Universities in Central Europe: Changing Perspectives in the Troubled Twentieth Century

Abstract

During the twentieth century, in Central Europe perceptions about scientific and educational centres and peripheries were moulded by dramatic political changes. Disintegration of the Habsburg Empire (1918), newly established national states in interwar period (1919–1938), the Nazi order (1939–1945), socialist societies within the Soviet bloc (1945–1989), disintegration of the bloc, and (re-integration) of East-Central Europe into European and North Atlantic organisations, after 1989, have induced administrative, political, social, and cultural changes in the context in which universities had to fulfil their tasks as top educational and research centres.