  12. On the spatial dimension of nationalism in central Europe see, for example, Patrice M. Dabrowski (2008) ‘Constructing a Polish landscape: The example of the Carpathian frontier’, Austrian History Yearbook , 39, 46–65.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Partha Chatterjee (1993) The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 159.

    Google Scholar 

  14. This process was analysed in the nineteenth century, for example, by sociologist Ludwik Gumplowicz. For a recent analysis see Brian Porter (2000) When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-century Poland (New York: Oxford University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Of course, none of this was limited to (East-)Central Europe. See, for example, the classic study by Eugen Weber (1979) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France (London: Chatto and Windus).

    Google Scholar 

  16. For the German case, see Siegfried Weichlein (2004) Nation und Region: Integrationsprozesse im Bismarck-Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste).

    Google Scholar 

  17. Jeremy King (2005) Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Tara Zahra (2008) Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  19. See, for example, James E. Bjork (2008) Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Tomasz Kamusella (2007) Silesia and Central European Nationalism: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  21. Peter Sahlins (1989) Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989), 271.

    Google Scholar 

  22. On this issue see Hans-Christian Maner (ed.) (2005) Grenzregionen der Habsburgermonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert: Ihre Bedeutung und Funktion aus der Perspektive Wiens (Münster: LIT Verlag).

    Google Scholar 

  23. For an earlier critique of the concept, which preceded the intensification of the debate by at least a decade, see Daniel Beauvois (1994) ‘Mit “kresów wschodnich” czyli jak mu położyć kres’ [The Myth of “Eastern Borderlands” and how to end it], in Wojciech Wrzesiński (ed.), Polskie mity polityczne XIX i XX wieku [Polish political myths of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries] (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego), 93–105.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Recently, critiques of this terminology have brought about a post-colonial turn in Polish self-reflection on its political position and cultural identity politics. See, for example, Bogusław Bakuła (2006) ‘Kolonialne i postkolonialne aspekty polskiego dyskursu kresoznawczego (zarys problematyki)’ [Colonial and postcolonial aspects of Polish borderland-science discourse: an outline], Teksty Drugie , 6, 11–33.

    Google Scholar 

  25. For an extended discussion of these complex relationships, see the chapter by Johannes Feichtinger in this volume.

    Google Scholar 

  26. See, for example, Holm Sundermann (2007) ‘Die Ethnisierung von Staat, Nation and Gerechtigkeit. Zu den Anfängen nationaler “Homogenisierung” im Balkanraum’, in Matthias Beer (ed.), Auf dem Weg zum ethnisch reinen Nationalstaat? Europa in Geschichte und Gegenwart , 2nd ed. (Tübingen: atempto), 69–90.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Immanuel M. Wallerstein (2011) The Modern World System , 4 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). First published 3 vols., 1976–1988;

    Google Scholar 

  28. André Gunder Frank (1970) Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution. Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: Monthly Review Press).

    Google Scholar 

  29. See also Immanuel M. Wallerstein (1998) ‘The Construction of peoples: Racism, nationalism, ethnicity’, Chap. 4, in Etienne Balibar, Immanuel M. Wallerstein (eds.) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso).

    Google Scholar 

  30. For an indirect critique of this model, see Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  31. For this distinction see Richard Handler (ed.) (2006) Central Sites, Peripheral Visions: Cultural and Institutional Crossings in the History of Anthropology ( History of Anthropology, Volume 11 ) (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).

    Google Scholar 

  32. ‘Das Wesen Österreichs ist die Peripherie’. Joseph Roth (1987 [1938]) Die Kapuzinergruft (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch), 17.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (eds.) (2005) Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (Austrian and Habsburg Studies, 6) (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books);

    Google Scholar 

  34. Pieter M. Judson (2006) Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers in Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  35. Marius Turda (2005) The Idea of National Superiority in Central Europe, 1880–1918 (New York: Edwin Mellen Press).

