An Italian architect, a Romanian researcher, an Austrian artist and a French musician walk into a palace. No, it’s not the start of a bad joke but the arrival of the latest Salzburg cohort of Young Cultural Innovators at Schloss Leopoldskron.

“None were born in Salzburg, but they have all since made it their home, setting up shop in one of Europe’s cultural capitals. While attending the latest Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Innovators, the newly inaugurated members of the “Salzburg YCI Hub” shared their impressions of the city.

Salzburg “is a very rich city,” says Irina Paraschivoiu, who previously worked as a curator for Bucharest’s ‘Capital of Culture’ bid in her homeland of Romania before joining the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg. “It has a very rich history that you can feel everywhere you go, whether it is a cultural event or just having a walk.”

Travel guide Lonely Planet describes Salzburg as “the stuff of fairytales.” A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997, it is flocked to by tourists throughout the year. Top attractions include the Festung Hohensalzburg, Schloss Mirabell, and Mozart’s birthplace – to name but a few. Does that history overshadow the newer things happening in the area? Perhaps. Paraschivoiu says, “I think, for sure, [Salzburg] would benefit from having more space for innovation and for young people to express themselves and be part of the cultural scene.”

Stefano Mori shares a similar view. Mori, an architect from Italy, moved to Salzburg to learn about “earth architecture,” which involves building with natural materials. He says, “Everyone has an image of the city, a certain expectation of the city and that is why this city, I think, is conservative... When you have something so strong from a cultural point, you are always a bit afraid of losing it or changing it too much and in the end losing it.

“It is actually a very common behavior – when you have something valuable and you know the value already, you are not going to experiment or change it because you always have the fear of losing what you have for something you are not sure of.”

But this conservative mindset could be beginning to change, according to Katharina Kapsamer, a visual artist and cultural manager. Kapsamer is the only new Salzburg YCI born in Austria. She is now based between Salzburg and Vienna. She says, “Salzburg is actually buzzing with creative people, especially the ones who are younger and still pursuing studies, and they are very eager to collaborate.”

The city is full of dancers, writers, authors, theater people, and visual artists. Kapsamer says several cultural initiatives are working to find more space in the city for creation, which means the spotlight is no longer just on classical music. However, Kapsamer admits, “In a city that is so rich in history and cultural heritage, it is quite difficult to really get there... You feel like if you really want to make [it] your own, you kind of have to take it from someone else.”

One person who is trying to make the situation easier is Matthias Leboucher, co-founder of the New Art and Music Ensemble Salzburg (NAMES). Leboucher, from France, is working to create a space for new art forms. He came to Salzburg to study for his Master’s degree in composition. While the city is more familiar with classical compositions, Leboucher’s forte is contemporary music. He believes Salzburg is a good city for the arts “in general,” but he hopes to encourage Salzburgers to experience the joys of modern music as well.

Leboucher says, “I hope to create concerts in this field of music that move people, that really bring people and a larger audience and that people take a bit more risk for things they don’t know.”

The Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Innovators was launched in 2014 to empower rising talents in the creative sector to drive social, economic and urban change. The global network of 250 competitively-selected change-makers is based in 22 “hub” communities across six continents.

See more of Salzburg’s Young Cultural Innovators online: SalzburgGlobal.org/go/yci/network

Her namesake aunt was killed by the Nazis at the age of 16. Her father and uncle survived the fate of the camps thanks to being included on Oskar Schindler’s now Hollywood-famous list. When decades later, historian and daughter of Holocaust survivors Avital “Tali” Helen Nates moved from Israel to apartheid South Africa to marry her husband, his activism against apartheid helped her realize that “through using one history, you can make a huge difference about another.”

For Nates, that one history was her family’s, and founding the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, one of the largest of its kind in Africa, was one step towards making a difference – and she’s taken many more since.

“If you think about Oskar Schindler, he was a member of the Nazi party, not ideologically but opportunistically, because by being a member of the party, he could do business,” reflects Charles Ehrlich, a program director at Salzburg Global Seminar, which has run Holocaust education and genocide prevention programs since 2010 with the support, among others, of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria. “He had no moral problem with stealing a Jewish factory, stealing a Jewish apartment to live in, enslaving a thousand Jewish workers. Initially, when his Jewish slaves are taken off to Auschwitz, he goes to get them because… he needs his slaves back. But he is convinced that they are actually human. And once he sees them as human beings, rescues them… He doesn’t have to be a good person. He is a flawed human being. There is nothing special about Oskar Schindler. But he saves a thousand people,” adds Ehrlich.

South Africa’s first free elections on April 27, 1994 marked the end of nearly five decades of institutionalized racial segregation. Tali and her family were among the euphoric Joburgers who thronged the streets. Meanwhile, three and a half hours away by plane, genocide had already started in Rwanda.         

Three weeks earlier, Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana had been assassinated, and the power vacuum gave rise to a 100-day killing spree, long orchestrated by the Hutu political elite to wipe out the Tutsi and Twa minorities. Eighteen-year-old Freddy Mutanguha was there. So was his family.

“I lost my parents and my four sisters,” he recounted, on the verge of tears, while receiving the Peace, Justice and Security award in 2016. “I have seen my mother before she dies, and heard the last word from her. She’s told me ‘Go and be a man.’ ‘Be a man’ in my culture is [an] encouragement. She said, ‘If you survive, be a man.’”

Mutanguha took those last words very seriously. As the orphan head of his household, Freddy worked his way through school to become a leading advocate for peace and human rights education. Today, he is the director of the Kigali Genocide Memorial and regional director for East Africa at the Aegis Trust.

Rather than hatred and resentment, he opted for the path of reconciliation.

“Forgiving is difficult, but it’s not impossible because the few genocide survivors can’t develop Rwanda by themselves. We all need to combine our energy to develop the country. But I think it’s better for those who committed the crimes to start asking for forgiveness. They should come to us to talk about it. Let’s say if it’s a Hutu who killed, he should come and say, ‘I killed people and I am really sorry.’ They should show us that they are truly sorry. Then things could proceed,” Mutanguha reflects in his testimony for the book We Survived, a poignant collection of survival stories from the Rwandan genocide.  

Unlike Freddy, fellow Rwandan Aloys Mahwa and his family were not in the country when the killings started. They were just 10 minutes over the border in neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC). Mahwa and his immediate family may have escaped the massacre, but when they returned to their country as soon as it was deemed safe, they found his extended family had not been so lucky.

“From Congo we could watch and see what was happening,” remembers the former executive director at the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center in Kigali and now project director of the Living Peace Project, operating across DRC, Rwanda and Burundi. “My father lost almost 80 percent of his brothers and sisters. It was a very huge family of ten children. And also, I lost aunts, nephews and cousins.”    

Mahwa, Mutanguha and Nates may have had different experiences, but they share a common purpose – a life devoted to preventing the suffering they and their families endured from happening ever again. When the trio, along with Richard Freedman, then director of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, came together in Salzburg in 2016, they put this shared belief into practice and devised what they have now called the Change Makers Program (CMP). “How can we use history to actually empower people to reflect on their own history in all ways?” was the question that kicked off this initiative.

Offered as an extra-curricular activity for high school students and their teachers, CMP gives teenagers the necessary skills to challenge extremist ideas by confronting past atrocities. The initial pilot focused on three main case studies: the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, and apartheid in South Africa.  

“One of the most important components was to look at individual stories and the choices people made in those times. So not only talking about the perpetrators and victims but also bystanders, also rescuers, upstanders, in the case of Rwanda, the international community: where was the world? So really looking deeply into human behaving [at] those times and choices the people – individuals and groups – made,” explained Nates in an interview with the BBC World Service shortly after the launch of the pilot project.

