12 Vignettes in 75 Years

Sometimes if you drop enough bombs, you can deliver democracy. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq. It didn’t work in North Korea or Vietnam. But it succeeded in 1940s Europe. The shrapnel cuts in the paintings in the lakeside salon just off the Great Hall, shredded beyond repair, along with a patchily restored porcelain stove, attest to American determination to return democracy to Europe. In February 1945, while a fleet of B-17 “flying fortresses” flattened parts of the nearby city of Salzburg, three bombs landed in the Leopoldskroner Weiher, the modest man-made lake designed to reflect the Schloss’s rococo façade. The explosions shattered the lakeside windows, defaced its stucco frills, and hurled shrapnel into the Bernard Stewart and Chinese Rooms on the ground and first floors, shredding the paintings and wall coverings and the eighteenth-century porcelain stoves. 

On the morning of Tuesday, July 15, 1947, with the slashes and scars of war still fresh, more than 100 Europeans and Americans gathered in the ground-floor Great Hall to listen to an address by a Harvard University professor who stroked a cat, as one Fellow recalled, that perched on his shoulder. “We have come from many countries and across the gulf of war,” Francis Otto Matthiessen, said in his welcoming remarks. “Some of you Europeans were in prison camps in my country. One of our Americans was in a prison camp here near Salzburg.” Another was in a Nazi concentration camp. Another in the Nazi Party. Still others in underground resistance movements. 

Collectively, they were survivors of the greatest human slaughter in history, an intra-ethnic butchery among the peoples of Europe that left their cities in ruins and their landscape littered with dead beyond counting, more than 60 million by some estimates. “So, beneath the pleasant surfaces of this summer afternoon,” Matthiessen said as he stroked his cat, “there must lie many questions, doubts, even suspicions.” 

“But we have not come here to discuss our political problems,” Matthiessen continued, “but to penetrate to deeper levels of understanding, to probe again to the nature of man,” which was one reason why Margaret Mead had agreed to join the faculty that summer. Having spent her career observing the peoples of the South Pacific, studying their rites, rituals and tribal wars, the renowned anthropologist was attentive to the divisive and dangerous tribal instincts of the indigenous peoples of Europe. “If the Seminar is to be regarded as in any sense typical, it has demonstrated that one of the major contributions which Americans can make to Europe, is to give to the members of the different European nationalities a wider identification, a sense of their Europeanness,” Mead observed. “At the present time, Europe, as a civilization—rather than as a geographical area seems more real to Americans than to Europeans… I think most of them learned, as counterpoint to an increasing sense of what American civilization was, that there was something which might be called European civilization,” Mead observed, “which was not merely an aggregate of national cultures, but an old shared tradition.”

The 92 European Fellows who attended the first program of the “Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization” were charmed and baffled by American informality. Professors wore jeans. They placed their feet on tables. They sat on the floor to discuss philosophy and economics. They forced recent enemies to confront each other. “Heller made a bold decision,” one observer recalled. “He put the students who had until recently fought against each other in the dormitory together.” A Dane, who had been “beaten senseless by Nazis,” admitted, “For the first time I can talk to a German or an Austrian as a human being.”

“The sons of Eastern European countries regarded this summer school with a certain degree of suspicion when they received the invitation,” a Hungarian participant admitted. “The American hosts openly pointed out their own faults and showed no hostility or intolerance toward the ideas or opinions of others.” These small epiphanies have left their traces in the archives. “Take 60 (sic) young, intelligent Europeans, all able to speak a common language, mix them together thoroughly in adequate but not luxurious accommodations, spice them with a sprinkling of Americans, and serve them with discussions and lectures in as beautiful a setting is to be one in Europe,” one participant wrote. “There you have the ingredients of a community which transcends national frontiers and ambitions.” A leading German-language newspaper captured the sentiment succinctly in the headline, “Miniatur-Europa in Salzburg.” A French-language newspaper perceived among this emerging collective identity, a “Préface pour l’Europe Unie.” 

Mere days before Matthiessen gave his opening remarks, representatives of 16 nations were meeting in Paris to deliberate on the implementation of the Marshall Plan—announced at Harvard that spring by Commencement speaker, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall—that was to facilitate the physical and economic reconstruction of Europe. The press scented a moniker. The Christian Science Monitor christened the Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization a “Marshall Plan of the Mind.” The Boston Globe called it “an intellectual Marshall Plan for Europe.” The term made Clemens Heller bristle. 

Clemens said as much when I saw him for the last time in spring 1997, at his residence in Lausanne, Switzerland. “If there was anything we wanted to do,” Salzburg Global’s founding father told me, “I would say it was to promote the idea of individual responsibility, the idea that the individual could make a difference.” Clemens felt that the Marshall Plan, for all its economic and material benefit, forced Europeans to choose between Washington DC and Moscow, further exacerbating postwar tensions and preventing them from finding a European solution to European challenges. Clemens wanted to instill in Europeans a sense of personal agency and individual responsibility. “I believe this was at the core of what we sought to achieve,” he told me. Clemens’s distillation conforms neatly with the stated Salzburg Global mission, but operatives of the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, along with American representatives of the Allied High Commission, housed in the Meierhof—the former farm building adjacent to the Schloss—did not quite see it like that. 

The charming, two-story Meierhof, which currently houses Salzburg Global’s administrative offices, the lecture room known as Fellows Hall, 55 nicely appointed guestrooms and café that offers one of the best cappuccinos in Salzburg, once served as a 42nd Infantry Division outpost in the Nazi-infested hinterland of postwar Austria. “Many Austrians are afraid to cooperate with the Americans because they know the area teems with fanatical Nazis,” TIME magazine reported from Salzburg in June 1945, “many of whom have taken to the mountains with both food and arms.” Even as retaliatory threats subsided, the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) remained on alert for other subversions.

“Although the Seminar was an unofficial venture, authorized but not sponsored by the local military authorities,” a State Department official wrote in January 1948 as plans were being made to convene a second session at Schloss Leopoldskron, “the political complexion of participants was considered a subject of some security interest.” The CIC investigations determined that the American staff, as well as some participants, were “critical of various aspects of current American policy” and were “possessed of unorthodox views on many political subjects.” It was strongly recommended that if the Seminar were to be continued it should be run by “virile, alert and intelligent personnel who are staunch believers in, and advocates of, the American way of life.” The CIC expressed particular concern over Clemens Heller and his criticism of US government policies.

A CIC report on “Communist Activity at Harvard Seminar,” dated July 26, 1947 and since acquired via a request made under the Freedom of Information Act, reported on “sharp attacks” made by Clemens on the US Military Government policies in the American Occupation Zone of Austria. The report found no fault with the other two founders, Richard “Dick” Campbell, Jr. and Scott Elledge. Clemens insisted, according to the CIC report, that a military government, even one run by the United States, was “inadequate to promote democracy in those areas.” When pressed on his alleged anti-Americanism, Clemens held his ground. “What I do believe is that no military government is an ideal instrument for the promotion of democracy,” Clemens had written in a letter framing his position. “The concept of absolute power implicit in the rule by a military government, and the general atmosphere engendered by government based on such a concept, is certainly not the most beneficial one for the realization of a democratic society.” Clemens did not help his cause in two subsequent interrogations by FBI officers stationed in Boston. In the transcripts to one interrogation, Clemens was asked, “Do you believe in democracy,” to which he replied, “What do you mean by democracy?” In the margin beside his response, an agent has written, “Does not even know what democracy is.” Clemens was branded “a Red” and banned from the American Occupation Zone, barring him from returning to Salzburg.