    Google Scholar 

  36. Ursula Prutsch (2003) ‘Habsburg postcolonial’, in Ursula Prutsch, Moritz Csáky and Johannes Feichtinger (eds.) Habsburg Postcolonial: Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag), 33–43, here 36.

    Google Scholar 

  37. Robert Donia (2007) ‘The Proximate Colony. Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian Rule’, http://www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/RDonia1.pdf.

    Google Scholar 

  38. Hans-Christian Maner (2007) Galizien. Eine Grenzregion im Kalkul der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: IKGS-Verlag), 49.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Philipp Ther (2004), ‘Deutsche Geschichte als transnationale Geschichte. Polen, slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire’, in Sebastian Conrad (ed.) Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 129–48.

    Google Scholar 

  40. See, for example, Alexei Miller (2003) The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  41. Veronika Wendland (2010), ‘Imperiale, koloniale und postkoloniale Blicke auf die Peripherien des Habsburgerreiches’, in Claudia Kraft and Alf Lüdtke (eds.), Kolonialgeschichten: Regionale Perspektiven auf ein globales Phänomen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag), 215–35.

    Google Scholar 

  42. From the vast literature on this topic, see especially Maria Janion (2006) Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna: fantazmaty literatury [Amazing Slavdom: The Literary Imagination] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie)

    Google Scholar 

  43. And Jaroslav Hrycak (2004) Strasti za nacionalizmom [Passion for Nationalism] (Kyjiv: Krytyka), especially the chapters ‘I my v Jevropi?’ [We in Europe?] (pp. 24–36) and ‘Istorija vid Pjatnyci’ [History on Friday] (pp. 309–24).

    Google Scholar 

  44. For a general overview see Alexander Maxwell (ed.) (2011) The East–West Discourse: Symbolic Geography and Its Consequences (Oxford, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang).

    Google Scholar 

  45. The term antemurale is mostly linked to Poland but can be found as a self-identification throughout Central Europe, from Estonia through Ukraine to Kosovo. See, for example, Chantal Delsol, Michel Masłowski and Joanna Nowicki (eds.) (2002) Mythes et symboles politiques en Europe centrale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France); for Ukraine see the project of Liliya Berezhnaya, ‘Die ukrainische Bastion’ – Vormauer Europas und antemurale christianitatis. Nationalisierung eines Mythos, http://www.uni-muenster.de/Religion-und-Politik /forschung/projekte/b15.html.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Paradigmatic here is Jan Kieniewicz (2008) ‘Polski los w Imperium Rosyjskim jako sytuacja kolonialna’ [Polish fate in the Russian Empire as a colonial situation], in idem (ed.) Ekspansja, kolonialism, cywilizacja [Expansion, colonialism, civilization] (Warszawa: DiG), 244–262, or the collection of articles in idem (ed.) (2009) Silent Intelligentsia. A Study of Civilisational Oppression (Warsaw: Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies ‘Artes Liberales,’ University of Warsaw).

    Google Scholar 

  47. Janusz Korek (ed.) (2007) From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective (Stockholm: Södertörn Academic Studies 32). For critical discussion of differences between postcolonialism and the particularities of post-partition (1793–1918) and post-1945 Poland (1945–89),

    Google Scholar 

  48. See Hanna Gosk (2008) ‘Polskie opowieści w dyskurs postkolonialny ujęte’ [Polish stories framed in postcolonial discourse], in idem and Bożena Karwowska (eds.) (Nie) obecność: Pominięcia i przemilczenia w narracjach XX wieku [Presence/Absence: Omissions and Concealments in narrations of the twentieth century] (Warszawa: Elipsa), 75–88.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Maria Janion (2004) ‘Rozstać się z Polską?’ [To part with Poland?], Gazeta Wyborcza , 02./03.10.2004, 14–16, here 16.