That was nearly three years ago and now, after proving fruitful in South Africa and Rwanda, the initiative has spread to 10 more African countries, with the hope to grow to 13 countries by the end of 2019 if funding permits.

“Young people, they are drawn into mass atrocities, into violence,” Mutanguha fears. For this generation, “the genocide seems to be a past, as history. But it’s really alive. Even today you can see the skulls, you can see the consequences. People are really traumatized… So, we have to tell them: ‘Other people made wrong action. How can you change it? How can you change Rwanda to be a very good story to tell instead of telling the story of genocide?’”

As well as learning about their own and other countries’ troubled pasts, CMP’s young leaders have been inspired to think of projects for a brighter future for their communities. “It really changed my point of view. It really taught me a lot,” says Nigerian student Akachukwu Joseph Nyame. “It taught me how to take up responsibility, and if something wrong is going on in the environment we should stand up and stand against it and not just watch it happen.” Nyame now wants to help less privileged people – the “people that can’t enjoy what I enjoy right now.”

Sakeenah Abubakar is, like Nyame, a secondary-school student at the American University of Nigeria Academy in Yola. In September 2018, they became the first participants of CMP in Nigeria. Their region, northeastern Adamawa State, is in the midst of Islamist insurgency; camps house around 35,000 internally displaced persons. “I grew up in Nigeria [where there are] hate groups like Boko Haram who kill people,” Abubakar points out. “So, the program has really taught us we should learn to forgive people.”

Behind those teachings is a group of teachers who work hard to make the program possible on a low budget. Paul Kase, a science teacher, is one of its coordinators in Yola. “We are really working towards seeing that we take this program to places beyond the imagination of people. We really go out and educate the people,” he proudly declares.

Four thousand kilometers away from Yola, school principal and peace advocate Ensa Gibba opened a “peace club” after he trained the CMP staff in Gambia. “CMP rekindled my initial desire to bring peace. We are in Gambia troubled, with tribal politics and social class segregation very common in the regions and communities of my posting,” he laments.

As an informal weekly gathering, the peace club discusses concepts of peace and sensitizes peers in classrooms and in school assemblies. CMP intends to be a breeding ground for more of such impactful initiatives. The awakening of thousands of teenagers across the continent could prevent the recurrence of abhorrent episodes of history like apartheid in South Africa or genocide in Rwanda. “I am confident that with the knowledge gained from Change Makers Program and more efforts at school and community [level], we will be able to change the hearts and minds of the future generations,” says Gibba.    

“If there are 100 people just like Oskar Schindler – not the saviors, 100 normal, flawed human beings – that’s 100,000 people [saved],” Ehrlich insists. “And once you get to a certain point, if there’s enough of them… actually you can’t go murder six million Jews, because then there’s enough resistance. [In Nazi Germany] there weren’t those people. So the one lesson to learn from Oskar Schindler is you don’t need to be a saint. You need to be just a normal, flawed… person.”

Her family’s link to Schindler meant that Nates “grew up with the knowledge that people have choices and can make choices throughout their life; they do not have to just do what governments are telling them to do.”

CMP continues to inspire future Oskar Schindlers across Africa. Following the success of Nigeria’s program, the team has taken up a new challenge: to bring the program not only to post-conflict countries but also to other countries that are still in the midst of conflict, like South Sudan and the Central African Republic. In those countries, the youngest citizens’ choices can be decisive for a better outcome in their nation’s story. If they can learn about past mistakes and their devastating effects, they can make different choices.

When breaking the chain that causes suffering to continue or history to repeat itself, it is vital to recognize and understand the links between past, present and future. As Nates explains: “The importance of that link to my father’s story, and my mom, and my uncle, and so on, is that for my father and my uncle it was very clear that if you study and if you learn from lessons from their own history of suffering, of oppression, of loss, certainly, you can learn about other societies. You can have sort of a link to your own history. And I am, very clearly, a great believer in that.

“So, through the work in the Centre, but also through the work in South Africa – and then with the Change Makers Program – I truly believe that you can make those links and you should make those links. Because it empowers you to look at your own history and hopefully, not repeat the same mistakes.”

The Change Makers Program was devised in Salzburg in 2016 at the Salzburg Global Seminar program, Learning from the Past: Promoting Pluralism and Countering Extremism. 

The German philosopher Hannah Arendt described education as “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin.” Adding “education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”  

But this compelling and optimistic vision of what education could and should be is barely visible in the vast majority of 21st century education systems. Too many of today’s education systems are still organized around approaches and principles from the 19th and 20th centuries, which are widely seen as outdated and will not help our young people to thrive in the modern world.

It is therefore not particularly surprising that there are a great many different voices calling for change in how education systems are organized and in the outcomes those systems are designed to achieve. What is surprising – and not nearly as well-known as it should be – is that the answers to a lot of the different demand-driven reforms lie in the same place: social and emotional learning.

Social and emotional skills – or life skills as they are often also known – are key human capabilities that allow individuals to manage their emotions, work with others, and achieve their goals. For example, they include skills around empathy, critical thinking, resilience, communication and team-working. There is no universal way to acquire these social and emotional learning (SEL) skills as different cultures attach different levels of importance to different skills. What is increasingly widely accepted, however, is that these skills are crucial for the wellbeing and success of every child and adult – and for the future of our societies and economies.

There is a remarkable correlation with the kinds of skills and competencies that social and emotional learning (or life skills) programs help young people acquire and legitimate responses to a broad range of different demand-side calls for reform, which is why this is such an exciting education reform topic at the moment.

If, for example, your priorities are around the skills and competencies required to equip the workforce of tomorrow, then part of the change you are looking for is a rapid increase in opportunities for young people to develop what the World Economic Forum calls “human skills” such as creativity, critical thinking or emotional intelligence.

If you are looking at education from the perspective of the innovation skills that populations will need for the challenge of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and tackling climate change, then you are looking at skills around leadership, creativity, empathy and resilience.

If you are focused on how education needs to adapt to respond to the mental health crisis that is affecting more and more young people around the world, then there is a clear correlation between the change you are looking for and the outcomes that SEL programs can achieve.

If you are just looking for better education outcomes or increased equity of outcomes, then there is an emerging evidence base that shows how SEL programs can help especially to improve learners’ cognitive skills such as information retention and recall.

All these different arguments are becoming more widely accepted by policymakers and people of influence around the world, in part because the demand-side voices span the whole political spectrum. What has not happened on a large scale yet, with a few honorable exceptions, is a “supply-side” reaction to all this. While the nuance obviously varies from context to context, there are certain reasonably universal supply-side challenges that have hindered the implementation of SEL reform. These fall into three broad categories: teacher preparation; curriculum design and the recognition of extracurricular learning opportunities; and measurement and assessment. These are valid concerns but recent years have seen major research, policy and practice innovations around SEL that point to promising ways forward.

One of the interesting challenges around SEL is how important local context is. There is no guarantee that an innovation that produced a positive set of results with a group of high schools in Chicago will have the same impact in Islamabad. As Michael Nettles, senior vice president at Educational Testing Services (ETS), ruefully remarked at a recent gathering of SEL advocates in Salzburg, Austria: “That is certainly true in the United States, where public education is a jealously guarded local prerogative at best, and a political, cultural and racial flashpoint at worst. What works in Massachusetts will not work in Tennessee.”

