July 15, 1947, 11:00 am

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.