    Google Scholar 

  50. See, for example, Pieter M. Judson (1993) ‘Inventing Germans: class, nationality and colonial fantasy at the margins of the Habsburg Monarchy’, Social Analysis , 33, 47–67;

    Google Scholar 

  51. Danuta Sosnowska (2008) Inna Galicja [The other Galicia] (Warszawa: Elipsa).

    Google Scholar 

  52. Izabela Surynt (2008) ‘Postcolonial studies and the “Second World”: twentieth-century German national-colonial constructs’, Werkwinkel , 3/1, 61–87.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Jozef Špetko (1986) ‘Ubližovanie – mýtus a syndrom’ [Rapprochement – myth and syndrome], Premeny , 3, 3–13.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Johannes Feichtinger, Ursula Prutsch and Moritz Csáky (2003), ‘Vorwort’, in idem (eds.) Habsburg Postcolonial: Machtstrukturen und kollektives Gedächtnis (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag), 11.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Christiane Zintzen (ed.) (1999) Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild. Aus dem Kronprinzenwerk des Erzherzog Rudolf (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau-Verlag);

    Google Scholar 

  56. Regina Bendix (2003) ‘Ethnology, cultural reification, and the dynamics of difference in the Kronprinzenwerk’, in Nancy M. Wingfield (ed.) (2003) Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books), 149–66.

    Google Scholar 

  57. Serhii Plokhy (2005) Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press).

    Google Scholar 

  58. Izabela Surynt (2004) Das ‘ferne’, ‘unheimliche’ Land: Gustav Freytags Polen (Dresden: Thelem Verlag).

    Google Scholar 

  59. Brigitte Fuchs (2003) ‘Rasse’, ‘Volk’, ‘Geschlecht’: Anthropologische Diskurse in Österreich, 1850–1960 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag).

    Google Scholar 

  60. Mykola Riabchuk (2000) Vid Malorosiji do Ukrajiny: paradoksy zapizniloho nacije tvorennja [From ‘Little Russia’ to Ukraine: Paradoxes of Delayed Nation Formation] (Kyjiv: Krytyka).

    Google Scholar 

  61. See, for example, Alina Cała (1989) Asymilacja Żydów w Królestwie Polskim 1864–1897: postawy, konflikty, stereotypy [Assimilation of Jews in the Kingdom of Poland 1864–1897: attitudes, conflicts, stereotypes] (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy);

    Google Scholar 

  62. Michal Frankl (2007) Emancipace od Židů. Český antisemitismus na konci 19. Století [Emancipation from the Jews. Czech anti-Semitism at the end of the nineteenth century] (Praha: Paseka);

    Google Scholar 

  63. Steven Beller (1989) Vienna and the Jews 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  64. Klaus Hödl (2006) Wiener Juden, Jüdische Wiener: Identität, Gedächtnis und Performanz im 19. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck, Vienna: Studien-Verlag).

    Google Scholar 

  65. For examples of the impact of Jewish assimilation on science, see John Efron (1994) Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 141–53;

    Google Scholar 

  66. Veronika Lipphardt (2008) Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über ‘Rasse’ und Vererbung 1900–1935 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

    Google Scholar 

  67. The stronger claim by Carol Harrison and Ann Johnson that ‘Research on nationalism has largely ignored the nexus between science and national identity’ applies, if at all, only to the literature in English. Carol E. Harrison and Ann Johnson (2009) ‘Introduction: science and national identity’, in idem (eds.) National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology (Osiris, new series, vol. 24) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 4.

    Google Scholar 

  68. For references to literature on linguists and language studies, see the chapter by Jan Surman in this volume. On ethnology, see Andrew Zimmermann (2001) Anthropology and Anti-Humanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press);

    Book  Google Scholar 

  69. H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl (eds.) (2003) Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press);

    Google Scholar 

  70. Karl Pusman (2008) Die ‘Wissenschaften vom Menschen’ auf Wiener Boden (1870–1959): Die Anthropologische Gesellschaft und die anthropologischen Disziplinen im Fokus von Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Wissenschafts- und Verdrängungspolitik (Vienna: Böhlau); Irene Ranzmaier (forthcoming) Die Anthropologische Gesellschaft in Wien und die akademische Etablierung anthropologischer Disziplinen an der Universität Wien, 1870–1930 (Vienna: Böhlau).