Social and emotional learning could well be the silver bullet our education systems need to meet many of the challenges we currently face. But more evidence of what works, what does not work, when, where, why and how is needed. To expand this evidence base for what works in SEL, an international group of educators, policy experts and academics are establishing a new global alliance, which aims to “empower policymakers and practitioners from across the world to promote quality and equitable Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills through initiatives that connect, coordinate, and drive action.” The alliance, formally launching in 2020, will be called Karanga, a Maori word that means a call to welcome people. Karanga is calling different stakeholders around the world to join a movement that will help and support the renewal of education systems, which in turn can help create a better world, or as Hannah Arrendt would have it: to help young people prepare for the task of renewing a common world.

Dominic Regester is the program director for the Salzburg Global Seminar multi-year program series, Education for Tomorrow’s World.

With the worst traffic jams in Europe, millions of its residents exposed to air pollution, and more than half its waste incinerated every year, it is hard to imagine that 2019 will see London become the first National Park City in the world.

But this bustling metropolis won’t be tearing down The Shard and Buckingham Palace to build parks and dig lakes in their place. No, instead the goal is to change mindsets – that “urban areas should be thought of more inclusively when it comes to thinking about nature,” explains “guerilla geographer” Daniel Raven-Ellison, the brains behind this initiative.     

“I don’t think that urban life is worth less than rural life,” he adds. “I don’t think that an urban red fox is worth less than an arctic fox or a desert fox… Urban falcons are worth just as much as those that are in the countryside.”

Raven-Ellison, who has visited every single National Park in the UK, first laid out his idea in a blog post. Six years on, he’s gained both local and international support, the backing of London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, and over £32,000 in crowdfunding. One in 20 Londoners is estimated to have supported the campaign in some way.

A National Park City is not the same as a National Park, but one philosophy inspires both concepts. “People are familiar with the idea that we want pristine and great habitats for wildlife in remote and distant places. But, you know, actually, we as animals that live in the city and the animals that live in cities alongside us, we need great habitats too,” Raven-Ellison insists.

The British capital gives shelter to 15,000 species of wildlife alongside eight million humans, and around 47% of Greater London is already physically green, when including natural habits, public parks and private gardens. This is not enough for the 250 organizations taking part in the movement. The target is a city where green and blue (ponds, lakes and rivers) is the majority.

Raven-Ellison believes this would be possible if each Londoner were to turn at least one square meter of “gray” (urban) space into green or blue space, by planting road-side mini-meadows or installing ponds.

The National Park City Foundation, a charity created to support this effort, wants to bring the movement to other cities as well. To turn that aspiration into reality, whether in London or anywhere else, the ultimate responsibility lies with the citizens.  

“[It is] essential that we reverse the tide on the city becoming grayer and start making it incrementally greener,” says Raven-Ellison. “But that target is not something that the mayor can achieve on his own through policy, or local councils can do on their own through policy. It’s not something the property developers can do just in their developments where they’re building. And it’s certainly not something that any individual resident can do on their own either. But if on average everyone does that bit, that target is not only completely possible – [but we can] smash it and exceed it.”

Daniel Raven-Ellison is a Fellow of Salzburg Global Seminar and Salzburg Global Seminar is proud to support the National Park Cities Initiative.

“Look at the rainbow in every crowd,” said Dipak Misra, the Chief Justice when India’s Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality in September 2018. “Equality and liberty and this freedom can only be fulfilled when each one of us realizes the LGBT community has the same rights as other citizens.” The decision of that country’s Supreme Court to rule against Section 377, a British colonial-era law banning same-sex relations, is a landmark in the struggle of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) minorities for their human rights and has brought hope to many other countries where such a law is still in force.

Now, the Indian government is trying to black out the rainbow. The broadly right-wing, Hindu nationalist coalition led by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supported the court’s decision but made clear it would not allow activists to push for further rights. Gay people in India cannot get married, adopt children, or inherit their partner’s wealth. Labor discrimination is commonplace, and same-sex relationships are considered taboo by many. Even if legal changes have been made, country-wide social change seems far away.

It is not only India that is grappling with this gap between laws and mindsets. “We have signed a lot of commitments about human rights, but from the [signature] to the reality we have big steps to go for ahead,” explains former Costa Rican Vice President and human rights activist Ana Chacon. “We have statements that say beautiful things in all of our [Latin American] countries, but our culture hasn’t changed,” she laments.

The Central American country is set to legalize gay marriage in 2020 at the latest, following a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Last year, President Carlos Alvarado Quesada issued a public apology to members of the LGBT community for the state-sponsored persecution and discrimination they had suffered in the past. However, although the region has seen some improvements, social acceptance remains an issue for LGBT people, and same-sex relations are still illegal in nine countries in the Caribbean and South America. All are former British colonies.

Many of the countries which still criminalize homosexuality and transgender expression base their discriminatory laws, now hailed as a signature of their sovereignty, on a former global process: colonization. The British Empire, in particular, has left an anti-LGBT colonial legacy in its former occupied countries; today almost 70 percent of states with a British colonial history still have anti-sodomy laws on their books. While Nepal, which was never colonized, has made rapid progress in the decriminalization of homosexuality, the recognition of gender identity and legal protections for its LGBT citizens, neighboring India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, like much of the Commonwealth, are much further behind. Ironic for a region that was once progressive in its attitudes towards same-sex relations and alternative gender expressions, as depicted in pre-colonial religious art and texts.

LGBT individuals and activists face disparate challenges worldwide, shaped by their unique contexts, but they share one cause: the push for legal and social equality. As a major step towards social acceptance, legal inclusiveness is fundamental, but it is not enough. How can LGBT activists, advocates and allies work to bridge the gap between the two? Some original initiatives to advance LGBT rights are flourishing across continents.

Danish Sheikh is an assistant professor and associate director of the Centre for Health, Law Ethics and Technology at the Jindal Global Law School in Haryana, India. A lawyer, academic, and queer activist, he also engages in fiction writing and theater. Sheikh is the founder of the Bardolators, a theater group which performs contemporary adaptions of Shakespeare in public spaces.

Sheikh leads a course teaching first-year law students how to read, think, and write about the law in accessible and interesting ways. There, he explores the connections between legal and theatrical texts. He does the same in his original play, “Contempt”. The play portrays some of the severe consequences under Section 377, including the violence faced by gay men, lesbians and especially trans women, delving into the contradictions between Indian law and the queer experience. Ultimately it seeks to change the audience’s perceptions of LGBT Indians.  

The lack of queer visibility in most countries makes life even harder and lonelier for LGBT individuals. Their loves and losses, hopes and dreams, triumphs and struggles are largely absent from the public sphere, leaving members of the LGBT community isolated, misunderstood and ignored. Making queer lives more visible is a hugely important element of changing social attitudes – something the Indian LGBT and human rights community well understood.   

“I think it is important to understand that this decision [to overturn Section 377] is also the result of a sustained media and social advocacy campaign over the last five years,” explains Sheikh. “And that campaign already created a kind of discourse around the queer community that ensured that conversations and voices are being broadcast in the living rooms across the world. It wasn’t just liberal media channels; it was also otherwise conservative channels who were having these conversations on gay rights issues.”

In Pakistan, too, efforts are being made to make queer lives more visible. Outcast is a literary magazine that publishes short stories by LGBTQ+ writers from Pakistan and beyond. Founder and editor Fameta Bhaji says she launched the magazine in order to give queer people in the Global South the chance to tell their own stories, rather than only ever hearing from Western voices. And it’s not only niche publications like Outcast that are finally telling queer stories in South Asia.

Bollywood too is “kind of waking up and having more queer representation,” explains Sheikh, noting that after the historic striking down of Section 377, “Bollywood released its first mainstream movie with an A-list star playing its titular lesbian character.”

