Von der Wissenschaftsverwaltung zur Wissenschaftspolitik. Friedrich Althoff (19. 2. 1839-20. 10. 1908)

Friedrich Althoff (1839–1908) was one of Germany's three great administrators of science and humanities between Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Carl Heinrich Becker (1886–1933). He was perhaps the most prominent representative of Prussian bureaucratic liberalism and the first eminent politician of culture or — in the words of W. H. Dawson — “the most enlightened but also the most dictatorial Minister of Education Prussia has ever had”. Althoff dominated the state administration of higher education in Prussia between 1882 and 1907, serving as Ministerial director over higher educational affairs under at least four ministers. The so-called “Althoff system”, that he built pushed the development of German science and scholarship to a dominant position in the world, rationalized the universities and further subordinated them to state or ministerial policy through a rigid control of professional appointments, started the mobilization of private capital in support of German scientific hegemony (founding of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft), and put forward the Prussian tradition — ultimately an unsustainable one — of strong personal administration, by which Althoff systematically manipulated or overrode the very bureaucratic apparatus he had helped to create. On the other hand his policy defended academic freedom, patronized Catholic and Jewish scholars against reactionary university faculties as well as the so-called Kathedersozialisten against the influences of big business and laissez-faire capitalism. As a creator of german cultural foreign policy he paved the way for more international understanding and peace policy, an alternative to the war-aims policy of Imperial Germany on the eve of the Great War.     

Von der „Natur der Sache”︁ zur Geschichte der Sprache Der Übergang von der Sprachforschung zur Sprachwissenschaft zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts

From the “nature of things” to the history of language: The transition from the study of language to historico-comparative linguistics. This brief essay deals with a somewhat problematic phase in the history of linguistics and tries to investigate the process by which language could be understood as a historical phenomenon with a history of its own. This new understanding of language turned out to be the starting condition for a new and very prolific way in the study of language. The conjecture is that this is due to certain alterations in the semantic field of some important notions relating to language and its study. The process of alteration began by the end of the eighteenth century with conceptual achievements which could adequately be termed as temporalization of aspects of language and the notions related to these aspects. In connection with the so called discovery of the Sanskrit language and the gradual reception of its grammatical structure, looking upon language as an organic entity with autonomous and internal structures of developpement became possible after the German romantic language philosophy had developped a strictly abstract concept of language as a notion of form. This essentially metaphorical mode of speaking nevertheless inaugurated that languages were concieved of as having their own history totally independent of their speakers. With language as an autonomous object the study of language rapidly became the science of language.     

Venedig und die Wissenschaftssprachen. (30. Symposium der Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Deutschen Studienzentrum in Venedig, 20.-23. Mai 1993)

Languages of science, the idioms of learning and teaching, depend on intellectual trends and cultural developments. Their characteristic adaptation and transformation was particularly evident in the Venetian history of mind which influenced — comparable to the humanist circles of Florence and Rome — wide parts of Europe. In the 12th century James of Venice translated Aristotle directly from the Greek originals, thus forming a new scholastic idiom, whereas — in the 14th century — Petrarch attacked the lingua franca of the scholastic researchers, stressing the importance of poetic and rhetoric elements. Scholastic and humanistic languages were regarded as irreconcilable. In the 15th century an approach was enabled by Bessarion and Ermolao Barbaro who accepted Aristotle and natural sciences as humanistic topics. Around 1500 the famous Venetian printing offices spread the specific idioms of science and researching in the European countries.     

Performing space across time: a 520-year anniversary in a western Ukrainian village

Abstract

Festivals and celebrations have special significance for the foundation of community and collective memory. They are part of social practice and, at the same, also reveal much about current and historical social structures, traditions and rituals. Festivals contrast with everyday life, taking participants away from it; celebrations, conversely, celebrate and reinforce social hierarchies, the role of individuals in the community and the characteristics of the community. This is clearly demonstrated in this contribution on the example of the festivities of two western Ukrainian village communities celebrating 520 years of existence. The communities’ notable peculiarity lies in the fact that they were founded as a single village. Due the partitioning of Poland along the Zbru? River, however, the two sides were situated in Austria-Hungary and Russia, respectively. In the interwar period, they were located in Poland and the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Second World War, they were part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Although they did not have borders for the first time in 150 years, they nevertheless continued to exist as independent villages. Given this starting point, a celebration of the 520th anniversary of the founding of these communities obviously has very complex historical contexts within different past state regimes. The following analysis of the village festival will first demonstrate how such a celebration was achieved. Further, it will examine the extent to which a socio-spatial demarcation was reproduced just as efforts were simultaneously made to eliminate it. The village is a striking example of the manifestation of the experience and perception, design and imagination of present and past spaces.     

Introduction: Biographies Between Spheres of Empire

ABSTRACT

Biographical research offers a promising approach to the study of empire, imperialism and colonialism. The careers and life stories of individuals and generations show particularly clearly the disruptions and constraints, but also the new possibilities and mobilities, that were created by colonial rule. This special issue focuses on practices and experiences of boundary crossing in imperial and colonial history. It explores how ‘ordinary’ individuals and groups navigated between the different imperial spaces and spheres into which they were categorised according to the ideologies and regulations of the well-ordered colonial world. Africa offers particularly interesting cases for studying these issues because, first, it was a field of particularly rigid colonial distinctions and, second, different colonial empires overlapped and competed there with particular intensity. This introduction outlines briefly the relevance of biographical research for new approaches in imperial, colonial and African history, and highlights the major themes of the five articles comprising this special issue. It is argued that these new biographical approaches tell us much not only about life in Africa on the eve of and under colonial rule, but also more generally about both the power and the permeability of imperial domination and of colonial categories.     

After Empire: Karl Renner's Danubian model of pluralism

This article argues that Karl Renner's multinational model for the Austrian‐Hungarian Empire is an alternative model for contemporary a‐territorial, multinational and federal arrangements. Nations, in his view, should act as intermediary bodies between the relevant communities and the state. His concept of ‘subjective public law’ combines principles that most authors find mutually exclusive: individual rights, choice over one's national cultural membership, non‐territorial administration of national communities and overseeing of equal collective rights by the state. Neither Staatsnation nor Kulturnation, the model is a combination of the two under the auspices of a federal state combined with a strong theory of individual and collective rights. I provide the reader with a comprehensive intellectual biography of Karl Renner, as I argue that an understanding of the man himself, his political pragmatism and his statism are crucial to comprehending this theoretical position. Throughout his life, Renner was a German nationalist, held a strong nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire and voted in favour of the Anschluß. His concurrent careers as a scholar and as a politician account for a series of contradictions. I argue however that these can be reconciled and explained by a careful comparative reading of his scholarly work and his political statements.