    Google Scholar 

  71. On archaeology and prehistory, see Paul Graves-Brown (ed.) (1996) Cultural Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities (London: Routledge);

    Google Scholar 

  72. Heiko Steuer (2001) Eine hervorragend nationale Wissenschaft: Deutsche Prähistoriker zwischen 1900 und 1995 (Berlin: De Gruyter).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  73. On history, see, for example, Stefan Berger (1997) The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  74. Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey (2002) Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (London: Rowman and Littlefield);

    Google Scholar 

  75. Christoph Conrad and Sebastian Conrad (eds.) (2002) Die Nation schreiben: Geschichtswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht);

    Google Scholar 

  76. Hans-Peter Hye, Brigitte Mazohl and Jan Paul Niederkorn (eds.) (2009), Nationalgeschichte als Artefakt: Zum Paradigma Nationalstaat in den Historiographien Deutschlands, Italiens und Österreichs (Vienna: Böhlau).

    Google Scholar 

  77. For recent studies on history and historians in Eastern Central Europe, see Pavel Kolár (2008) Geschichtswissenschaft in Zentraleuropa: Die Universitäten Prag, Wien und Berlin um 1900 , 2 Halbbände (Leipzig: Leipzig University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  78. Monika Baár (2010), Historians and Nationalism in East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  79. This traditional view, which uncritically reproduces hopes of the era in question and tells only one side of the story, is nicely reflected in the statement that in the age of nationalism the sciences ‘functioned as some kind of universal language – a bond or bridge between nations and not a bar’, Hans Hauge (1996) ‘Nationalizing science’, in Roger Chartier and Pietro Corsi (eds.) Sciences et langages en Europe (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes études en sciences sociales), 159–68, here 160.

    Google Scholar 

  80. For a brief general discussion, see Mitchell G. Ash (2000) ‘Internationalisierung und Entinternationalisierung der Wissenschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert – Thesen’, in Manfred Lechner and Dietmar Seiler (eds.) zeitgeschichte.at. Österreichischer Zeithistorikertag 1999 (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag), 4–12.

    Google Scholar 

  81. For earlier literature on scientific internationalism, see Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus (1990) ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, in Robert C. Olby, George N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie and M.J.S. Hodge (eds.) Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge), 909–19;

    Google Scholar 

  82. Elisabeth Crawford (1992) Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880–1939 – Four Studies of the Nobel Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  83. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books).

    Google Scholar 

  84. Ralph Jessen and Jakob Vogel (2002) ‘Einleitung. Die Naturwissenschaften und die Nation’, in idem (eds.) Wissenschaft und Nation in der europäischen Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag), 7–37, here 18.

    Google Scholar 

  85. Ludmilla Jordanova (1998) ‘Science and nationhood: cultures of imagined communities’ in Geoffrey Cubitt (ed.) Imagining Nations (Manchester: University of Manchester Press), 192–211;

    Google Scholar 

  86. Idem (1996) ‘Science and national identity’, in Roger Chartier and Pietro Corsi (eds.) Sciences et langages en Europe , 221–31;

    Google Scholar 

  87. David Edgerton (2003) ‘Science in the United Kingdom: a study in the nationalisation of science’, in Dominique Pestre and John Krige (eds.) Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge), 759–75; Harrison and Johnson (eds.) National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology , raises some of the relevant issues, but is devoted mainly to developments in the twentieth century and especially to post-colonial science.