That August, a young political officer was dispatched from the US Embassy in Vienna to gather intelligence on the activities of “the Harvard Seminar” at Schloss Leopoldskron. Earlier that year, Martin Herz had investigated the allegations of communist sympathies that had banned Clemens from the American sector labeling him “a dangerous Red.” “This is a case of a serious political mistake having been made in high places,” Herz reported in a confidential memorandum. The false allegations of communist sympathies had been “motivated by spite and bigotry.” He did admit that Clemens was a “free thinker” but did not feel this should be held against him. “If we cannot afford to have an American student there who occasionally, in a bull session with foreign students, tends to agree with them and criticizes some American policies,” Herz wrote, “then we are in a very sad situation.” 

Now, Herz had come to Salzburg to collect intelligence on the Seminar activities. He discovered that the CIC agent who had written the negative report the previous year had become engaged in a fight on the “virtuousness of the United States” and the “dastardliness of the Russians.” A heated debate ensued with the Seminar staff seeking to parse the differences. “The agent appears to have taken the attitudes that all who disagreed with him were just a bunch of Communists,” Herz reported. “Such loose statements appear to have been most harmful to the seminar.” Herz argued that the “importance of the seminar in advancing the purposes of American policy” lay in the fact that “it is definitely not a propaganda venture,” he wrote, “but a place where serious-minded students can acquire information on the United States—and where they have to work to acquire that information.” Herz praised, in particular, the “informality” of the lectures and the “approachability” of the faculty who participated in informal discussions with the students and conversed on a first name basis. “The freedom of the atmosphere in the seminar, then, is an integral part of its basic idea,” he continued. “Students of many nationalities can be seen sitting together in small groups until the small hours of the morning, discussing the widest range of subjects with complete freedom and independence.”

Herz recommended permitting the Seminar to continue. “For it provides a live demonstration of the fact the freedom of speech and academic freedom do indeed exist in the United States,” he wrote. “If we can demonstrate that, they feel [sic], we will also have gone a very long way toward selling democracy—real constitutional democracy—to the Europeans who attend the seminar.” And thus, a 31-year-old junior political affairs officer, just eight months on the job, had singlehandedly saved the Salzburg Seminar. This was, I believe, the sort of engagement Clemens meant when he spoke of the “courage of individual responsibility.” A US State Department memo summarizes succinctly: “Here, if left to develop in its own way, is a peculiar and unique instrument for the effective projection of American democracy.” 

“You should also note one serious omission. There is no Negro among us,” F.O. Matthiessen said in his opening remarks in the Great Hall back in 1947. “But that was not an oversight. The Negro scholar whom we invited was unable to come, and we will do our best to remedy that omission another year.” That other year was 1950. The scholar was Alain Leroy Locke, the first Black doctoral student of philosophy at Harvard University, the first Black Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and editor of the landmark volume, The New Negro, with which Locke intended, as he wrote in the introduction, “to register the transformations of the inner and outer life” of Black Americans two generations after the abolition of slavery. “As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico,” Locke wrote, “we are witnessing the resurgence of a people.” He spoke of discovering “a new soul” for Black Americans.

If you had walked into the Venetian Salon, shortly after 11 o’clock on any Tuesday or Thursday morning in August 1950, you would have heard the 64-year-old professor of philosophy holding a series of lectures beneath the crystal chandelier, his image reflected in the mirrors embedded in the gold-gilt wall coverings. Locke had joined the faculty of Salzburg Seminar Session 10, “General Session in American Studies.” The presence of the first Black member of a Salzburg faculty was highly anticipated by many of the nearly 70 Fellows in attendance that summer. “Their curiosity, if it had any particular focus,” a Session 10 Faculty member recalled, “was aroused by those aspects of American life which, like the Negro question and the problem of academic freedom, reveal the greatest disparity between professed national ideals and reality.” In this respect, Alain Leroy Locke disappointed. 

Instead of discussing the horrific racial disparities in America that were so contradictory to the ideals the United States attempted to project to the world, Locke lectured on the philosophical origins of American Puritanism and individualism and pragmatism. He assigned readings by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and William James. He was noticeably reserved in discussing the plight of Black people in America. “He represented the Negro problem in the United States,” one Fellow complained, “although he did not speak very much about it.” A Salzburg Seminar in-house report from the time confirms Locke’s reticence to address racial issues, noting that Locke convened a small informal group discussion, but explicitly did not want to “to make the issue a general one.” Locke was there first as a philosopher, then as an American, then as a Black American philosopher. It would be left to other faculty members to highlight the myriad injustices and inequalities suffered by Black people in America. In 1951, John Hope Franklin served on the faculty for a program on American studies. Franklin was author of the landmark book, From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947. “My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history,” the great historian once said, “enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.” 

Early in 1954, the Seminar extended an invitation to Ralph Ellison, who had won the US National Book Award for his 1952 novel, Invisible Man, a fierce and unsparing chronicle of American racial hatred, prejudice, and malevolent indifference. “I am invisible, understand,” Ellison wrote, “simply because people refuse to see me.” Unlike Locke’s carefully curated list of titles, or Franklin’s historical contextualization, Ellison assigned readings that exposed the nightmare world of contemporary Black America: James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel of life in Harlem, Go Tell it on the Mountain; and Richard Wright’s Native Son, a novel about crushing poverty in Chicago’s South Side; as well as Wright’s Black Boy, his searing autobiographical account of racism across America; and of course, Ellison’s own novel Invisible Man, along with his essay “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity.” Ellison also brought a collection of jazz recordings. 

“I am wondering whether there is a tape recorder available at the Schloss Leopoldskron or if the Seminar could conveniently borrow one,” Ellison wrote in his May 17 acceptance letter. “The lectures on jazz are not, of course, dependent on illustration but their interest would undoubtedly be heightened if they were illustrated with actual music.” 

In those same hours of Tuesday, May 17, 1954, as Ellison was writing his letter of acceptance, addressed from Apartment 2B at 730 Riverside Drive on the west side of Manhattan, the United States Supreme Court announced a decision, in a 9 to 0 vote, to overturn the 1896 ruling, Plessey v. Ferguson, that established a legal basis for racial segregation—“separate but equal”—in the United States. In its 1954 landmark ruling, Brown v. the Board of Education, the nine justices formally acknowledged the pernicious and debilitating effects of racial prejudice on American citizens, in particular, among young Black Americans, noting that “it generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” With a high heart over the high court ruling, Ralph Ellison travelled to Salzburg. 

The Salzburg Global archives contain only the scantest traces of Ellison’s time at the Schloss, namely six items that include his lecture schedule, list of recommended readings, his typed, modest half-page CV, and his May 17, 1954, letter of acceptance, signed in green ink with his name rendered in a cascade of fine line, filigreed elegance. However, the Rare Books and Manuscripts division at the Library of Congress, home to Ellison’s private papers, more than 74,800 items, in 314 boxes, with 25 oversize containers, a total of 143 linear feet of documents, preserve the details of Ellison’s summer at the Schloss.

When I searched the Schloss Library shelves for Ellison’s copy of Invisible Man, catalogued as 813.ELL, on a shelf in the library gallery, I discovered it was missing. I did however come across a catalogue of jazz recordings, typed on yellowing index cards, while rummaging through a storage area on the third floor of the Schloss, where I also discovered a letter with Alain Locke’s New York City address, 12 Grove Street, near Washington Square, in lower Manhattan. “In the summer of 1950 it was my good fortune to be a member of the instructorial staff of The Salzburg Seminar in American Studies,” Locke wrote in the undated letter. “I regard the experience more and more in the perspective of four years as one of the most rewarding and educative episodes of forty-one years of college teaching.” 

But while many people, like Locke, find their experiences in Salzburg rewarding and educative, others can find it challenging. One such moment was Saturday morning, October 21, 2018, when photocopied racist images of men in blackface and others dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes and still others posing before a Confederate flag were found taped to the gold framed paintings of a black-faced Harlequin figure in the Venetian Salon, with a note in black marker: “This is BLACK FACE.” It was the closing morning of the Young Cultural Innovators Forum that had brought Fellows from around the world, including many people of color who were stunned by the Venetian Salon’s apparent racist iconography. 

“It was lazy at best and dangerous at worst that there was no context or acknowledgement of the minstrelsy and mockery present in that painting that has plagued our community for so long,” one Fellow asserted. It was “disheartening”, Fellows remarked, to travel so far to an allegedly “safe space” to be confronted with images that were so shocking and offensive. Some Fellows called for the images to be contextualized. Others called for their total removal. 

The Salzburg Global staff responded by noting that the Schloss had been “a place of renewal and inspiration for 38,000 Fellows from 180 countries” for more than seven decades, but conceded to the need for “more nuanced and critical ways” of contextualizing these complex legacies. An inventory was made of the Schloss’s collective transgressions and offenses. The Prince Archbishop had vowed to “root out and expatriate” the “unruly, seditious and insurgent population” of Protestants. More than 20,000 men, women and children were given ten days to liquidate their assets and leave. Max Reinhardt had been similarly dispossessed of Schloss Leopoldskron and forced to live in exile because of his Jewish heritage. The Schloss had then served for seven years as gathering place for Nazis. Salzburg Global now displays various placards with images and text in relevant rooms around the Schloss in an attempt to contextualize and bring greater nuance to these dark periods in the Schloss’ history. 

As part of its “Contested Histories” project, Salzburg Global devoted particular attention to the offending paintings in the Venetian Salon. It was first determined that images of the Harlequin figure dated back to the 16th century and appeared to have no connection with racism, though Salzburg Global conceded that the figure wearing a black mask “can appear to be a depiction of blackface.” Further research revealed, in fact, that the black-masked Harlequin figure could sometimes be “attributed to early depictions of African slaves.” But it was also speculated that Max Reinhardt “himself a victim of racism, identified with the persevering character of the Harlequin.” 

Salzburg Global made assurances of its “institutional respect for equality, diversity and inclusivity,” and the need to reach out to the community of Fellows who felt alienated or hurt by the Venetian Salon images. A promise was made to contextualize the Harlequin figure, and to engage in continued “dialogue” and “debate,” which at another institution might sound like a dodge, but was in fact, the same solution that the Seminar’s founding fathers had considered foundational to healing a damaged world back in that distant summer of 1947. 

As you enter the Max Reinhart Library in the Schloss, just of the Marble Hall on the palace’s bel etage, you will find on a lower shelf in first window niche, under the classification 803.BEL, one of the most prescient books of the 20th century. It could be science fiction, were it not written by an eminent Harvard scholar and published by a leading nonfiction imprint and weighted with social theory, political philosophy, data-based projections, and full academic apparatus—footnotes, annotations, bibliographic references. Hundreds of footnotes.

This 500-page treatise, published nearly a half century ago, envisions a brave new world where “intuitive judgements” are replaced by “algorithms” with computers “hitched up”—the author’s words not mine—to global network that are to become “the tool of the future.” Centuries-old means of production—factories, workshops, skilled artisans—are superseded by “new science-based industries” that shift economies “from manufacturing to services.” Chapter six describes a “new technical elite,” with unprecedented wealth and power that exceeds the capacities of many governments. The chapter is titled, “Who Will Rule?”

If you open this first edition, wrapped in a protective plastic sheath, of Daniel Bell’s prescient tome, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, published in 1974, you will find on page 23 a brief explanation as to his now near prophetic vision of our 21st century world. “No idea ever emerges from the head of Jove, or a secondary muse,” Bell writes. “Its intellectual antecedents are sketched in the notes I prepared for my lectures at the Salzburg Seminar.” The 38-year-old professor of sociology first posited the concept of a “post-industrial” society, back in June 1959, at a session on American politics, economics and foreign policy, but it was not until a decade later, at a series of sessions on “the new technology” that he stress-tested “the role of technology as an autonomous variable of social change” and its myriad impacts on labor practices, social stratification, political change, decision-making and higher education. In June 1969, at Session 123, “The Social Impact of the New Technology,” Bell concerned focused, in particular, on “the apocalyptic and anti-intellectual tendencies” precipitated by the seismic change was anticipating. Five years later, he digested this decade of research, reflection and analysis into his landmark book on post-industrial society with its credit line to the Salzburg Seminar. 

It is said that you can tell a lot about people by the books they keep. The same can be said of Salzburg Global Seminar. The Max Reinhardt Library today is a repository of the ideas and initiatives that were either conceived, articulated, discussed or disseminated at Salzburg Global’s programs over the past 75 years. Like the gold-leaf placards that preserve the intellectual imprint of Max Reinhardt’s book collection—Theater, Shakespeare, Goethe, Musik, Literatur, Architektur, Salisburgensia, to name a few—the current book collection represents the reification of Salzburg Global’s early intellectual world and its later ambitions in all their complexity, diversity and contradictions. 

The original copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is missing, but other volumes from his original reading list are still present, including a first edition of Richard Wright’s Native Son, published in 1938, and Wright’s Black Boy, published in 1940, as well as John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom, American Mirror and The Color Line. Dewey Decimal 326. There is also an anthology, published in 1944, What the Negro Wants, with chapters titled “the four freedoms,” “certain inalienable rights,” and “full equality,” as well as a poem by Langston Hughes, “My America,” and another anthology, published in 1958, titled, The Deep South Says “Never.” 

For a time, the Salzburg Global library contained one of the most extensive collections of American studies in Europe. “The library is by no means what the planners would have liked, because of financial and material shortages,” Anthony Lewis reported from the Schloss in August 1947, “but the seminar has managed to acquire enough copies of significant works to make a go of it.” The future Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who was then editor of the Harvard Crimson, found many “familiar titles” on the mostly vacant Reinhardt shelves. “‘Walden,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘US Foreign Policy,’ ‘The Rise of American Civilization,’ ‘Main Currents in American Thought,’” Lewis reprised, “‘The Frontier in American History,’ ‘Middletown,’ ‘Economic Policy and Full Employment.’” The early books linked to American literature, theatre, politics, law, and related subjects, reflect in a broad sense, the deep connection Salzburg Global maintains to American studies, which is now manifested in its ongoing American Studies Program symposia. 

In my own perusal of the library shelves, I found first editions of works by Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner, as well as a collection of “Uncle Remus” stories by Joel Chandler Harris. Published in 1908, this volume of “new stories from the old plantation” was tucked between an anthology of Grimm’s fairytales on the right and traditional stories of Indigenous Writers of Taiwan and Indian Sleep-Man Tales on the left. The book recounted the adventures of the wily “Br’er Rabbit” and “a strapping black girl, with a saucy smile and ivory white teeth.” 

I also found a copy of Hiroshima, inscribed by Seminar faculty member John Hersey, his iconic eyewitness account of the human toll wrought by the first atomic bomb. Similarly, Arthur Miller, also a faculty member, inscribed copies of The Crucible, his cautionary tale about the American capacity for deadly public hysteria and Death of a Salesman, about the tragic allure of the American dream. The shelves of the Schloss Library sag under the weight of America’s collective social, economic, political and moral injustices—exactly as US military intelligence officers originally feared—but also brim with volumes celebrating the myriad triumphs and miracles of “American civilization,” along with vivid examples of Americans’ “inalienable right” to the pursuit of happiness. 

Hi, derry-derry
The rhyming’s facile,
Where hearts are merry,
At Reinhardt’s Castle.

On Monday, June 3, 1974, Brendan Gill, scribbled this ditty into a copy of his book Happy Times—Dewey Decimal 790—which contains hundreds of photographs of Hollywood celebrities ranging from Buster Keaton and Greta Garbo to Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman and Marylin Monroe. (Monroe herself had for a short time been the owner of a collection of some 140 notebooks of Max Reinhardt before selling them to Reinhardt’s son, Gottfried.) A legendary New Yorker writer and Seminar faculty member, Gill distilled in a few brief lines the levity and cheer that paralleled the serious and weighty discussions from the Seminar’s earliest days. “Some students are capable of drinking a great deal without their work suffering,” one in-house report noted. “Others are capable of fornicating a great deal without converting the Seminar into a cesspool of degeneracy or themselves into roués and whores of Babylon.” The Schloss Library preserves both the innocent and the explicit in life at the Seminar. There is a biography, written by Seminar co-founder Scott Elledge, chronicling the life of E.B. White, author of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, and an inscribed autobiography by Erica Jong, author of the iconic “pornographic novel,” Fear of Flying, who served on the faculty of a literature session in the late 1990s. 

As the Seminar expanded thematically and geographically, so did its book collection, reflecting the intellectual embrace of an increasingly ambitious vision—climate change, migration, civil society, human rights, healthcare, inclusivity—within this wood-paneled paradise where gold gilt placards preserve the intellectual imprint of Reinhardt’s original book collection and early volumes, both inspiring and discomforting, preserve the complexity and contradiction of Salzburg Global’s founding years.

Back in the 1990s, a 20lb piece of the Berlin Wall sat in the stairwell niche leading into the Bierstube, the palace’s former coal cellars. It was not one of the tourist-size fragments, with a quick dash of paint, that are hawked as “authentic” relics, but rather this was a true chunk of the true wall—concrete imbedded with reinforcing iron bars and smeared with red and green paint—that was once part of the most visible expression of the Cold War and a tragically ironic form of nativistic German violence: Germans killing Germans trying to escape from Germany to Germany.

The concrete relic was a gift from an East German Fellow, who, with hammer and chisel hacked a chunk of the Berlin Wall and presented it to the Seminar as an expression of gratitude for its decades-long effort in working toward a reunited Europe. “What could be a better gift than a big piece of the Berlin Wall?” he explained in an accompanying note. “Europe had become a better world, the Iron Curtain was penetrated and the Berlin Wall had come down.” This had been part of the Salzburg Global’s founding intention all along, as Session 1 faculty member Benjamin Wright wrote back in 1947: “The seminar may well even contribute toward the altogether desirable end of lifting the Iron Curtain if students and teachers from the countries of eastern Europe attend.” The Schloss worked its magic from that session on. Margaret Mead praised the ameliorating effects of the Schloss setting, in particular, the ornate mirrored panels in the Venetian Room. “The first shock as they found themselves sitting side by side with men whom two short years ago they might have killed, was softened as they saw themselves reflected back, in the dim lights, from the great mirrors,” Mead observed. “This gave them time to pause, to hesitate, to see themselves with a certain degree of detachment.”

The Bierstube offered a very different setting but with similar effect. The cavernous space with its low stone arches and whitewashed walls with mildew in the corners is considered by many the most memorable space in Schloss Leopoldskron. Equipped with an old piano, a radio, a ping pong table, and an endless supply of beer, wine, and soft drinks, the Bierstube was the place where the conversations that began in the lecture halls and seminar rooms during the day continue late into the night, especially among the Europeans from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Fellows from Eastern Europe had attended some of the earliest Seminar sessions, especially those from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but as the international tensions heightened, Fellows stopped coming. It was not until 1966, during a thaw in the Cold War, that Fellows from behind the Iron Curtain again began attending. “Any explicit stressing, especially in the lectures, of the virtues of our free market system,” a letter to faculty instructed, “could easily confirm the communists unwarranted suspicions that the Salzburg Seminar is really a propaganda outfit.” Faculty were told to concentrate on presenting rather than preaching, and letting “the facts” speak for themselves. It worked. By 1989, the Seminar had over 1,400 alumni across the Soviet Bloc, with 327 in Poland, 178 in Romania, and 92 in Bulgaria. A page from the Seminar session “guest book” for one 1968 session presented a world without distinction between East and West or even countries, states or cities: Belgium, Hungary, Romania, England, Texas, Finland, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Holland, Belgrade. One Fellow wrote, “The shortest distance between Washington and Moscow is through the Bierstube.”

Joseph Nye was a faculty member at two Seminar sessions in the 1970s. Like Daniel Bell, his Seminar lectures and interactions helped shape a nascent idea, in particular, at Session 186, in 1978, “Is Internationalization the Alternative to Nuclear War?” It was the notion that a country’s influence extended beyond its military and economic might, indeed that a country could set an example through its cultural influences that could exert greater impact in shaping the perceptions of the populations of entire nations and thus influence them without ever dropping a bomb or imposing an embargo. “I did not invent the term ‘soft power’ until I wrote the book Bound to Lead in 1989 and my Salzburg residence was in the mid-1970s,” Nye recalls. “Nonetheless, I think there was an indirect influence. Soft power is the ability to affect others to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion. Sometimes people make the mistake of confusing it with propaganda, but propaganda is rarely credible and thus fails to attract,” which is exactly the point that Martin Herz, the green diplomat, had made back in 1947. “Face-to-face interaction that engenders trust is a more lasting source of attraction,” Nye continued, “and that is what I observed occurring during my experience at Salzburg,” which mirrors what Margaret Mead observed back in 1947, and which had been Clemens Heller’s intent all along.

The same year that Joseph Nye published his landmark book on “soft power,” Oleg Bogomolov spoke of its impacts on the 350 million people of the Soviet Bloc, at Session 278, “The New Revolution: The USSR in Transition.” Bogomolov was a delegate to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the Soviet Union’s new legislative body charged with implementing Mikhail Gorbachev’s social and economic reforms known as perestroika. On Friday morning, August 25, 1989, Bogomolov described to Fellows and faculty the “widening gap” between East and West, not only in terms of technology and productivity, but also in regard to more fundamental issues like quality of life and basic human rights. In his lecture, titled “Political Reform and the New Social Contract,” Bogomolov explained that “late Leninist concepts” like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “social justice” had been lost in the seven decades since Lenin’s death in 1924. Bogomolov spoke of the need for “renewal in the Socialist world” without “negating classic Marxist Leninist thought,” while conceding that “the feeling that profound revolutionary change is now inevitable.” 

Two days earlier, two million people had joined hands to form a 420-mile-long human chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a gesture of anti-Soviet Baltic unity. A day later, Poland installed the first non-communist government in the Soviet Bloc. The following month, Hungary opened its border to allow thousands of East German refugees to flee onwards into the West. In the weeks that followed the “inevitable” became palpable, as mass protests swept the Soviet Bloc, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall that November. 

The following summer, in my first year at Schloss Leopoldskron, I was standing in the Great Hall when an elderly man opened the front door and entered the Schloss with a disarming sense of familiarity, unlike the tourists who dashed in to snap a picture of The Sound of Music palace. He explained that he had just arrived by car from Prague, Czechoslovakia. He glanced about the Great Hall, with its portraits and “Bordello Madonna” in a niche, the grand piano in one corner, and the view of the Untersberg beyond the lakeside terrace, and asked, “Is this still the Salzburg Seminar?”

He had attended the second session, back in 1948, and remembered it as one of the most memorable and remarkable experiences of his life, six weeks devoted to open discussion and debate with Americans and fellow Europeans intent on rebuilding a continent devastated by six years of war. He departed Salzburg with a sense of hope for the future. On arrival in Prague, the authorities confiscated his passport. For the next four decades, exiled from the rest of Europe, he sustained himself on the memories of that summer, and vowed that if he ever again could travel west, Schloss Leopoldskron would be his first port of call. 

Now, in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, and the opening of his country’s borders, he was making good on that promise to himself. He had returned to Schloss Leopoldskron and, he hoped, to the Salzburg Seminar. “How is it that I have not been here for nearly a half century,” he wondered, “and yet it feels as if I had never left?” It is a sentiment one often hears from returning Fellows and faculty, whether from Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas, whether a half a year or a half a century ago, whether it includes memories of the Venetian Room or the Bierstube or the Marble Hall.

On the first evening of Session 299, “Transnational Law and Legal Institutions,” in 1992, US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor took to the podium for the second time that day. She had delivered the session’s opening lecture, “The American Federal System” that morning, but now convened an informal evening discussion to reflect on the recent Supreme Court’s decision on a woman’s right to abortion. It had promised to be one of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings since Roe v. Wade in 1973, which had established a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy two decades earlier. O’Connor knew the public uproar the court ruling would unleash and decided to travel abroad as soon as the court recessed in June 1992. The 62-year-old justice, the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court, had met with judges in Kigali, then continued into the Rwandan highlands to experience first-hand the legendary “gorillas in the mist.” “The woman who had pored over stacks of National Geographic as a girl,” O’Connor writes in her memoirs, “was drawn to exotic and far-off places by her love of nature.” O’Connor was now in Salzburg having missed much of the resultant furor while in Rwanda.

Session 299 belonged to annual series on law and legal institutions that dates back to June 1953. Then, at Session 26, the Seminar convened its first law program with Harvard Law School and gradually expanded to include faculty from the US Supreme Court. In 1972, US Chief Justice Warren Burger served as a guest speaker at Session 136 and became a regular faculty member over the years. A staff member recalls him “raiding” the Schloss kitchen for food to bring to the Bierstube in the evenings. A portrait of the Supreme Court, signed by all nine justices, is displayed just outside the Schloss Library, with the inscription: “To the Fellows, Faculty and Staff of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.” Other justices followed including Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Steven Breyer and Anthony Kennedy. 

In July 1989, Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, joined the faculty of Session 276. “A State’s restrictions on a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy also implicate constitutional guarantees of gender equality,” Blackmun wrote in the 1973 ruling. “State restrictions on abortion compel women to continue pregnancies they otherwise might terminate. By restricting the right to terminate pregnancies, the State conscripts women’s bodies into its service, forcing women to continue their pregnancies, suffer the pains of childbirth, and in most instances, provide years of maternal care.” As a reminder of the intensity of emotions associated with the 1973 ruling, Blackmun told a staff member that he had a chair at home with a bullet hole from a would-be assassin. “One of the most moving presentations we have heard here—clear, logical, thorough, modest—was,” the Session 276 in-house report notes, Blackmun’s presentation “to a packed house on ‘The Anatomy of Roe vs. Wade.’” 

Now, three years later, in July 1992, Justice O’Connor was in Fellows Hall to discuss the recent Supreme Court case, Casey v. Planned Parenthood, that sought to overturn the 1973 landmark ruling. The nine justices, O’Connor told the Fellows, had been divided with four justices seeking to uphold Roe v. Wade, and five justices seeking to reinstitute a national ban on abortion. Then something remarkable happened, as O’Connor told the Fellows, and subsequent disclosures confirm. “Dear Harry, I need to see you as soon as you have a few free moments,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote Blackmun on April 24, 1992. “I want to tell you about some developments in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and at least part of what I say should come as welcome news.” Kennedy had changed his mind.

O’Connor said that as a woman, her position on Roe v. Wade was clear, but for Kennedy, as a man, as a conservative, and as a devout Roman Catholic, the decision to uphold a woman’s right to an abortion was more complex, personally and morally, but ultimately his belief in precedent prevailed—a sentiment reflected in the majority decision.

“Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” Justice O’Connor wrote in the majority opinion. “Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe,” which was the reason for compelling Justice Kennedy to vote for upholding a woman’s constitutional right to protect a woman from having her body conscripted by the state.

In the years to come, Justice Kennedy became an annual presence at Salzburg Global, speaking on immigration, global citizenship, freedom of speech. In 2012, following his swing vote on gay marriage and the affordable health care act, Kennedy was featured on the cover of TIME magazine, with the moniker “The Decider.” Described as the most powerful man in America for his ability to tip Supreme Court rulings, Justice Kennedy continued to appear most summers at Schloss Leopoldskron, most recently in 2019, always with a smile and a pocket size copy of the US Constitution.

The Salzburg Global-Supreme Court connection continues beyond Schloss Leopoldskron, with the Court itself serving as a regular venue for the Cutler Lecture on the Rule of Law held annually in Washington DC since 2010. Justices O’Connor, Ginsburg and Kennedy have all hosted the annual event, with Justice Breyer delivering the lecture itself in 2013. The lecture is named in honor of Lloyd N. Cutler, the Washington “superlawyer” and two-time White House Counsel, who had been instrumental in bringing both senior judges and early-career jurists from not only the US but around the world to Salzburg during his long tenure on the Seminar’s board of directors. 

Cutler’s legacy also continues in Salzburg Global’s Cutler Law Fellows Program, which has been bringing together some of the brightest young lawyers from top US law schools since 2012. Just as timely as O’Connor’s talk was three decades earlier, the 2022 law session, “The Future of Public and Private International Law,” opened the day Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, with a keynote panel featuring former US State Department and National Security Council legal advisor John Bellinger, political scientist Pavel Baev, and former counsel to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Svitlana Starosvit. “The Cutler Fellows Program is always looking to respond to current world events,” the session report noted, “but this session happened at a particularly crucial time in history, as the most ‘notable use of force that we have ever seen on the European continent since World War II’ was happening simultaneously.”

As one new Cutler Fellow noted, hearing from such speakers the same day as Russian tanks advanced upon Kyiv was both “inspiring and surreal.”

“In the dining room, heated by a large fireplace, enormous and terrible paintings of Archbishop Firmian willing the Schloss to his nephew, with his favorite dog in the foreground,” Edmund Wilson once wrote, “and, opposite, the nephew and his wife, presumably reigning in the castle.” The legendary editor and literary critic who helped advance the writing careers of Ernst Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and served as on the Seminar’s faculty, was equally dismissive of the “bogus Austrian portraits” in the stairwell and the gaudy “glass and porcelain chandeliers” in the Venetian Room, as well as the “big bearded black busts of Romans, with Gilded trimmings,” representing Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus, the first Black Roman Emperor, on the bel étage landing just outside the Marble Hall. But the keen-eyed critic failed to notice the remarkable ceiling details of the Marble Hall—the depiction of the four corners of the earth rendered in stucco on the four sides of the vast hall: dragon and elephant for Asia; lion, parrot, monkey for Africa; horse and ox for Europe; alligator and llama for the Americas. Australia and Antarctica are unsurprisingly absent given they were unknown to Europeans when the Schloss was built in 1740s.

Schloss Leopoldskron was global long before Salzburg Global Seminar called it home. But the Seminar’s global aspirations were apparent from its earliest years. The first Fellow from Japan attended Session 17, “American Poetry and Prose,” which was detailed in an article, with an accompanying photograph of the Schloss, in Chubu Nippon Shimbun, or Central Japan Newspaper, on March 5, 1952. “I was invited to the literary seminar which was held in January, 3rd in Salzburg in Austria,” Rikutaro Fukuda wrote. “The literature seminar gathered scholars from all over Europe.” The first Fellow from China, Yueh-Tseng Feng, attended Session 18, “Political Science and American Politics,” the following month. 
The 1970s saw the first Fellows come from Central America and Africa, but it was in the Middle East where the Seminar made its most concerted recruitment efforts during that decade, bringing Israelis and Arabs together at the same sessions. As a Jordanian Fellow wrote in 1979, “If the world recognized the extent of affection and understanding that can be generated by human interaction, it would denounce and abandon forever wars and hatred. The Salzburg Seminar is a forum whereby such a realization can be easily obtained.” 

