A lot has been written lately about the importance of titles in various societies and the means people are prepared to use to get hold of one. Personally, I’m glad that Mr. von Guttenberg was found out and had to resign from his post. And there should have been no reason whatsoever why the report of the university committee that looked into the plagiarism should not have been published. During his time as Minister of Defense, Mr. von Guttenberg constantly surrounded himself with journalists and couldn’t get enough publicity. So why should the public have been excluded when the scandal broke?
It would also be interesting to know whether former Austrian Minister of Science and Research, Johannes Hahn, plagiarized on a large scale in his doctoral thesis (as has been rumoured since 2007), or whether it was only trashy and unscientific. But in Austria, people don’t seem so eager to shed light on affairs like this. Considering the fact that even this humble piece of writing has to be submitted via SafeAssign to be checked for plagiarism, this is all very strange.
With regard to the general attitude in society towards titles, I can only judge the differences between Germany and Austria. Whatever has been said in the wake of the Guttenberg affair, these differences are qualitative rather than quantitative. In Austria, the importance attributed to titles is incomparably higher than in Germany and has a different cultural significance. If Austrians aren’t using a title, you can be quite sure they don’t have one to use in the first place. In Germany this is different. As long as we were living in Germany, my husband never used his hard-earned and well-deserved title: neither on the letter-box, nor in the telephone directory or anywhere else. This was no unusual behaviour, no mere quirk of my husband’s personality. Although to this day his title doesn’t even appear in his passport, his day-to-day handling of it has changed during the years in Austria. In some situations, titles can come in quite handy in a society that sets so much store by them.
Most importantly, it has to be a title you can be addressed with. According to Austrian etiquette expert Thomas Schäfer-Elmayer, one of the urgent problems created by the Bologna Process with its subsequent bachelor/master studies is the resulting lack of academic titles – at least ones that can be used for personal address. You can’t really address someone as “Mr. Master” or “Ms. Bachelor”. How are you supposed then to pigeonhole new acquaintances and show them the respect due to them if you don’t know whether they hold an academic title or not?
An academic title like the ubiquitous Austrian “Magister” or “Magistra” is seldom found in German academia. Getting a degree in biology, sociology, geography, physics etc. at a German university doesn’t supply you with a title you can really be addressed with. (I’ve never heard anyone being called “Mr. Certified Social Pedagogue” or “Ms. Qualified Biologist”.) You also won’t find secondary-school teachers being addressed as “Professor” rather than with their proper names. That was something my children had to get used to when we moved to Austria. During her time at primary school my youngest daughter even had to address the school caretaker as “Herr Hauswart” (Mr. Caretaker): What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
There are exceptions though. Some weeks ago I attended a reading at the Literaturhaus (House of Literature) in Salzburg, where Professor Leo Truchlar, an eminent scholar and a friendly, modest person, presented his latest book. Although many of his fellow academics were present – the Principal of the University of Salzburg, Heinrich Schmidinger, for one – hardly any academic title was mentioned that evening at all. That didn’t make it any less impressive for me.
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