    Google Scholar 

  88. Tatjana Buklijas and Emese Lafferton (2007) ‘Science, medicine and nationalism in the Habsburg Empire from the 1840s to 1918’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences , 38/4, 679–86.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  89. Ibid., 685.

    Google Scholar 

  90. Emese Lafferton (2007) ‘The Magyar moustache: the faces of Hungarian state formation, 1867–1918’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science , 38/4, 706–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  91. On the reception of Darwinism in Hungary, see also Sándor Sóos (2008) ‘The scientific reception of Darwin’s work in nineteenth-century Hungary’

    Google Scholar 

  92. And Katalin Mund (2008), ‘The reception of Darwin in nineteenth-century Hungarian society’, in Eva-Marie Engels and Thomas F. Glick (eds.) The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe , vol. 2 (London: Continuum), 430–40 and 441–62, respectively.

    Google Scholar 

  93. Marius Turda (2007) ‘Race, politics and nationalist Darwinism in Hungary, 1880–1918’, Ab Imperio , 139–64;

    Google Scholar 

  94. Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling (eds.) Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: CEU Press);

    Book  Google Scholar 

  95. Marius Turda (2010) Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan); idem (2011) Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest: CEU Press).

    Google Scholar 

  96. For literature on this topic see the chapter by Jan Surman in this volume.

    Google Scholar 

  97. Such multiple linkages are not as surprising as they may seem from a current perspective. The vast array of disciplines and specialities within disciplines now taken for granted was not yet in place anywhere in Europe in the early nineteenth century. See Rudolf Stichweh (1984) Zur Entstehung des Systems moderner Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland 1740–1890 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp);

    Google Scholar 

  98. idem (1994) Wissenschaft, Universität Profession: Soziologische Analysen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp);

    Google Scholar 

  99. Mitchell G. Ash (1999) ‘Die Wissenschaften in der Geschichte der Moderne (Antrittsvorlesung am Institut für Geschichte der Universität Wien, 2. April 1998)’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften , 10, 105–29, English abstract on p. 131.

    Google Scholar 

  100. See Olga A. Valkova (2002) ‘Wissenschaftssprache und Nationalsprache. Konflikte unter russischen Naturwissenschaftlern in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Jessen and Vogel (eds.) Wissenschaft und Nation , 59–79; see also the papers by Jan Surman and Soňa Štrbáňová in this volume.

    Google Scholar 

  101. William Brock (1992) The Chemical Tree: A History of Chemistry (New York: W.W. Norton), 87.

    Google Scholar 

  102. See the chapter by Jan Surman in this volume.

    Google Scholar 

  103. On the priority dispute over the liquefaction of oxygen, see Zdzisław Wojtaszek et al. (1990) Karol Olszewski (Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 899; Universitatis Iagellonicae Acta Chimica fasc. 33) (Warszawa, Kraków: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe), 86–98. On Mendeleev’s periodic table see Michael D. Gordin (forthcoming) ‘The textbook case of a priority dispute: D.I. Mendeleev, Lothar Meyer, and the periodic system’, in Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli (eds.) Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

    Google Scholar 

  104. See, for example, Svante Lindquist (ed.) (1993) Center on the Periphery, Historical Aspects of 20th-Century Swedish Physics (Canton, MA: Science History Publications);

    Google Scholar 

  105. Louise Hecht (2005) ‘The beginning of modern Jewish historiography: Prague – A center on the periphery’, Jewish History , 19, 347–73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  106. David N. Livingstone (2003) Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). See also the studies of the reception of Darwinism in Hungary cited above (note 53).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  107. See A. Suresh Canagarajah (2002) A Geopolitics of Academic Writing (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press).

    Google Scholar 

  108. See http://147.156.155.104/?q=node/3 (last accessed 21.12.2010). In the descriptions of participating projects the word ‘periphery’ is sometimes used with inverted commas and sometimes not.