By the early 1990s, a truly global reach in Seminar programming had emerged. The Seminar initiated a series of sessions on European unification, and another on the rise of industrial East Asia, as well as a sustained exploration of international law with a focus on human rights. Then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it also launched a decade-long project on university reform in the former Soviet Bloc, and reinvigorated its American Studies programming but from an international perspective. 

In April 1993, Session 301, “Japan, Europe and North America: Toward a G-3 World” included Fellows and Faculty from China, Japan, Korea, and perhaps most notably, a Fellow from Vietnam. Given the US “engagement” in Southeast Asia two decades earlier, it was an important development. Nguyen Xuan Phong was acting director of the Americas Department at Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry in Hanoi. Having studied humanities at the University of Havana, Phong had served as counsellor at the Vietnamese embassy in Cuba, before taking up his post at the Americas desk in Hanoi where he was assigned a single task: convince the United States to drop economic sanctions against Vietnam. Phong was now attending the Seminar to better understand American foreign policy in a global context. He was already familiar with domestic dynamics. For the previous two years, Phong had accompanied Senator John Kerry on helicopter trips across the country on a mission to retrieve the last remains of American servicemen who were missing in action. Phong told me he had the double task of convincing the farmers, who were holding US soldiers’ remains “hostage” for financial compensation, to surrender them while convincing the Americans that the Vietnamese government was acting in good faith. It worked. 

In January 1994, Kerry reported to the Senate that he had “traveled eight times to Vietnam, flown at risk in Soviet helicopters across their territory,” with Phong of course, “and spent hours trying to get answers.” “I have listened to the people in the field—something that we did not do during the war itself,” Kerry said. “The people in the field are saying to us: Lift this embargo. You will help us get answers for the families.” Kerry said that the United States had “to turn away from a policy of retribution” and one of engagement with the Vietnamese. “For 19 years, we did nothing,” he said, “for 19 years, we got very few answers, if any, for our families.” The following month, the sanctions were lifted and plans were made for the opening of the first Vietnamese consulate in the United States. “Vietnam reportedly already has named Nguyen Xuan Phong, 53, a strong supporter of the prime minister’s reform policies, to be consul general in San Francisco,” one news source reported.

On Monday, November 14, 1997, Phong started his first day on his new job. Less than three months later, another sort of reconciliation was taking place in Salzburg. 

Just off the Great Hall, behind a double-wooden door that locks with a skeleton key, the Chapel rises within the Schloss in two stories of Baroque splendor—marble altar, stucco ceilings, gold-gilt streams of radiant light, religious iconography—at the bottom of which lies the hard heart of the prince archbishop, sealed in an iron cask beneath an oval slab of black stone. A Latin inscription confirms the spot as the final resting place. It is supposed to serve as a physical metaphor for Prince Archbishop Firmian’s love for the charming rococo palace that sits on a lake beyond which lie the snowcapped Alps. But for all its alluring beauty, this palace which came to serve as the backdrop to The Sound of Music, was in truth, in Firmian’s time, a four-story monument to intolerance and injustice.

In an unprecedented act of brute prejudice, Prince Archbishop Firmian gave 20,000 protestants ten days to liquidate their properties and leave the Province of Salzburg, an early act of social eradication in the population that was to foreshadow even darker chapters of intolerance in times to come. Following the annexation of Austria in 1938, Max Reinhardt was forced to join the ranks of the expropriated and was exiled from his homeland, with the Schloss falling into the hands of the Nazis. This history undoubtedly helped set the moral compass for the Seminar’s decades-long programming in addressing prejudice whether in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender orientation, or any other manifestation of human intolerance. The Seminar’s focus on inclusivity and social justice found particularly poignant expression on the night of Monday, February 2, 1998, when two men sat alone in the Great Hall before smoldering embers in the fireplace in solemn conversation. Jeffrey Donaldson was then a representative of the Ulster Unionists Party of Northern Ireland who had previously served in the British Army. Seán MacManus had been national chairman of Sinn Féin, the Irish republican party with ties to the militant IRA.

A week earlier, both men had been involved in the faltering negotiations seeking peace to the decades-long struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. They had come to Salzburg during a hiatus in the struggling peace talks in Northern Ireland, along with other members of the negotiating parties, to attend a special session with individuals from other intractable conflicts around the world—Latin America, the Middle East, the Balkans. “The session I chaired with victims from Latin American countries focused on the terrible atrocities they had experienced over previous decades,” Monica McWilliams, a leading Northern Irish social justice activist, wrote in her memoir, Stand Up, Speak Out. “Ana Guadalupe Martinez the female commander of the FMLN, had been kidnapped, tortured and held hostage by El Salvadoran forces and spoke about how she had entered negotiations with the government responsible for that harm,” McWilliams recalled. Meanwhile, a Fellow from Croatia spoke of the lasting effects of violence suffered by women during the war in the Balkans.

During the evening’s discussion, Donaldson shared his experiences with the death of family members and comrades who had died fighting in the Ulster Defense Regiment. It was then that MacManus stood up. “I recall every detail vividly,” recalls Tim Phillips, the Fellow who had helped bring the delegation to Salzburg. “Seán MacManus stood up in the Great Hall and basically admitted that he was recruiting killers for the IRA, one of whom was his son, who was subsequently killed. Sean said not a day, not a moment had gone by since then without him thinking that he was responsible for his son’s death.” Indeed, that Monday was the five-year anniversary of his son’s death. 

When the session adjourned, Donaldson quietly asked McWilliams if she would introduce him to MacManus. “After the introductions, I left them sitting together in front of the fire,” McWilliams recalled. 

“The meeting did provide a historically important breakthrough moment for the peace process,” Phillips recalled. “In fact, according to Monica and Paul Arthur [peace studies professor and another Northern Irish Fellow of the same session], the meeting and side conversation between Jeffrey and Seán was not only one of the first times that a senior Unionist leader and a Sinn Féin leader spoke with each other, but according to Jeffrey, seeing and hearing Seán’s grief for his son’s death and blaming himself for his son joining the IRA and hurting innocent civilians, deeply touched and humanized Sinn Féin/IRA leaders for Jeffrey.” Both men took their conversations from their fireside conversation back to their respective negotiating teams. “It was many years later that I heard that Jeffrey talked openly about what had transpired that evening in Salzburg, describing the conversation as a most enlightening experience,” wrote McWilliams.

Two months later, the historic Good Friday Agreement was signed. “I learned that sitting around a fire or eating a meal together,” McWilliams recalled, “is when you will often find the humanity in the ‘other’, and that’s what happened that night in Schloss Leopoldskron.”

If you look carefully at the ceiling stucco in the Red Salon, the elegantly appointed room just off the Schloss Library, you will see swallows chasing butterflies. The stucco is white, as are the walls, the name recalling the red brocade of the high-back chairs. The swallow, from the family of passerine birds, is known for graceful movement in flight, as reflected in the stucco, and its culling of mosquitos and other carriers of vector-borne disease.  

On a mid-autumn Thursday in late October 2019, a group of health professionals from across six continents gathered to discuss the interspecies transference of disease and to identify mechanisms for early detection and interdiction. They catalogued thirty “milestones across the livestock, wildlife, and environment sectors” that could allow experts to “find outbreaks faster and to create a ‘disease agnostic’ framework that could be used by every country.” They drafted protocols for early “event recognition” and “verification.” They proposed rapid response mechanisms. They outlined designs for smart phone applications that were “interoperable” and “geo-tagged” and “multilingual.” They identified the critical need for “bridging the gap” between the medical and veterinary sectors. This proposed “one health surveillance” was framed to serve as a pandemic early alert system that would be integrated, comprehensive, global, since—as was recently explained to me—“the majority of infectious diseases in humans originate in animals.”  

Three decades earlier, a similarly international group of Fellows had gathered at Schloss Leopoldskron to consider the global spread of a virus also later believed to have originated in animals before transferring to humans. In February 1988, Salzburg convened Session 266, “AIDS: Confronting an Epidemic,” which was one of the first international discussions of the AIDS crisis as a social and political rather than a purely medical issue. The session’s global representation reflected the global concern. There were Fellows from Austria to Brazil to China, across the global alphabet of nations, to Greece and Ghana to Indonesia and Israel and Italy to Spain and Sudan to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. They also represented a wide array of sectors, from health care and public policy to gay activism and the Catholic Church. According to the session’s chair, Tom Delbanco from Harvard Medical School, the session convened a “Who’s Who” of global health leaders, some now “legendary,” in the fight against AIDS. “I’m still furious that we didn’t publish the results of the game we constructed,” Delbanco recalls. “It proved (unfortunately) prescient in terms of the international spread it predicted.”

Within a month of Session 641, “Finding Outbreaks Faster: Metrics for One Health Surveillance” and almost forty years since the start of the AIDS epidemic, a new disease was about to make the interspecies leap and spread internationally. Its symptoms included fever, coughing, fatigue, and perhaps most anomalous, the loss of taste and smell. “Government records suggest first person infected with new disease may have been a Hubei resident aged 55,” the South China Morning Post reported, “but ‘patient zero’ has yet to be confirmed.” The disease caused by the newly “identified” SARS-CoV-2, was abbreviated to “CO” for corona, “VI” for virus, and “D” for disease. It was tagged “19” for the new millennial year of its appearance. By the end of January 2020, COVID-19 had reportedly killed 213 people in China. Within the year, this airborne and highly contagious disease was to kill, according to the World Health Organization, more than three million people worldwide and cripple the global economy. 

Mark Smolinski, session chair at that November 2019 meeting later told Salzburg Global that the consensus of the experts at the session was “again expeditious.” Smolinksi, a former director at the US Center for Disease Control, is now head of the global initiative Ending Pandemics. Back in 2007, Smolinski was part of Session 444 on “The Global Nexus of Animal and Public Health,” which highlighted the growing risk of interspecies disease transfer. Recognizing Salzburg Global’s unique convening capacity, he urged Salzburg Global to develop sustained work in designing an interdiction regime. Smolinski wrote, “It would fulfill a big item on my bucket list if this pivotal meeting could be held at the Salzburg Global Seminar in 2018.” In November 2018 the first meeting was convened and the “Salzburg Metrics” were adopted by the World Health Organization by year’s end. Then in November 2019, Smolinksi was again at Schloss Leopoldskron meeting with experts to refine the metrics further to incorporate environmental monitoring for prediction and prevention, as well as for use in animal outbreak surveillance. 

Speaking in February 2020, as COVID-19 had begun to exponentially spread worldwide and governments started considering national lockdowns, Smolinski said the pandemic “is a wake-up call and outbreaks such as this that spread from animals to humans will continue to occur. My motto is, ‘Don’t be scared, get prepared.’” The Salzburg Metrics will hopefully help the world be more prepared in case of the next global pandemic. At the time of Salzburg Global’s 75th anniversary in 2022, the disruption wrought by COVID-19 continues; the threats remain, but Salzburg Global can take pride that its challenge to current and future leaders to shape a better world is still being met. 

When the sun begins to set and the skies are clear—a preciously rare occurrence in Salzburg—a single beam of sunlight cuts through the trees along the perimeter wall of the Meierhof, across the Schloss Park and between the two faux Greek columns flanking the small fountain, to illuminate the statue of Leda and the Swan in the Schloss Park. It is a moment of luminous wonder. Along with the magical panoply of crystal, glass, gold, illuminated by the crystal chandelier in the Venetian Room, and enfolding warmth of the Schloss Library, Reinhardt’s choreography of light and leaf and stone with its interplay of the natural and the manmade beauty is one of his most visually stunning if ephemeral experiences at Schloss Leopoldskron. The statue veritably shimmers in ethereal light, when, of course, it is not raining and the stone has been scrubbed of moss and lichen.

Back in August 1931, Max Reinhardt had attempted one of his most ambitious theatrical projects ever, a staging of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in a 250-seat outdoor theatre, deep in the Schloss Park, that used the Untersberg vista as backdrop. Reinhardt engaged his finest actors, hired an orchestra from the Mozarteum and invited 250 select guests, all attired in evening wear, for the evening premiere. Green Chinese lanterns illuminated the footpaths and bridges that led deep into the Schloss Park, as guests carrying torches assembled and took their seats, and the opening lines—“If music be the food love, play on”—were spoken as clouds gathered overhead. It began to drizzle, then rain, then deluge, and “the last lines were blown away with the wind,” as one commentator noted. The crowd stumbled back to the Schloss in the pouring rain. Reinhardt vowed never to use the theatre again and didn’t.

The Seminar used the abandoned theater intermittently across the decades. There were performances by Fellows and faculty in the 1950s that included a performance of HIM, a 1928 play by e.e. cummings. On a spring evening in 1981, 60 Fellows and faculty from Session 205, on contemporary theater, staged a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, under the direction of Ellen Stewart, the African American theatre director and fashion designer, who worked with Christian Dior and foundedthe La Mama experimental theatre in Manhattan. Brendan Gill from The New Yorker detailed the performance. “It was given the other night, at twilight, in the depths of the park,” Gill wrote, “and the audience moved from one grassy open place to the next, torches flared along the woodland paths, and music was improvised out of kitchen pots and pans and strips of tin roofing.” The skies were clear. “The cast spoke in eighteen languages, but in this production no common language was needed,” Gill continued. “Though Romeo spoke his lines in Maltese, and Juliet hers in Israeli, somehow we heard Shakespeare. His words sang to us under the first stars.”

In summer 2010, Salzburg Global collaborated with the Salzburg Festival in reviving Max Reinhardt’s failed attempt of 80 years previously with a Schloss Park staging of excerpts from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and a screening of Reinhardt’s famous 1935 Hollywood film adaptation. “The Midsummer Night’s Dream was unbelievably beautiful,” an audience member recalled. “The front part of the park was enchanted by fantastic lighting under the large trees. There was a tent where guests picked up their picnic baskets and then lounged on wooden platforms (equipped with blankets and pillows) in front of the stage under the trees.” The Salzburg Festival, and later the Salzburg State Theater, reprised the event in seasons to follow, capturing the spirit that Reinhardt had sought to achieve eight decades earlier.

The most memorable performance, of course, took place on the Meierhof side of the Schloss, back in the early 1960s when Hollywood film director Robert Wise staged scenes from his film, The Sound of Music, on the edge of the Leopoldskroner Weiher, where replicas of the Schloss’ stone seahorses were erected. Although the Schloss itself never appears in the film, the Venetian Room inspired the Von Trapp family ballroom, which was constructed on a Hollywood studio set. The blockbuster transformed the home of Salzburg Global Seminar into a global tourist destination for fans of the Oscar-winning film, which has come to benefit Salzburg Global’s hotel operation and occasionally its Fellows. 