Fifteen thousand kilometers away from India, Venezuela’s first and so far only transgender and lesbian congresswoman Tamara Adrian is a living embodiment of visibility, prominent on not only a national but also a global stage. “Globally, the fight faces different kinds of barriers. I am engaged at the international level, so I have the opportunity to understand the struggles in Africa, Latin America, the US, Europe, China and other countries, so I have a global perspective,” Adrian said in an interview with the Stanford Daily. “I feel that in every single part of the world, you have people that are willing to be engaged in this fight. Their ability to create networks and sympathies and alliances with non-LGBT people is important because this is how you create a critical mass.”

Creating that critical mass and forging networks and alliances across the world is part of the purpose of the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum. Launched in 2013, it counts Adrian, Chacon, Sheikh, Bhaji and dozens more in its 72-countrywide global network. Each year since then, the Forum has met in both Europe and Asia to expand the global conversation around LGBT and human rights, not only including diverse voices from across the world but also amplifying those long marginalized within the community too.  

One such marginalized group battling to be legally, socially, and discursively recognized is intersex people, and one person leading the fight in India is social worker Daniel Mendonca, a proud intersex person. From campaigns to install the first gender-neutral toilet in an Indian college while studying at the University of Mumbai to sharing powerful personal stories at international gatherings like the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum in Kathmandu, Nepal, The Economist’s Pride and Prejudice conference in Hong Kong, and even in the Vatican, Daniel is ensuring intersex voices are heard.

The term “third gender” is rapidly gaining prominence in South Asia and beyond as LGBT activists and allies alike try to gain legal and social recognition of more than just male and female binary genders. But Daniel does not agree with this approach: “When you say ‘third gender,’ are you ultimately trying to say male is the first, female are the second, and non-remaining are the third? And by putting ‘others,’ you already say they are others – ‘Just get lost!’ So those terminologies need to be changed… Have you heard the saying ‘treat people the way you want to be treated’? I say no, that’s wrong. Treat people the way they want to be treated.”       

Legal change is happening. LGBT human rights are at a tipping point in South Asia and elsewhere, where social transformation seems ever closer.

“It goes without doubt that legal progress alone cannot change the much more complex social progress that is needed – the further facilitation, the mediation, the discussion within families, within faith communities... All of this is an ongoing progress, but of course it’s a progress that is much more strengthened if you do it from a position of legality instead of a position where you are declared to be illegal,” reminds Klaus Mueller, founder and chair of the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum.

Progress in LGBT rights moves to and fro, unsteadily, between accomplishments and backlashes. Taiwan has just legalized same-sex marriage in a historic first for Asia. Meanwhile, despite India’s landmark precedent, Kenya’s high court unanimously upheld the law criminalizing same-sex relationships. The UK, once a proponent of anti-sodomy laws through its former empire, has since decriminalized homosexuality, allows gay marriage and adoption, legally recognizes changes in gender identity and offers a variety of protections against discrimination for its LGBT citizens – but is currently facing loud protests outside schools and online over the inclusion of LGBT relationships in a new sex education curriculum.

Legal change is only half the battle in the struggle to change hearts and minds – but determined networks of activists, advocates and allies the world over are forging ahead.

Since its founding in 2013, the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum has brought together over 226 LGBT activists, advocates and allies representing 72 countries on six continents to programs in Austria, Germany, Thailand and Nepal to engage in a truly global conversation on advancing LGBT human rights.

We are using the term “LGBT” as it is widely recognized in many parts of the world, but we would not wish it to be read as in any way exclusive of other cultures, groups or terms, either historical or contemporary.

To receive updates from the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum, visit: salzburgglobal.org/go/lgbtnewsletter

One day in 2014, when Roman Yosif was an ambitious graduate running his own successful startup, he saw in the newspaper that the Chilean government was to create the first public innovation lab in Latin America. “Interesting,” he thought.

Believing it to be the opportunity he had been looking for to have greater positive social impact through his work, he contacted the man featured in the newspaper article and sent him a résumé. Months passed with no answer. “As I am not involved with any political party, then they are not going to hire me,” he assumed—wrongly. “You are starting next week,” was the message when the government finally called.

Now, five years later, 31-year-old Yosif is the ambitious executive director of the Laboratorio de Gobierno Chile.

Launched in May 2015, a shift in government just three years later jeopardized the future of the lab. The new administration did like the idea of a lab but was demanding, above all, a result-oriented approach. The team had one week to deliver a plan that would please their new employer. The choice was to innovate or die. Luckily, the new strategy was approved, and they survived the earthquake. “If we don’t have the capacity to be flexible… we stop being a lab, and we have to close the day after,” Yosif underlines.

In 2018, Apolitical announced “LabGob” as the winner of its Public Service Team of the Year Award. As a manager, Yosif does not hesitate to use the phrase “you are absolutely right” when one of his team members, most of whom are older than him, comes up with a better solution than his. Technological innovation has long been part of his life. A commercial engineer, Yosif was the co-founder and commercial manager of the first Latin American online platform for group gifts. He also founded another startup to manage organic content for brands and events generated by users in social media. All of this happened in his twenties. Still, it did not seem enough.

“I had the motivation that, at some point, my professional career would be linked with public policies since public policies can have an impact at the national level in a much stronger way than when you work in private business,” Yosif reflects. He may have to do without the “economic profit” characteristic of private business, but he now gets his incentive through “social profit” instead.

What concerns Yosif the most is ensuring that the lab will be a long-lasting institution, with very long-term positive impact. “For me, this is… more than a job,” he says. For him, it’s “a super personal life mission.”

Roman Yosif is a member of the Public Sector Strategy Network, an initiative led by Salzburg Global Seminar and partners to help senior public sector leaders harness technological innovations.

Humanity faces an unprecedented threat. If global temperature rises aren’t halted at 1.5°C by 2050, we will cross a dangerous threshold and reach a tipping point. A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, and dying forests will begin. Unstoppable processes will be released, which will lead to further temperature rises that will then continue, no matter what actions we take. If we reach 4°C, the world will become an almost impossible place for most people to live in.   

As governments the world over fail to take real action, despite international efforts like the Paris Agreement, the situation can look hopeless. But hope can still be found in the unlikeliest of places. According to lawyer James Thornton, founder of the nonprofit law firm ClientEarth, hope can be found in economics and the law.  

Renewable energy is becoming increasingly economically viable. The cost of buying, installing and running renewable energy is cheaper than the cost of running an existing coal-fired power station. Intermittency is being tamed thanks to new storage solutions like the Tesla big battery in Australia. Simple market forces, however, are not bringing about the end of coal. Entrenched incumbents in the market are hunkering down against change. But lawyers are taking them on – in the board room, the courts and the legislatures.  

In Germany, leading European energy company RWE was stopped in its tracks from chopping down the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest so they could mine the area for lignite, the most polluting of all types of coal. In addition to the 50,000 who marched in the streets, environmental group BUND brought a case alleging that cutting of the trees would violate the European Union’s Habitats Directive by endangering a rare bat. The court issued an injunction that stopped the logging. RWE’s share priced tumbled by 8%.

In Poland, ClientEarth bought shares in two energy companies that were planning to open a government-backed, loss-making, coal-fired power station. Believing its reliance on government subsidies to be illegal, ClientEarth, along with 40% of the other shareholders, voted to block the building of the plant. When the company, backed by its majority shareholder, the Polish government, went ahead anyway, the lawyers sued the directors for violating their duty to the shareholders.