  109. Crawford, Nationalism , pp. 37, 87; Gary B. Cohen (1996) Education and Middle-class Society in Imperial Austria 1848–1918 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  110. For an example of the impact see Lenka Vodrážková-Pokorná (2006) Die Prager Germanistik nach 1882: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der bis 1900 an die Universität berufenen Persönlichkeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), esp. 67–73.

    Google Scholar 

  111. On the Cracow Academy see Renato Mazzolini (1995) ‘Nationale Wissenschaftsakademien im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Lothar Jordan and Bernd Kortländer (eds.) Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch: Studien zum Kultur- und Wissenschaftstransfer in Europa (Tübingen: Mohr), 245–60. For literature on the Academies of Sciences in Budapest and Prague, see the chapters by Gábor Palló and Soňa Štrbáňová in this volume. In contrast, the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna (founded in 1847 and only later called ‘Austrian’) can be regarded as part of an effort towards the construction of an imperial ‘nation’ that was redoubled in the neo-absolutist era (see below).

    Google Scholar 

  112. A possible confusion of concepts should be mentioned here. In Czech, Polish and Ukrainian the concepts nationalism and patriotism have different connotations; while the first is negative and conceptually near to chauvinism, patriotism is positive. On this point see Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate (cit. note 7). For recent discussion of this terminology in Polish, see Krzysztof Jaskułowski (2009) Nacjonalizm bez narodów: Nacjonalizm w koncepcjach anglosaskich nauk społecznych [Nationalism Without Nations. Nationalism in anglophone social sciences] (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego).

    Google Scholar 

  113. Hermann Helmholtz (1862) ‘On the relations of natural science to science in general’, in idem (1995) Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays , ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 76–95, here 92.

    Google Scholar 

  114. Ibid. See also Ash ‘Die Wissenschaften’; Mitchell G. Ash (2002), ‘Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen für einander’, in Rüdiger vom Bruch and Brigitte Kaderas (eds.) Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik: Bestandsaufnahmen zu Formationen, Brüchen und Kontinuitäten im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner), 32–51.

    Google Scholar 

  115. Nationalistic divisions in the sciences and the mobilization of scientists for war and propaganda during the First World War are well studied topics. For literature in German see, for example, Jürgen and Wolfgang Ungern-Sternberg (1996) Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt!’ Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Steiner);

    Google Scholar 

  116. Stefan L. Wolff (2001) ‘Physiker im “Krieg der Geister”’ (Arbeitspapiere des Münchener Zentrums für Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte, Munich).

    Google Scholar 

  117. See, for example, Jana Mandlerová (1969) ‘K zahraničním cestám učitelů vysokých škol v českých zemích (1888–1918)’ [Travels abroad by university teachers in the Czech Lands (1888–1918)], Dějiny věd a techniky , 4, 232–46;

    Google Scholar 

  118. Maria Julita Nedza (1973) Polityka stypendialna Akademii Umiejętności w latach 1878–1920: Fundacje Gałęzowskiego, Pileckiego i Osławskiego [The stipends policy of the Academy of Sciences and Arts 1878–1920: The endowments of Gałęzowski, Pilecki and Osławski] (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich).

    Google Scholar 

  119. Julian Dybiec (2005) ‘Prześladowca i nauczyciel. Niemcy w nauce i kulturze polskiej 1795–1918’ [Oppressor and Teacher. Germans in Polish science and culture 1795–1918], in Bogusław Dopart, Jacek Popiel and Marian Stala (eds.) Literatura, kulturoznawstwo, uniwersytet. Księga ofiarowana Franciszkowi Ziejce w 65. rocznicę urodzin [Literature, cultural sciences, university. Festschrift for Franciszek Ziejka in honor of his 65th birthday] (Kraków: Universitas), 455–68; see also the chapter by Tibor Frank in this volume.