Christian Thomsen, who attended a session on American theater in 1970 and went on to write a book on the Schloss and the Seminar, recalls a group of “American college girls” appearing at the Schloss and asking him and another Fellow whether it really was home to the Von Trapp family. “We told them that we were two members of the of the Trapp family!” Thomsen recalls. “We enjoyed their enthusiastic ‘ahs’ and ‘ohs’, and asked the girls whether they would like to see ‘our castle’.” Thomsen says that the young ladies “melted” at the invitation. “The only stupid thing,” he adds, “was the fact that neither Josef nor I had ever seen The Sound of Music.”

“In my own life, there have been many unexpected encounters and discoveries,” Saskia Wieringa writes in a blog post. “One such unexpected encounter was seeing a statue of transgender goddess Guan Yin again at my first gathering of the Salzburg Global LGBT* Forum that took place in the Schloss that once belonged to theater director Max Reinhardt.” The Dutch sociologist had joined nearly 60 Fellows from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas for the first annual program devoted to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Guan Yin was declared the LGBT Forum’s reigning deity. 

“While this was the first LGBT session at Salzburg, LGBT history is woven into the palace’s long history,” session chair Klaus Müller noted, citing not only the transgender deity, but Reinhardt guests like the film star Marlene Dietrich who was bisexual, as was Seminar founding faculty member Margaret Mead. “Mattie” Matthiessen’s homosexuality was, Müller says, a “public secret.” Gay composers, ranging from Tchaikovsky to John Cage, are regularly performed at Schloss concerts. A bust of Antinous, Roman Emperor Hadrian’s young lover, graces a ground floor niche. “On more than one level, this session felt like coming home,” Müller says. An overarching mission from the very beginning of the Seminar was to make all Fellows and faculty feel “at home”—regardless of the person’s background or identity.

“When a displaced person comes to Leopoldskron he is asked to forget that he is a DP, coming perhaps from Lithuania,” Seminar cofounder Dick Campbell wrote in January 1948, “and he is accepted simply as the individual he is.” At the time, the Schloss was serving as a refuge for displaced students between the Seminar’s own sessions. The Schloss housed refugees again in 2016 when two Fellows of the LGBT Forum sought asylum after a program, citing threats to their lives back home in Ethiopia due to their activism. Salzburg Global Seminar staff and Fellows alike helped Noël Iglessias and Faris Cuchi Gezahegn as they rebuilt their lives in a new country. Speaking six months later at the fifth session of the LGBT Forum, “Home: Safety, Wellness, and Belonging,” Gezahegn reflected on their struggle, “We are in a healing process, and we feel safe and loved. But this is still a rollercoaster of feelings as we build a new home.” Finding refuge and safety at Schloss Leopoldskron most recently have been Ukrainian Fellows displaced by the Russian invasion of their country. After contacting Salzburg Global Fellows in the war-torn country and issuing notices across its social media accounts days after the first incursions of Russian tanks, Schloss Leopoldskron became a new, safe home for two dozen Ukrainians, including Fellows with their parents, children, and grandparents fleeing the war. Many of them fled by car, some by train, traveling for days with little more than the clothes on their backs to reach safety, leaving behind their homes, husbands, fathers, brothers, family members, and friends.

Like many organizations, Salzburg Global was forced to grapple with how to handle its response, not only in help to the victims but also in the face of the perpetrators of the war. Would Salzburg Global continue to allow Russians to participate in its programs? With surprisingly little debate, the decision among staff was unanimous: yes—though not as representatives of their government or country, but as individuals independent of their nationality and who share in Salzburg Global’s mission of challenging current and future leaders to shape a better world. As an institution founded to bridge divides between former enemies post-World War Two, and just as during the Cold War and throughout the various conflicts in the Middle East, Fellows from across cultural, national, racial, political and even warring divides continue to find Salzburg Global Seminar and Schloss Leopoldskron not only a safe space of refuge but also a brave space for dialogue.
 

*  Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. We are using this term as it is currently widely used in human rights conversations on sexual orientation and gender identity in many parts of the world, and we would wish it to be read as inclusive of other cultural concepts, contemporary or historical, to express sexuality and gender, intersex and gender non-conforming identities.

The lakeside windows of the Schloss Gallery provide an unobstructed view of Lake Leopoldskron, beyond which lies a belt of green forest and the Untersberg and the stunning vista of the snowcapped Alps. When light falls just right on the Weiher, you can still see just below the water’s surface the dark circumference of the crater blasted by one of the three 500lb bombs back in February 1945. It is a room with two views: from the cityside windows there rises the imposing Hohensalzburg Fortress.

The Gallery once housed one of the finest portrait collections in central Europe. These were not Edmund Wilson’s “bogus” portraits. An inventory lists Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, all of which were sold off in the 19th century. Max Reinhardt hung the vacant walls with painted tableau. The Salzburg Seminar filled the space with dozens of army cots. Former allies and enemies were thrown together in one cavernous space. A scrabble of Danes, French, Hungarians, Americans, Czechs, Germans, Finns, Italians, Norwegians, Yugoslavs. “The wounds of the recent war have healed sufficiently so that there was no international incident among the students,” a 1949 Fellow recalled. But tensions stirred. “Typical was the comment of one student toward another from a former enemy country,” he wrote. “‘I beg to take issue with Mr. ____, my friend and, I might add, my roommate.’ This introduction brought down the house since the two of them shared a dormitory room with 38 others!” 

Herbert Gleason was a Harvard student in those early years. As one of five underclassmen selected to be an administrator at the Session 3 and then a long-serving board member, faculty chair, Fellow and friend until his death in 2013, he inherited the Heller mantel and became known as “the fourth founder.” A bronze bust preserves his memory outside Fellows Hall in the Meierhof, the space where generations of Fellows and faculty have gathered for lectures and debates. Gleason always insisted that the tensions not be glossed. “There is too much willingness to affirm lightheartedly that we are all friends, neighbors and allies, without noticing the deep chasm which divides us—particularly the Germans—from everyone else,” Gleason wrote in an early memo to the Board. “It seems to me that the real value of the Seminar lies in confronting these very profound disagreements, talking them out and possibility eliminating them.” He cautioned that “we will simply be wasting our time if we go gliding along” at the “level of polite conversation.” The Gleason injunction was imbedded in the Salzburg Global maxim: be tough on the issues, but kind to one another. 

In the 1950s, the Schloss Gallery was cleared of cots, and in the early 2000s refitted to hold plenary meetings. The room with two views became a room with a great many views, which frequently moved beyond “polite conversation” and into the some of the most challenging issues of the day. During one particularly contentious board meeting, Salzburg Global’s LGBT Forum was launched here, as was its work on global citizenships and historical justice. The architect of the Oslo Accords, Ron Pundak, joined 30 Palestinians and Israelis in the Schloss Gallery to explore the potential for historical reconciliation in the Middle East. Hrant Dink joined a meeting of Turks and Armenians to seek a path toward reconciliation. Dink was gunned down in Istanbul two years later. General Olesegun Obasanjo, the first African military ruler to relinquish power voluntarily, framed his vision of an increasingly democratic future for his continent in this room. He was subsequently arrested and imprisoned, then released and twice elected president of Nigeria, and went on to serve as chair of the African Union. 

Today, the former portrait-gallery-cum-dormitory-cum-conference-room has been renovated and updated. Two large circular LED lights, tracing similar circumference to the bomb crater shadow in the lake, illuminate the space where chandeliers once hung, casting a calming ambient light over the current and future leaders who gather and are challenged to “to shape a better world.” The discussions, about climate change, immigration, healthcare, digital technologies, the future of democracy are sometimes ambitions and visionary, some would say quixotic, illusory, but as the shadowed crater just below the Weiher surface reminds us, so too were the ambitions of our founders back in 1947 when they envisioned a unified and peaceful union of states on their war-ravaged patch of our world.