“On its own, the case sends a signal,” explains Thornton. “But it may also encourage further shareholder activism, where company decisions that will lead to environmental harm are also bad for investors. It is a new lens through which to analyze company behavior, and it provides a new angle of attack for unacceptable conduct.” Since its founding in 2008, ClientEarth has prevented more than 35 new coal plants from being built. Now, they’re moving on to existing coal-fired power plants, using litigation to close them down.

But it’s not just the energy companies in the lawyers’ sights; they’re going after the pension funds that invest in them too. In Australia, a 23-year-old man has taken his pension fund to court for failing to disclose climate change risk. “He wanted to know about the impact of climate change on his investments and what the fund is doing about it,” Thornton explains. “Would the assets that were to provide his pension be stranded by the time – say 40 years from now – when he needed to start drawing his pension? These were basic questions, but ones that the $37 billion pension fund said it had no answers to. And now, he’s having to take them to court, we’ll see what they do say in court. This Australian case is the first of its kind, but there will certainly be many more.”

“Governments are not leading… Citizens must take it upon themselves… “The most vital tool citizens have in their arsenal is the law… If we hold governments to account, move aside the incumbents, empower people everywhere to use the law to build the future, we can indeed succeed in saving civilization.”

– James Thornton, “When the Earth is Your Client: Taking the Law into Our Own Hands,” Cutler Lecture 2018

Thornton and his team of lawyers in offices across Europe, the US and China, are determined to make investors and individuals realize that climate risk is a financial risk. In 2018, they reported four companies, including the airline EasyJet and the global construction firm Balfour Beatty, to the UK’s Financial Reporting Council for failing to address climate change risks and trends in their reports – seen as a breach of British reporting laws. ClientEarth also views the auditors of these companies to be in violation of their duties by approving such reports. Action is thus being taken against the auditors, too.  

The law can also be used to hold governments to account. Many countries do have laws to protect the environment and human health, but not all are adequate and few are truly enforced. After a long, drawn-out but ultimately successful case against the UK government to make it adhere to EU law on air pollution, a further 30 such cases are being brought by ClientEarth in courts across Europe. In Germany, local courts have banned diesel vehicles in their cities in an effort to reduce air pollution. Here again, economics has a role to play: as diesel sales fall and “diesel-building companies see there’s no future in it, the transition to cleaner vehicles and to electric technology should come more quickly,” says Thornton.

It is not only in Europe where lawyers are taking up the fight against climate change catastrophe. China may not be a leader in human rights, but they are becoming a leader in addressing environmental problems, according to Thornton. “Indeed, with the United States government undermining efforts to take care of the environment, China may become the global leader,” the American lawyer acknowledges.

One Chinese legal innovation is to allow citizen groups to bring cases against polluting companies to help improve enforcement of environmental laws and compliance. “This is a big change for China and, indeed, it is not even possible for environmental groups to bring this type of case in all European countries,” explains a clearly impressed Thornton.

Thornton and his firm are assisting China in the establishment of a series of new environmental courts, from regional to the Supreme Court level, to handle environmental cases, with 3000 dedicated judges. Starting with a seminar for justices of the Supreme Court of China on climate litigation, ClientEarth is now into its third year of training Chinese environmental judges and prosecutors. “Can you imagine the CEO of a non-profit environmental law firm being invited to give a seminar to members of the US Supreme Court? Less likely,” says Thornton, ruefully.

“We know what needs to be done,” says Thornton. “For the first time in all the decades I’ve worked on environmental issues, the market really can deliver, if properly aligned with the needs of the future. If we hold governments to account, move aside the incumbents, empower people everywhere to use the law to build the future, we can indeed succeed in saving civilization.”

Civilization needs all the help it can get.

James Thornton delivered the Cutler Lecture on the Rule of Law in November 2018, held by Salzburg Global Seminar each year in Washington, DC.

“By 2050, at least one in four people is likely to live in a country affected by chronic or recurring shortages of fresh water.” A stark warning from the sixth goal of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. But for the people of Cape Town and neighboring towns in the Western Cape province of South Africa, 2050 has already arrived.

The Cape Town Dam supplying much of the city’s water has fallen so low that “Day Zero,” when the taps would run dry in the city of 4.2 million habitants, was scheduled for April 12, 2018. This ominous occasion was avoided – but still looms large.

While climate change contributed majorly to declining dam levels, the failure of city authorities to manage water effectively and the unsustainable use by citizens also played a role.

“It became really, really bad in that our dam levels reached less than 20% in terms of water capacity… [and so we had] to put in place water restrictions,” explains Noxolo Kabane, deputy director at Western Cape Department of Human Settlements.

The decision to push back “Day Zero” came after significant rainfall and a raft of drastic measures to control water use implemented by the provincial government. Water use was reduced to 50 liters per person, many public toilets were shut, and watering lawns with tap water was discouraged. The government used a system to monitor water meters and cut off and fined households deemed to be wasting water.

But while these water-saving measures helped avert the water crisis, some had unintended health consequences. In some cases, hospitals were not getting water because of the restrictions. And while the mantra “If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down” was used to urge Capetonians to flush feces but not urine, not flushing increased the risk of urinary tract infections. Meanwhile, the closure of handwashing sinks in public places also increased the spread of other diseases.

“We should not take water for granted because we assume that when the dams are full, we have got water in abundance and that it  will never run out. We should always be futuristic in terms of the resource and how we use it.”

Legacy of Apartheid

The end of apartheid in 1994 witnessed a rapid increase in urbanization as the majority black population were finally able to move freely. But decades of racial exclusion meant cities such as Cape Town had no plans for them, hence the sprawling settlement of townships such as Khayelitsha – the largest and fastest-growing township in the country. For these Capetonians, already with limited access to basic sanitation services, the crisis hit especially hard.

Kabane says, “But the flip side to that is that we were learning from them because that was a daily reality – not having access to water – and the resilience... around water saving and being more water savvy.”

The dams are rising now, but Kabane warns against complacency. “There is this perception that we are fine,” she says, “but I don’t think this is the attitude we should be having. We should still be sticking to using water in a sustainable manner.”

Kabane says “we should not take water for granted because we assume that when the dams are full, we have got water in abundance and that it will never run out. We should always be futuristic in terms of the resource and how we use it.”

Kabane hopes Cape Town’s crisis will spark conversations around water use by governments and citizens. She says, “Being more proactive is what I think other countries can learn from Cape Town. We were faced with a situation where we had to act very quickly, whereas if we had planned before the time... I think we could have handled the situation better.”

In hindsight, Kabane believes a benefit of the crisis was people began to evaluate how they used water. She says, “It was not something that was just left to environmentalists who are the ones that normally advocate for sustainable use of natural resources. But now, it became the whole of society... [with] people actually sharing ideas with each other in terms of what they are doing in their homes to save water, so people stood together and held hands to walk through the crisis.”

This solidarity means Day Zero has been avoided – for now.

Noxolo Kabane took part in Salzburg Global Seminar’s Health and Health Care Innovation program Building Healthy, Equitable Communities: The Role of Inclusive Urban Development and Investment in October 2018.

For decades, science fiction books and movies have foretold of a future where robots dominate the world, where human action becomes obsolete, and human intelligence subsequently dwindles into oblivion. However, Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, is of a different mindset.

“My theory is,” he jests, “we want to make sure robots think humans are cute – kind of like doggies and puppies and kitty cats… because if they think we’re cute, then they’ll take care of us.”

Varian has worked at Google since 2002 on algorithmic designs for auctioning and marketing systems, as well as policy-related issues, like privacy and intellectual property. Adopting a more serious tone, Google’s chief economist and the founding dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Information says: “I think there’s a mystical belief in the power of data. Data is like oil in one respect… namely, it needs to be refined in order to be useful. So the data itself is not the important component; the know-how to refine it into something – that’s useful. It’s the same [when] we talk about oil or data – it’s just the raw material, it’s not the finished product.”

Data needs to be “refined” into information, knowledge and action. Just as the refined oil-based product of petroleum (alongside electricity and steel) helped propel the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, refined data is now propelling the widely hailed Fourth Industrial Revolution of the 21st century. Past industrial revolutions occurred first gradually and then all at once, explains the veteran economist, adding that challenges and risks were involved but then also a plethora of opportunities. It will be similar this time around, he says.

“In Silicon Valley, they always say you overestimate what can be done in a year; you underestimate what can be done in ten years.”

In 2015, Varian wrote in Foreign Policy: “A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade.” If that’s so, then in 20 years, we’ll see today’s luxury items such as electric cars, voice-activated assistants and smart fridges rolled out into all homes, regardless of income, drastically changing the way we live.

“A lot of technology that looks so exciting and so obvious today will probably take many years to deploy… The mobile phone has come up as an example. The first working mobile phone was in 1970; the first commercial version was in 1980 – it cost over a $1000, it weighed several kilos, it was the size of a brick. So, that technology took… more than a decade to really disseminate in a meaningful way.”

“Data is like oil… it needs to be refined in order to be useful.”

A similar example can be found in autonomous vehicles. For years, companies worldwide have been endeavoring to circulate driverless cars more widely. It is, as Varian underlines, “a trillion-dollar industry” that technically works, but human error and erratic, unpredictable human behavior have thus far been too strong a deterrent against its operational and marketing advancement. And yet, the likes of Google, Apple, Uber and Tesla, as well as traditional car manufacturers, are all seeking to make a breakthrough in this industry.

It won’t only be in the home and on the roads where we will see the rise of the machines; our factories, offices and schools are also embracing artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Smart robots could soon steal your job” declared a headline on CNN in 2016; similar headlines can also easily be found in the newspapers of 1980, 1960, 1935 and even 1812 when the Luddites smashed up their textile machinery. But Varian says workers shouldn’t be fearful.

With birthrates falling in the developed world, forecasts predict there will be fewer workers, not just fewer jobs. “Demography is destiny,” declares Varian, saying we need to look at not just “bots” but also “tots”. Labor supply is failing to meet demand in the developed world, so far from being something to fear, increasing automation has come “just in time to prevent a really bad outcome,” he explains. With a smaller available workforce, machines will be needed to pick up the slack, supporting both manual and cognitive tasks of workers. Countries with “bad demographics” are investing in robots. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), while Japan has the OECD’s oldest population; both also have the highest rates of robots per 10,000 workers.

Machines can better perform specific tasks previously done by humans, but Varian foresees few entire occupations being eradicated. Of the 270 detailed occupations listed in the 1950 US Census, only one has been eliminated due to automation, he points out: the elevator operator. There are more apocalyptic predictions (some estimates are high as 3 billion jobs lost to automation by 2030), but as MIT’s Technology Review admits, “There are about as many opinions as there are experts.”

Varian remains optimistic. “We are a long way away from truly intelligent robots,” he reassures. “But at the same time… we’ve seen tremendous advances in just the last five years about tasks that were thought to be extremely difficult, like image recognition and automatic translation and voice transcription… I think that within the next two years, your mobile phone will be able to translate in real time.” However, “that doesn’t mean that translators would entirely disappear,” he says. Henry Ford might have said “In mass production there are no fitters,” but the great visionary car manufacturer of the 21st century, Elon Musk, admits “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake.” Machines do well in maintaining consistency but they are less good at trouble-shooting.

 “Humans are underrated,” Musk added. Creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and intercultural communication skills are all being hailed as important human skills for the 21st century workplace.   

While Varian warns against being blasé about the rise of the machines – he’s particularly concerned about the possibility of remote control and weaponization of “ordinary devices” such as cars, trucks and drones – he’s more interested in the “tremendous possibilities for improvement in how people live.” As humans age, we need to be taken care of. It’s thus perhaps unsurprising that, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, four of the ten occupations with the biggest projected growth between 2016-26 are personal care aides (#1), registered nurses (#3), home health aides (#4), and medical assistants (#9). (Software developers rank fifth.)

Will the robots end up caring for us “cute” humans after all? Time will tell. Varian’s last word of advice in the meantime: “Keep an open mind.”

Hal Varian was the keynote speaker at the 2018 program of the Salzburg Global Forum on Finance in a Changing World, The Promise and Perils of Technology: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cybercrime and Fintech.

Scarcely any other field of technology leads to as much confusion as artificial intelligence (AI). Manufacturers with oversized marketing budgets promise that their cognitive technologies will cure cancer, help companies to predict market developments, and save millions with automated processes. A host of Cassandras predict unemployment on a global scale if jobs are taken over by faceless robots. Venture capitalists are wondering how they can invest when there are only around 10,000 Ph.D.-level data scientists across the world.

Practice has shown that companies waste a lot of money on poorly thought-out experiments with AI applications, whether on start-ups with half-finished bots or IBM Watson.

At the same time, five of the ten most valuable companies in the world have pursued an AI-centric strategy since 2015. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are developing their own AI semiconductors, hiring the best AI professors, and creating their own cloud technologies. They are investing in key areas of AI that already enable thousands of products and services today – from computer vision to natural language recognition and processing. Every year they buy several start-ups that use machine learning (ML) for activities such as analyzing emotions in videos, optimizing cloud security, or flagging anomalies in data streams.

It doesn’t make sense to lump all these companies together. Apple is very focused on the privacy of its users and processes their data directly on their devices without sending it to the cloud. The competitive advantage of “privacy by design” wasn’t easy to achieve. The company learned to apply ML in the context of small datasets. At the same time, however, Facebook has been rocked by scandals since the last US presidential election.

A force to be reckoned with

AI means power, which has prompted politicians in many countries to push for the development of national AI strategies. China will invest a total of $150 billion in AI by 2030. The “Next Generation” strategy that China announced in 2017 is almost a mirror image of the strategy that the Obama administration came up with in 2016.

Can AI and ML be easily explained? In simple terms, ML is a family of approaches within AI that are designed to make a computer do useful things by acquiring knowledge. Learning happens by analyzing data: either structured data, such as financial data from SAP systems; or – with much more difficulty – unstructured data, such as the text of legal documents or customer complaint records.

Algorithms help to identify certain patterns and principles. ML is a sub-discipline of AI, which itself comprises further schools of thought and approaches. Y Combinator, one of the best start-up accelerators in the world, talks about 21 different AI cultures.

The development of AI applications is not without its challenges. The company x.ai, which is famous for its virtual assistant Amy, has 160 employees. Ninety of them focus on cleaning up data. This has to do with the fact that human language is complex. A phrase can be meant ironically, and the wrong emphasis of a word can confuse a machine.

IT infrastructure

In addition, AI needs a flexible and agile IT infrastructure. This makes it difficult for many companies. AI technologies don’t just bring benefits. Yann LeCun, Facebook’s AI science officer, strongly believes that ML needs bias to go about a task. If programming teams are lacking in diversity, human bias gets scaled according to the harsh power of mathematics. In 2017, a group at Facebook taught a computer to predict occupations based on faces. Barack Obama was placed in the category of “basketball player” because the computer was unable to conceive that a dark-skinned, tall person could also be the American president. Algorithms can cause inequality and discrimination. If you’re in the “wrong” data cohort, you might not get a loan, or you could be rejected by a university. Foundations and institutions are working to combat this, such as AI4ALL, which enables girls from the eighth grade and up to study AI in school. It’s easy to make comparisons – in China, ML has become a compulsory part of the sixth-grade learning program.