    Google Scholar 

  120. Lewis Peyenson (1993) Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and Colonial Expansion 1830–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  121. Richard Drayton (2000) Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press);

    Google Scholar 

  122. Roy MacLeod (ed.) (2000) Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (Osiris, vol. 15. Chicago: University of Chicago Press);

    Google Scholar 

  123. Kapil Raj (2006) Relocating Modern Science; Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

    Google Scholar 

  124. See, for example, Christian Marchetti (2007) ‘Scientists with guns: on the ethnographic exploration of the Balkans by Austria-Hungarian scientists before and during World War I’, Ab Imperio , 1, 165–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  125. Marianne Klemun (ed.) (2009) ‘Wissenschaft und Kolonialismus’, Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit , 9/1.

    Google Scholar 

  126. Walter Sauer (ed.) (2002) K. und k. kolonial. Habsburgermonarchie und europäische Herrschaft in Afrika (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag);

    Google Scholar 

  127. Christa Riedl-Dorn (ed.) (2010) Novara – das Vermächtnis (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag);

    Google Scholar 

  128. Ursula Rack (2010) Sozialhistorische Studie zur Polarforschung anhand von deutschen und österreichungarischen Polarexpeditionen zwischen 1868 1939 ( Berichte zur Polar- und Meeresforschung , 618. Bremerhaven).

    Google Scholar 

  129. Jan Surman (2009) ‘Imperial knowledge? Die Wissenschaften in der späten Habsburg-Monarchie zwischen Kolonialismus, Nationalismus und Imperialismus’, W iener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit , 9/2, 119–33.

    Google Scholar 

  130. On the role of mapping see, for example, Pieter M. Judson (1996) ‘Frontiers, islands, forests, stones: mapping the geography of a German identity in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1900’, in Patricia Yeager (ed.) The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 382–406;

    Google Scholar 

  131. Irina Popova (2003) ‘Representing national territory: cartography and nationalism in Hungary 1700–1848’, in Nancy M. Wingfield (ed.) Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books), 20–38.

    Google Scholar 

  132. For more general perspectives see Robert Kaiser (2001) ‘Geography’, in The Encyclopedia of Nationalism , volume 1 (San Diego: Academic Press), 315–33;

    Google Scholar 

  133. David Guggerli and Daniel Speich (2002) Topographien der Nation: Politik, topographische Ordnung und Landschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Zurich: Chronos);

    Google Scholar 

  134. Janes R. Akerman (ed.) (2009) Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). On the role of data-gathering networks in Habsburg-era geology see the chapter by Marianne Klemun in this volume. On the Empire’s central institute for meteorology and seismology

    Google Scholar 

  135. See Christa Hammerl, Wolfgang Lenhardt, Reinhold Steinacker and Peter Steinhauser (eds.) (2001) Die Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik 1851–2001: 150 Jahre Meteorologie und Geophysik in Österreich (Graz: Leykam).

    Google Scholar 

  136. On the creation of data-gathering and reporting networks and the circulation of knowledge in climatology see Deborah R. Coen (2006) ‘Scaling down: The “Austrian” climate between Empire and Republic’, in James Rodger Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic and Deborah R. Coen (eds.) Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications), 115–40;

    Google Scholar 

  137. Deborah R. Coen (2010) ‘Climate and circulation in Imperial Austria’, The Journal of Modern History , 82, 839–75. In certain respects these correspondence networks and survey projects are comparable with those in the US – also a land-based empire – at roughly the same time.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  138. See Daniel Goldstein (1985) ‘“Yours for science”: The Smithsonian Institutions’s correspondents and the shape of the scientific community in nineteenth-century America’, Isis , 85, 573–99;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  139. Robert V. Bruce (1987) The Launching of American Science 1846–1876 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  140. On the Imperial and Royal Natural History Museum in Vienna see Christa Riedl-Dorn (1998) Das Haus der Wunder: Zur Geschichte des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien (Vienna: Holzhausen).

