The Salzburg Seminar

A picturesque 18th century Austrian castle, called Leopoldskron, once the traditional palace of the archbishopric of Salzburg, has become the first teaching center in Europe for advanced study of American civilization. One of the few real attempts ever made to unite Americans and Europeans culturally, the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies has expanded far beyond the original hopes of its founder, Clemens Heller '45.

In the early post-war years, Heller and a friend of his, Richard D. Campbell, Jr.'48, had pushed the idea of an American seminar in Europe. When the widow of the famed German producer, Max Rinehart, offered to donate Leopoldskron to them, they were able to enlist the support of such influential figures as ex-President Conant, and received the sponsorship of the Student Council and the International Student Service. But funds were still difficult to raise. Heller and the other Americans sweated out the first session in the summer of 1947. The war in Europe had ended only two years before, and national hatreds were still intense. Heller made a bold decision. He put students who had so recently fought against each other in the dormitories together. In the course of the summer an ex-Rommel staff officer formed a close friendship with a German communist, while down the hall a young Dane who had been beaten senseless by the Nazis confessed to an American, "For the first time I can talk to a German or an Austrian as a human being."

Heller returned to Harvard with an enthusiastic recommendation that the Seminar be continued for at round cultural center with a budget of over $100,000 a year. Now, the Rockefeller Foundation and two similar groups contribute 50 percent; the other half is dependent upon contributions from private individuals in the United States and student groups at Harvard, Smith, Radcliffe, and Vassar. Phillips Brooks House, through it Combined Charities Drive, supports the Seminar at Harvard.

The faculty at Leopoldskron, in addition to a small group of Europeans, consists mainly of professors from more than three dozen American colleges and universities. Such notable scholars as sociologist Margaret Mead and University Professor Zechariah Chafee, Jr., serve without pay to offer Europeans one of their few opportunities to observe American culture first hand.

The Seminar is conducted on a graduate school level, offering courses on American politics, literature, law and sociology to 350 students from thirteen European nations. The school year is divided into six weeks, and gradual additions to the curriculum are made from year to year. Last year, for instance, Chafee and four other professors from the Law School initiated the session devoted to American Legal Though and Institutions.

The Europeans are grateful not only for the chance to have direct contact with Americans, but also to meet other Europeans. As one Stockholm youth put it, "Perhaps Americans believe that people from the different Europeans countries know each other well. At least for me... the knowledge of other European countries outside Scandinavia before the Seminar was very much less."

This personal contact, in the opinion of many American observers, may well be the most valuable part of the Seminar. The United States spends four billion dollars a year on military and economic foreign aid. But as America's former Austrian ambassador, Walter J. Donnelly, has admitted, this type of aid and the fragments of American culture which drift across the Atlantic are "poor substitutes for living and studying together." ROBERT L. SAXR