I expect significant problems from criminal groups that will use ML and deep learning (DL) to escalate cyberattacks, find ways around protective systems, mislead forensic data specialists, and even attack real data. We’re already seeing that sensors in cars can be manipulated to recognize a stone as an animal. Not every company has the necessary know-how to prepare for such attacks and implement preventive measures.

But it’s also important to note that current AI applications are not really intelligent. People make decisions about how these systems are built. And the worry that we don’t know how a machine makes a decision is premature. AI is evolving from month to month. For example, in its models for self-driving cars, the chip manufacturer Nvidia is already tagging algorithms and chunks of data that have contributed the most to an outcome. Mathematical models of swarming will perhaps provide new ways to better understand AI.

Many disciplines

In future, AI will absorb more knowledge from neurobiology, the cognitive sciences, physics, and philosophy. Complex questions cannot be confined to the domain of a single discipline. Just as light is both a particle and a wave, some scientists are now proceeding on the assumption that the brain and intelligence form a duality, which is in turn coupled to consciousness.

Since AI technologies will affect many aspects of our lives and our economy, our society should work to improve understanding of technology in schools, among the public, in companies, and in public authorities. At the same time, internet giants should set up ethics boards to address human-centered design, the balancing of goals between humans and machines, and the prevention of risks. Artificial Intelligence offers very useful benefits for humanity. However, we must become actively involved and understand – without hype and hysteria – what we are dealing with. The best technologies are made possible by much listening and interaction between many disciplines.

Anastassia Lauterbach is an entrepreneur and expert in the fields of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. She took part in Salzburg Global Seminar’s program Brave New World: How Can Corporate Governance Adapt? Her most recent publication is The AI Imperative (2018).

This article was originally published in German in Der Standard and is kindly reprinted with their permission. Translation provided by Sebastian Smallshaw.

“Leopold contract signed. God grant us the happiest contents for this precious shell.” So began the telegram Max Reinhardt sent to Helene Thimig in Berlin on April 16, 1918.

This day marked the beginning of a two-decade-long transformation of Schloss Leopoldskron, which was built in 1736 by Prince-Archbishop Leopold von Firmian. With the arrival of theater impresario Max Reinhardt exactly 25 years after his first engagement as a young actor at the Salzburg Stadttheater (now Salzburger Landestheater), the heavily dilapidated palace awoke to a new life.

With the same dedication, creativity and attention to detail with which he directed plays, Reinhardt rebuilt the palace by fundamentally renovating the staircase, the Great Hall and the Marble Hall, equipping a Venetian room with Italian wall paneling for his Commedia dell’Arte collection and building the library, a copy of the library at the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. Only few knew of the library’s theatrical mystery at the time: the secret staircase behind a bookshelf, which led to Reinhardt’s private living quarters – and which visitors to the Schloss today are welcome to explore!

Reinhardt also redesigned the garden and park: he bought orange and lemon trees from the orangery of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, acquired pelicans, cranes and flamingos, as well as Chinese nightingales from Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Zoo, and set up a garden theater in the back of the palace’s park – although the notorious Salzburg “Schnürlregen” all too often thwarted his outdoor theater ambitions.

Reinhardt’s sense for design and coloring is still visible throughout the palace: many of the drawings that served as templates for the renovation were inspired by Reinhardt’s pen and thus lent the palace its individual character. Many people called Leopoldskron his “most beautiful staging”; his future wife Helene Thimig even called it “his masterpiece.”

Reinhardt’s artistic talent was also reflected in the fact that he made the palace a meeting place of the then art scene. Through his international circle of friends, Leopoldskron became a summer gathering of actors, musicians, singers, poets and artists in the 1920s and ‘30s. To this illustrious group belonged Arturo Toscanini, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Noël Coward, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Thornton Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, and many, many others.

Max Reinhardt not only breathed new life into this “precious shell,” he also turned the whole city into a stage: together with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss he founded the idea of the Salzburg Festival at Schloss Leopoldskron, which officially came to life with the first performance of “Jedermann” in Salzburg’s Domplatz (Cathedral Square) on August 22, 1920. In 1923, the festivities even took place at Schloss Leopoldskron itself, as Moliere’s “Imaginary Invalid” was performed in the palace.

In 1938, the Nazis eventually ended the Reinhardt era in Leopoldskron. Uncannily, it was April 16 again. Exactly 20 years after Reinhardt signed the contract for Leopoldskron, the palace was designated “Jewish property” by the Nazis and subsequently confiscated by the Gestapo. Reinhardt, who mainly had been living and working in Hollywood since 1937, never returned to Leopoldskron.

In New York in 1943, Max Reinhardt recounted his memories in one of his last letters to his wife Helene Thimig: “I lived in Leopoldskron for eighteen years, really lived, and I brought it to life.”

When I moved to Salzburg five years ago to take up my position as General Manager at what is now Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron, Max Reinhardt was known to me, but I did not really know much about him at the time. The way Reinhardt dealt with the palace and what he made of it – and of Salzburg – fascinated me from the beginning. More and more thoughts on Reinhardt influenced my actions: “What would Reinhardt say if he were here today?” “How would he tackle this or that?” “What vision would Reinhardt have for the palace today?” Over time these questions formulated a “Vision Reinhardt 2.0.”

At the same time, I came across the first Reinhardt photo. I bought it and hung it in my office, as a reminder to preserve Reinhardt’s legacy and to continue to do justice to his efforts in the palace. Over the course of time, I bought more and more photos, but also stamps, coins, magazines, books, program leaflets, historical festival tickets and even a mirror offered at a Berlin auction, which now once again hangs at Leopoldskron, just like it did during Reinhardt’s time. While I did not succeed in acquiring Reinhardt’s red Steinway grand piano, it at least returned to the palace for a few days during an event in 2015.

A selection of the best photos I have collected over the last few years are now on show in an exhibition at Schloss Leopoldskron. Except for three photos provided by the great-grandchildren of Max Reinhardt, all photos are in the possession of Salzburg Global Seminar, the current owners of this historic place. It is a small contribution that Salzburg Global, as a nonprofit organization who have been calling Leopoldskron their home for more than 70 years now, can make in order to remember Reinhardt and maintain his legacy.

The significance of this became painfully aware to me in Berlin in March 2018 when I attended the premiere of “The Entertainer,” with Peter Lohmeyer in the lead role, at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm. With “The Entertainer,” Peter Lohmeyer carries to the grave a theater Max Reinhardt founded in 1924 and led until 1932 and which will be demolished in May 2018 to make room for a casino. With the demolition of this traditional stage not only will 100 years of theater history be lost, but so too will a piece of Max Reinhardt. One more reason for me to keep up our responsibility of preserving Max Reinhardt’s legacy here at Schloss Leopoldskron.

Much of what we do in the palace today, Max Reinhardt probably – hopefully – would have liked. Thus, for the past four summers, the actors of the Salzburg Landestheater have been strolling through the park as they perform “Shakespeare in the Park” and the Salzburg Festival has been coming home for a few years now as well: instead of the performances of the past, today we have annual artist talks, premiere parties and a Jedermann Picnic. And in 2014 the late Karl Lagerfeld staged his “Métiers d’Art” fashion show for fashion house Chanel here, transforming Leopoldskron into a baroque fairytale palace.

