I had heard about the Salzburg Seminar long before I was invited to lead one of its sessions. It was, I knew, a highly respected program that brought together scholars, business and civic leaders, and public figures from around the world. I also knew it was held in the Schloss Leopoldskron, an elegant, 18th-century castle in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, where The Sound of Music was filmed. But until a couple of months ago, that was all I knew.
The Salzburg Seminar, founded in 1947, sponsors about two dozen sessions a year. Some deal with topics of public interest, such as aging, the arts, or the judicial system. Others focus on the changing role of the university, and still others on scholarly questions. Anywhere from 20 to 60 people may attend a session -- some apply, others are invited.
The program initially focused on American studies, on the assumption that close ties to the United States could help promote the recovery of Europe in the aftermath of World War II. It began when three Harvard University undergraduates came up with an idea: Perhaps a dialogue among people of different political convictions, from different countries, might help heal the wounds of war. With funds from the Harvard Student Council, the first session included 112 Europeans, who gathered for six weeks at the Schloss. Some were concentration-camp survivors; others had served in the German military. In Salzburg, they had to learn to speak to one another.
The founders intended the program to be a one-time affair, but the anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of the leaders of that first meeting, urged that it keep going. It combined a “sense of distance from real life,” she observed, with a “sense of the importance of the traditions of civilization.” Another seminar was held in 1948, and still another in 1949, and so a continuing program took hold. Today, the seminar is financed by attendance fees, often paid by public or private sources within a participant’s country, or by foundation grants.
I went to Salzburg to help lead a session on American immigration. Immigration is one of those issues that is a fundamental part of the American past and a source of intense political and social concern today. As we debate affirmative action and argue over bilingual education, we return again and again to issues that have concerned us for hundreds of years: Should we promote assimilation of new arrivals? How can we help them maintain their heritage?
I wondered at the outset about the focus on immigration to the United States alone. In an era when scholars look to cross-cultural connections to help clarify national issues, I feared we might be establishing too narrow a framework for analysis. I needn’t have worried: With 24 participants from 18 countries, conversation soon broadened beyond the United States. Exchanges about what was happening in India, Mexico, and Russia, and about the experience of immigrants to America from those lands, highlighted why such dialogue is so important.
As one of three faculty members for the seminar, I was fortunate in my colleagues. Orm Overland is a professor of English at the University of Bergen in Norway and a well-known authority on Scandinavian immigration to America. Jay Blair is an American who has taught American literature -- including immigration literature -- at the University of Geneva in Switzerland for the past 30 years. Those who attended, most of them university teachers, came from such countries as Algeria, the Czech Republic, India, Israel, Italy, Mexico, the Republic of Macedonia, Russia, and Tunisia.
Our Israeli participant had overseen the absorption of Russian immigrants into his country in recent years, and was now working for a private organization dealing with immigration issues. That gave him a firsthand perspective. His reflections on the effort to teach Russian immigrants Hebrew as quickly as possible, for example, illuminated the complexity of the process of integrating new arrivals into a society very different from their place of origin. He spoke of how hard it was for people to immerse themselves in a new language, to accommodate themselves to a more open, more technologically savvy culture in Israel than they had been used to in Russia, to take jobs that were sometimes very different from what they had done before.
As we talked about multiculturalism in the United States today, the Algerian attendee helped us put often-prosaic debates over national history standards and core curricula in perspective. She has watched the ruling party in her country attempt to impose cultural uniformity on its citizens, and pointed out that the conflict in the United States over multiculturalism pales in comparison with what is happening in North Africa. (She also expressed her relief that some constraints in Algeria seem to be lessening today -- something that many of us had not realized.)
A professor from the Czech Republic had herself been an immigrant to America, where she did her doctoral work. She spoke movingly -- and read a poem she had written -- about trying to adjust to a new country, and about the problems, with the end of the Cold War, of returning home. She spoke of warring feelings: of the day-to-day joy in the familiarity of being home, and the sadness at the shortage of professional resources. She said she was trying to decide whether to stay in her homeland for good. Her experience mirrored that of those immigrants to the United States who had gone back and forth between their old countries and the new.
The dialogue between a woman from Mexico and an American woman of Latina background helped us reflect on the influx of Latin Americans to the United States over the past few decades. Much more so than our Mexican participant, the American was caught in the midst of two cultures -- like so many immigrants of the past. She described the problems of growing up on the border between identities: of living, working, and going to school with Americans, while still maintaining her love of speaking Spanish. Later, still in e-mail contact after the seminar, she told us of her decision to go to Central America to help hurricane victims, a decision made out of a sense of solidarity with Latino people.
Our group, like most, I assume, took a while to come together. There was some formality at the start, perhaps caused by the imposing Schloss, perhaps by the diversity of the group. Some of the participants had not attended such gatherings before, and some came from countries that had been squabbling in recent years. Two members of our group -- one from Greece, the other from Macedonia -- insisted on calling particular locations in their part of the world by different names, regardless of new political boundaries that all parties are supposed to observe. There were other people (Russians and Czechs, for instance) who came from countries that had been, at the very least, unfriendly toward one another in the not-too-distant past.
In our first lectures and discussions, we sounded one another out, took the measure of our peers, and ventured observations on an intellectual level. But, as in the opening sessions of a university class, we stopped there, unsure about going further until we felt comfortable letting our defenses down.
Orm, Jay, and I delivered opening lectures that tried to provide a historical and literary background on which we could all build. I sketched immigration in its broadest perspective, speaking about the waves of immigration to the United States. Orm talked about immigrant literature, reflecting on how immigrants from a variety of cultures have described their experiences. And Jay addressed issues of assimilation, tracing the concept of the melting pot in its various incarnations, and concluding with questions about multiculturalism today. Has the nature of the assimilation process changed? Do people today retain more, or less, of their cultural heritage?
By the end of the first day, we had all begun to relax. Questions became a bit less formal. Discussions became more expansive. We found that technology helped break the ice. Hoping to provide participants with materials that are appearing with increasing frequency on the World-Wide Web, we sat them down at computer keyboards. Staff members from the seminar helped us show novices how to use e-mail, but it took my wife, Sara, a librarian by profession, to make the search process less intimidating even for those of us who had done it before.
Our common task was the development of several units for classroom use that could help participants further explore the themes of the seminar once they returned home. To that end, we broke into groups and began to search the Web. As we worked late into the night, moving from one computer to another, grumbling when we failed to find what we wanted, we got to know each other better, developing an almost-giddy sense of cohesion and camaraderie. (See http://www.salsem.ac.at/csacl/progs/ASC22/group1/index.htm for an example of a Web site created by one group of participants.)
As the seminar unfolded and we relaxed with one another, our reflections became more personal. On the final day, in a panel on the general theme of multiculturalism, Jay began by sketching his own background -- one side of his family had come from Northern Ireland, the other from France -- and the difficulties that some of his relatives had had gaining title to land they thought they had bought, and getting the education that was part of the American dream. Acknowledging later that he had never before spoken publicly about those things, Jay added an intensely human dimension to the patterns we had been describing for the past several days.
When it was my turn, I talked about the experience of growing up Jewish in America -- this after we had watched the film Hester Street together -- and described an ambivalence toward Judaism that was part of both my life and American culture in the 1950s and 1960s, an ambivalence that had taken me decades to overcome. I had written about this in an essay a few years before, but had never had an intimate discussion about it, and certainly not with such a diverse group. At the end of the session, our Mexican participant, who had been one of the most vocal, confided to me that her husband is Jewish, and shared for the first time her questions about how to blend their two traditions.
That kind of questioning is what the Salzburg Seminar fosters so well: It encourages people to share their views and values with others from around the world. In such a beautiful setting, with the foothills of the Alps rising just beyond the lake, it somehow seems easier than it does at a university back home to talk about issues of real importance.
Allan M. Winkler is a professor of history at Miami University in Ohio.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: B8