April 18-30, 1993

“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.