Not by Bread Alone

Harvard had sent $40,000 worth of food to Europe's starving students. But, said Austrian-born Harvardman Clemens Ludwig Heller, "It's about time we gave them food for their minds." With the help of the faculty and student council, he started raising money (from students, educators, friends) to found a special summer seminar at Salzburg, Austria--for Europeans only. From U.S. colleges and universities he picked a dozen top educators to teach. He chose erudite Francis Otto Matthiessen (American Renaissance) to teach U.S. literature, Italian-born Historian Gaetano Salvemini to teach U.S. history, Anthropologist Margaret Mead for sociology, and James Johnson Sweeney, onetime director of painting and sculpture at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, for U.S. art.

In early spring, Heller hired famed Leopoldskron Castle, once the home of Producer Max Reinhardt. The windows, shattered by a U.S. bomb, were unboarded and mended, the huge rooms refurbished; blackboards and lecture platforms were set up in the glittering corridors where Max Reinhardt once entertained. By July, the school was ready to open.

At first, there was bitter squabbling among the school's 100 students. Dutchmen and Danes balked at the idea of sharing rooms with Austrians and Germans. The teachers expected a certain sullen resistance to lectures on U.S. life and letters (chiefly Emerson and Hawthorne, Henry James and Howells, Hemingway and O'Neill), but the students, mostly teachers themselves, were eager to learn. They spent the mornings avidly taking notes at lectures. They spent the afternoons questioning and discussing at seminars. In the evenings, they gathered in the castle garden for reading and conversation.

Salzburg was no house party. Few students had had time even to attend the music festival. The professors, who receive no salary (some of them even paid their own traveling expenses), often had to get up at 4 a.m. to prepare the day's work.

But by last week the teachers had decided that it was worth it. Next summer, they thought, they might try the experiment again. They even had reason to hope that the nations which had sent no students--Russia, Rumania, Poland, Yugoslavia--might be willing (and able) to fold back the iron curtain and try it too.

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