Monday, February 2, 1998, 10:30 pm

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.”