Sunday, June 2, 2013, 6:00 pm

“In my own life, there have been many unexpected encounters and discoveries,” Saskia Wieringa writes in a blog post. “One such unexpected encounter was seeing a statue of transgender goddess Guan Yin again at my first gathering of the Salzburg Global LGBT* Forum that took place in the Schloss that once belonged to theater director Max Reinhardt.” The Dutch sociologist had joined nearly 60 Fellows from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas for the first annual program devoted to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. Guan Yin was declared the LGBT Forum’s reigning deity. 

“While this was the first LGBT session at Salzburg, LGBT history is woven into the palace’s long history,” session chair Klaus Müller noted, citing not only the transgender deity, but Reinhardt guests like the film star Marlene Dietrich who was bisexual, as was Seminar founding faculty member Margaret Mead. “Mattie” Matthiessen’s homosexuality was, Müller says, a “public secret.” Gay composers, ranging from Tchaikovsky to John Cage, are regularly performed at Schloss concerts. A bust of Antinous, Roman Emperor Hadrian’s young lover, graces a ground floor niche. “On more than one level, this session felt like coming home,” Müller says. An overarching mission from the very beginning of the Seminar was to make all Fellows and faculty feel “at home”—regardless of the person’s background or identity.

“When a displaced person comes to Leopoldskron he is asked to forget that he is a DP, coming perhaps from Lithuania,” Seminar cofounder Dick Campbell wrote in January 1948, “and he is accepted simply as the individual he is.” At the time, the Schloss was serving as a refuge for displaced students between the Seminar’s own sessions. The Schloss housed refugees again in 2016 when two Fellows of the LGBT Forum sought asylum after a program, citing threats to their lives back home in Ethiopia due to their activism. Salzburg Global Seminar staff and Fellows alike helped Noël Iglessias and Faris Cuchi Gezahegn as they rebuilt their lives in a new country. Speaking six months later at the fifth session of the LGBT Forum, “Home: Safety, Wellness, and Belonging,” Gezahegn reflected on their struggle, “We are in a healing process, and we feel safe and loved. But this is still a rollercoaster of feelings as we build a new home.” Finding refuge and safety at Schloss Leopoldskron most recently have been Ukrainian Fellows displaced by the Russian invasion of their country. After contacting Salzburg Global Fellows in the war-torn country and issuing notices across its social media accounts days after the first incursions of Russian tanks, Schloss Leopoldskron became a new, safe home for two dozen Ukrainians, including Fellows with their parents, children, and grandparents fleeing the war. Many of them fled by car, some by train, traveling for days with little more than the clothes on their backs to reach safety, leaving behind their homes, husbands, fathers, brothers, family members, and friends.

Like many organizations, Salzburg Global was forced to grapple with how to handle its response, not only in help to the victims but also in the face of the perpetrators of the war. Would Salzburg Global continue to allow Russians to participate in its programs? With surprisingly little debate, the decision among staff was unanimous: yes—though not as representatives of their government or country, but as individuals independent of their nationality and who share in Salzburg Global’s mission of challenging current and future leaders to shape a better world. As an institution founded to bridge divides between former enemies post-World War Two, and just as during the Cold War and throughout the various conflicts in the Middle East, Fellows from across cultural, national, racial, political and even warring divides continue to find Salzburg Global Seminar and Schloss Leopoldskron not only a safe space of refuge but also a brave space for dialogue.

*  Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. We are using this term as it is currently widely used in human rights conversations on sexual orientation and gender identity in many parts of the world, and we would wish it to be read as inclusive of other cultural concepts, contemporary or historical, to express sexuality and gender, intersex and gender non-conforming identities.