    Google Scholar 

  141. Marlies Raffler (2007) Museum – Spiegel der Nation? Zugänge zur historischen Museologie am Beispiel der Genese von Landes- und Nationalmuseen in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Böhlau).

    Google Scholar 

  142. Earlier versions of most of these chapters were presented at the third international conference of the European Society for the History of Science in Vienna, 10–12 September 2008, and at the XXIII International Congress for History of Science and Technology in Budapest, 28 July – 2 August, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  143. Gábor Palló also discusses this issue with respect to the younger Eötvös in his chapter.

    Google Scholar 

  144. See the works by Kolár and Baár (cited above, note 45).

    Google Scholar 

  145. Marie Curie European Reintegration Grants.

    Google Scholar 

  146. See, for example, the scholarship Powroty/homing (now Homing plus) offered by the Foundation for Polish Science/ Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, http://www.fnp.org.pl/programmes/overview_of_programmes/grants_and_ scholarships/homing_programme; http://www.fnp.org.pl/programmes/overview_of_programmes/grants_and_scholarships/homing_plus_programme. The Austrian Science Foundation also had a Schrödinger Rückkehrprogramm, which was abolished in 2003. See Katharina Warta (2006) Evaluation of the FWF Mobility Programs Erwin Schrödinger and Lise Meitner (Vienna: Technopolis Forschungsund Beratungsgesellschaft mbH), http://www.fwf.ac.at/de/downloads/pdf/fwf_ mobility_report.pdf.

  147. For studies of such practices see for example, Pnina Abir-Am and Clark Elliot (eds.) (1999) Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory (Osiris, vol. 14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

    Google Scholar 

  148. The history of science is hardly immune from this trend. Posters accompanying plenary lectures at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology in Budapest in the summer of 2009 followed much the same pattern, depicting important contributions of Hungarian scientists and technicians and thus continuing a long-standing pattern of commemoration-oriented historiography, with no analysis or contextualization whatever.

    Google Scholar 

  149. Big Bang will open the Copernicus Science Centre , online: http://www.naukawpolsce.pap.pl/palio/html.run?_Instance=cms_naukapl.pap.pl&_PageID=1&s= szablon.depesza&dz=szablon.depesza&dep=376783&data=&lang=&_ CheckSum=1312044493

  150. One can find Comenius on the Czech 200 krona banknote, as well as Tomáš Masaryk and historian František Palacký on other notes. Ukrainian banknotes are emblazoned with portraits of the eighteenth-century philosopher and poet Grigorij Savvich Skorovoda/ Hryhorii Savych Skovoroda (500 hryven’, the highest banknote, introduced in 2006) and Mykhailo Hrushevskyi (50 hryven’), both members of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy. Polish zloty notes used to depict, apart from Copernicus, the chemist Maria Skłodowska Curie (= Marie Curie Skłodowska) and the eighteenth-century philosopher and geologist Stanisław Staszic. On Slovenia’s banknotes (before the introduction of the euro) Carniola-born Janez Vajkard Valvasor, Fellow of The Royal Society (20 tolarjev) and astronomer Jurij Bartolomej Vega/Georg Freiherr von Vega (50 tolarjev) were commemorated. In Slovakia the linguist Anton Bernolák was honoured in this manner. Also before the introduction of the euro, Austria depicted the physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1000 Schilling) and economist Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk (100 Schilling), as well as sociologist Rosa Mayreder and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who were excluded from the professional scientific community in their lifetimes.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors
  1. Mitchell G. Ash
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jan Surman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Vienna, Austria

    Mitchell G. Ash (Professor of Modern History) (Professor of Modern History)

  2. Department of History, University of Vienna, Austria

    Jan Surman

Copyright information

© 2012 Mitchell G. Ash and Jan Surman

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Ash, M.G., Surman, J. (2012). The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe: An Introduction. In: Ash, M.G., Surman, J. (eds) The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264978_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137264978_1

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33112-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26497-8

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation