Pictures from an Institution
The founding Americanist institution in postwar Europe took place in a baroque, bomb-damaged castle and had only the tenuous approval of the US military government in Austria. Leopoldskron Castle had been owned by the theater impresario Max Reinhardt before the Nazis expropriated it. The Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, a transnational collaboration of student organizations and Christian relief agencies, repurposed the castle in 1947 to bring American thought and art to occupied Europe. Scholars, novelists, and poets carried the American word abroad and, in turn, were shaped by their encounters in the ruins. This chapter is the story of that institution’s early years, perched between the imaginary geography of Mitteleuropa and the political geography of the Cold War. The Seminar preceded the Marshall Plan, and its previously unexplored archives yield dramas of denazification, displacement, and the bifurcation of Europe.