Friday, August 20, 1989, 9:00 am

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.