Thursday, June 26, 1969

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 Centuries-old means of production—factories, workshops, skilled artisans—are superseded by “new science-based industries” that shift economies “from manufacturing to services.”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.