Salzburg Seminar Thriving On Zeal in Wartorn Austria

Halsburg, August 10

Here is the shadow of the Austrian Alps a small but significant miracle has taken place. Armed only with a fantastic idea and an enormous store of energy, a few determined Harvard students have built as institution whose remarkable success this first year looks to be only the prelude to future growth and importance.

The Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization has come a long way since it was first bruited about Cambridge last March, and it has fought that way through obstacles which would have beaten most planners into mute submission. Lack of food, unobtainable military permits, money troubles, and countless smaller difficulties plagued the seminar plan from the start; as they say themselves, those who carried the load sometimes still cannot believe they are here.

Students From 16 Nations

What has come of all the effort is a unique experiment in international education, a school in which students from 16 nations have come together to learn as much as they can about America and American life in six weeks. An outsider visiting the school needs only a short time to discover how unusual it is in its mutual enthusiasm, the close relationship between its faculty and students, and the tremendously effective informality of its educational method.

The goal of the six weeks is to give each one of the 100 European students--82 men and 18 girls--a glimpse of American culture. The opportunities of reaching that goal are many. Every day there are three or four lectures on various topics by outstanding men, and every student also works in a series of seminars in the field of his choice.

Four Harvard Professors

Those fields--and the men in charge of them--present a rich choice to the students. F. O. Matthiessen, professor of History and Literature, and critic Alfred Kazin are giving courses on American literature; Wassily Leontief, professor of Economics, and Walt W. Rostow of Oxford are lecturing on economics and economic politics; Miss Elspeth Davies of Sarah Lawrence, Neal A. McDonald of the New Jersey College for Women, and Benjamin F. Wright, professor of Government, are in charge of the government field; James Johnson Sweeney, former director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, is lecturing on various phases of American art and architecture; anthropologist Margaret Mead is handling the field of sociology; and Richard Schlatter of Rutgers is giving a course on American historians.

Library Crowded

So good is the material presented in these various fields that the library-turned-lecture-room is almost always filled. Students go to all the lectures regardless of their special field. Harvard people here as administrators find themselves drawn to many of the lectures, too, and the faculty men are taking advantage of their unusual opportunity to take courses given by their colleagues.

The library is by no means what the planners would have liked, because of financial and material shortages, but the seminar has managed to acquire enough copies of significant works to make a go of it. Familiar titles are among them; "Walden," "Moby Dick," "U.S. Foreign Policy," "The Rise of American Civilization," "Main Currents in American Thought," "The Frontier in American History," "Middletown," Economic Policy and Full Employment."

Underlying the whole academic effort is a thirst for knowledge. Just the use of English as the medium for all communication presents a challenge. Students read into the small hours--and not to cram for examinations, for the only academic hurdles are voluntary papers suggested by their seminar leaders.

Poland, Bulgaria, Absent

These students come from all the western nations: Belgium, Holland, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and Greece--and from others outside the Marshall Plan: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Finland, and Republican Spain. Six Displaced Persons complete the roster, which was to have included Poland and Bulgaria, too, until last-minute difficulties kept their students away.

Faculty and students and administrators live and eat and study in Leopoldskron, an amazing castle whose life Salzburgians say only the arrival of the Seminar saved. Built in 1740 by Archbishop Firmian for his nephew, it became the property during the 'twenties of Germany's famous producer, Max Reinhardt. After the establishment of the Salzburg Festival as a yearly event, Leopoldskron became the center of planning for the festivals and, as Reinhardt's home, the cultural beacon of the city. Reinhardt fled to America before the Nazis, who used the castle for themselves, and with Reinhardt's subsequent death and the war's-end decay, Leopoldskron had lost its reason for existence.

Now it is humming with life once more. On its upper floors dormitories have been set up, shower rooms moved in bodily. A staff of 25 cleans and cooks, as academic affairs cram every old corner during the day.

Just how all this came to pass is where the miracle comes in. It started during Harvard's food relief drive, when Clemens Heller 2G, had the idea that Harvard might be able to do more than send food to Europe. He thought originally of a small group of faculty men coming to Salzburg during the festival season to talk about the United States to European students, but the idea grew as he outlined it to the International Student Service, a world organization which had been considering a plan for a rest home for European students.

This is the first of two articles on the Salzburg Seminar written by J. Anthony Lewis '48, the CRIMSON'S Managing Editor who is travelling through Europe. A second installment will appear next week.