Wednesday, July 15, 2022

The lakeside windows of the Schloss Gallery provide an unobstructed view of Lake Leopoldskron, beyond which lies a belt of green forest and the Untersberg and the stunning vista of the snowcapped Alps. When light falls just right on the Weiher, you can still see just below the water’s surface the dark circumference of the crater blasted by one of the three 500lb bombs back in February 1945. It is a room with two views: from the cityside windows there rises the imposing Hohensalzburg Fortress.

The Gallery once housed one of the finest portrait collections in central Europe. These were not Edmund Wilson’s “bogus” portraits. An inventory lists Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, all of which were sold off in the 19th century. Max Reinhardt hung the vacant walls with painted tableau. The Salzburg Seminar filled the space with dozens of army cots. Former allies and enemies were thrown together in one cavernous space. A scrabble of Danes, French, Hungarians, Americans, Czechs, Germans, Finns, Italians, Norwegians, Yugoslavs. “The wounds of the recent war have healed sufficiently so that there was no international incident among the students,” a 1949 Fellow recalled. But tensions stirred. “Typical was the comment of one student toward another from a former enemy country,” he wrote. “‘I beg to take issue with Mr. ____, my friend and, I might add, my roommate.’ This introduction brought down the house since the two of them shared a dormitory room with 38 others!” 

Herbert Gleason was a Harvard student in those early years. As one of five underclassmen selected to be an administrator at the Session 3 and then a long-serving board member, faculty chair, Fellow and friend until his death in 2013, he inherited the Heller mantel and became known as “the fourth founder.” A bronze bust preserves his memory outside Fellows Hall in the Meierhof, the space where generations of Fellows and faculty have gathered for lectures and debates. Gleason always insisted that the tensions not be glossed. “There is too much willingness to affirm lightheartedly that we are all friends, neighbors and allies, without noticing the deep chasm which divides us—particularly the Germans—from everyone else,” Gleason wrote in an early memo to the Board. “It seems to me that the real value of the Seminar lies in confronting these very profound disagreements, talking them out and possibility eliminating them.” He cautioned that “we will simply be wasting our time if we go gliding along” at the “level of polite conversation.” The Gleason injunction was imbedded in the Salzburg Global maxim: be tough on the issues, but kind to one another. 

In the 1950s, the Schloss Gallery was cleared of cots, and in the early 2000s refitted to hold plenary meetings. The room with two views became a room with a great many views, which frequently moved beyond “polite conversation” and into the some of the most challenging issues of the day. During one particularly contentious board meeting, Salzburg Global’s LGBT Forum was launched here, as was its work on global citizenships and historical justice. The architect of the Oslo Accords, Ron Pundak, joined 30 Palestinians and Israelis in the Schloss Gallery to explore the potential for historical reconciliation in the Middle East. Hrant Dink joined a meeting of Turks and Armenians to seek a path toward reconciliation. Dink was gunned down in Istanbul two years later. General Olesegun Obasanjo, the first African military ruler to relinquish power voluntarily, framed his vision of an increasingly democratic future for his continent in this room. He was subsequently arrested and imprisoned, then released and twice elected president of Nigeria, and went on to serve as chair of the African Union. 

Today, the former portrait-gallery-cum-dormitory-cum-conference-room has been renovated and updated. Two large circular LED lights, tracing similar circumference to the bomb crater shadow in the lake, illuminate the space where chandeliers once hung, casting a calming ambient light over the current and future leaders who gather and are challenged to “to shape a better world.” The discussions, about climate change, immigration, healthcare, digital technologies, the future of democracy are sometimes ambitions and visionary, some would say quixotic, illusory, but as the shadowed crater just below the Weiher surface reminds us, so too were the ambitions of our founders back in 1947 when they envisioned a unified and peaceful union of states on their war-ravaged patch of our world.