The photos in this exhibition are a journey through the life of Max Reinhardt; from his beginnings as a young actor in Berlin in 1895 to his death in New York in 1943: Reinhardt as a young actor, Reinhardt among his family, in private moments at the Lido in Venice or even skiing in Switzerland. They show a confident Reinhardt in Paris in 1933, a proud, smiling Reinhardt at the peak of his career in Hollywood in 1935, and two years later with the tired, sad look of the emigrant looking into an uncertain future. They show the life of a man who has influenced the theater like no other, whether as an actor, theater director or director; the life of a man everyone knew and yet who died almost alone and whose death Erwin Piscator described as the “Sunset of the Theater of the World.”

Max Reinhardt – A Life In Pictures is on permanent display in the Meierhof of Schloss Leopoldskron.

It was love at first sight for me with this special place when I was given a tour of the park surrounding the Schloss Leopoldskron one late summer afternoon in 2013.

Since Max Reinhardt had had to leave his residence, the garden had grown wild and his visions shared the fate of “Sleeping Beauty.” In this garden of dreams, the paths had become overgrown and the structures of the orangery disintegrated.

And still: as we strolled through the park, the garden had a romantic sense of magic as gentle glades and mellow meadows opened to spectacular views of natural habitats, the beautiful palace, the lake with its islands and inlets, and the ever-dominant mountains.

A Stage in the Park

Daniel Szelenyi, general manager of Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron, led the way across a lonely lawn to the place where the garden theater had once been. The original structures were derelict and still the location displayed its very own magic: a semi-circle of impressive trees forms the stage and through the trees you look across the water over to an enchanted island. We immediately agreed that the original garden theater had to be recreated, but we also knew that this would be a project for years to come until the theater would be able to shine in its former splendor.

So we decided to do what “theater folks” do best: we used our imagination and determined that the park was a magnificent stage the way it is. New York’s “Shakespeare in the Park” takes place in Central Park in an open-air theater; my idea now was the entire park would be our theater.

Shakespeare’s most natural theater

In every corner, I could easily imagine characters from Shakespeare’s plays. Elves and fairies assembled in the mild light of sunset. Ophelia’s song sounded from the pond guarded by the magnificent Hercules statue. The lovers of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” chased each other through the spinneys in the woods. Juliet appeared on the balcony under which Romeo approached her through the audience.

Since 2014, the Artistic Team of the Salzburger Landestheater has developed three “Shakespeare in the Park” productions, each of which played for two summers. The shows were designed as immersive theater pieces.

Daniel Szelenyi and his team prepared delightful pre-show picnic baskets and created a Glyndebourne-like atmosphere around the palace. Members of our Young Chorus of the Salzburg Festival and State Theater – dressed up as elves and fairies – invited the audience to stroll to different scenes and locations throughout the park. Actors and singers appeared on trees and from the water, there were love scenes and battles and audiences were overwhelmed. Pure theater joy. And even though we all know that you cannot rely on summer sunshine in Salzburg, the park displays its own beauty in every weather condition.

To complete Max Reinhardt’s vision, we fervently hope that someone is ready to support the recreation of the original garden theater. And until then, the productions of the Salzburger Landestheater will strive to capture the spirit of Max Reinhardt’s magic.

Carl Philip von Maldeghem is the artistic director of the Salzburger Landestheater, the Salzburg State Theatre. He has developed and directed the program “Shakespeare in the Park” at Schloss Leopoldskron.

In 2019, the show “Love Songs” featuring Shakespeare scenes, songs and sonnets from four centuries will run through August. The new show “Elves and Errors” will open in May 2020.

He started out writing about memes as well as breaking international news, and now as a senior reporter at Buzzfeed, Ryan Broderick’s focus is on how internet culture and international news intersect. The “old guard” tactic of reporting on large formal events is out; the “new guard” are instead engaging with their readers while stories from the street are still developing and in motion. “Our generation has a lot of more interest in street-level protesting and political movements and human storytelling,” says Broderick. “People want context; they want to understand why people care about this stuff; they want to hear from people. It’s a very different… philosophy.”

You’ve spent six years at BuzzFeed; what are the biggest changes you’ve seen?

I would say very little is the same… In six years my job is totally different; my point of view on the world is totally different; I think BuzzFeed’s idea of itself is totally different. When I started, we had a small beginning news operation. The big idea was: do some politics, write a few news stories… [Write] lists and quizzes and fun articles and blog posts and just have a good time and make stuff people want to share. Over the last six years, every time we’ve come up against a thing where we’re like, “Oh we’ve never done this before.” Instead of saying “Well, let’s not do it,” we’ve just said, “Well, let’s try it”… We invest in things that we find interesting and we’re not afraid to scrap stuff we don’t.

Why did Buzzfeed launch a spin-off site just for news?

In this new really hyper-competitive, hyper-intense media world, the need for kind of saying to people, “This is a news story, this is factual, this is non-fiction, this is real, this isn’t fun” was worth doing, and it was worth making that distinction for people. And I think it’s a good idea…

I saw a journalism professor tweet, “I’ve been telling my students for years that this was a good idea. Finally, BuzzFeed is respectable!” Like... seriously – if you can’t handle the fact that your news article is touching a story for a young woman in the sidebar, you have much bigger problems than the design of BuzzFeed.com.

Fake news is a global problem. How can we begin to tackle it? How do countries come together to tackle a problem that has no borders?

On a practical level, I have no idea. On a philosophical level, I think it just comes back to if enough people want it, it will happen.

If people want reforms for information technology, they will happen... The problem and the “big if” is if people want real news. I would like to believe that they do, but... I think, for the most part, people think that they want the truth until the truth is something that makes them feel bad, and then they don’t want it.

Most people on a day-to-day basis don’t even want to think about whether their news is real or fake, but in most societies that lose the ability to tell what is real or fake in their news bad things follow.

All these things are giant “what ifs?” that I don’t know, but there are things that are happening that are promising... The EU [and its] fights with Google and Facebook are good, India’s fights with Facebook are good, the UK has been sort of successful in certain ways in dealing with Cambridge Analytica once they discovered it… I think we’ve got a couple years’ worth of watching... We’ll see.

How do journalists reach parts of societies who instantly dismiss their outlets as fake? Where does that conversation begin?

Report the truth, build credibility, be transparent with your readers... When I say be transparent, I don’t mean take a camera into the newsroom and film journalists at their computers… We use a term internally at BuzzFeed called “showing your work,” which is like, if you come to a conclusion in your piece it should be clearly understandable by reading your piece how you got to that conclusion… If you write your stories like that, readers aren’t confused, and they can figure out how you got to that point so at least they can get mad at you for the facts.

Previously, you were a Buzzfeed comment moderator. What was your biggest take away from that experience in regard to internet culture? Has that influenced your approach to news writing at all?

Yeah, it totally influenced it. Basically, I just started to realize that the internet was a series of communities that basically would fight with each other. So, I became really interested in the anthropology of the internet – the sociology of the internet. When I write stories I’m always thinking about “Okay, what is this group? How are they built? And how are they colliding or not with another community?” The best stories in my mind are when like one community accidentally slams up against another and then you have tension there. I think a lot of great stories are like this one part of the internet accidentally [colliding] with another and now we all have to deal with it... A lot of stories right now are between social groups, and I think the internet is creating that because it’s so easy to form a social group.

I think the internet brings people together, you can then form a little community, and then those communities can fight with each other… It might not stay that way but for right now… that’s what I learned as a community moderator. Once you can look for the communities, then you can find cool stories.

There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the future of journalism. In your opinion, can we be optimistic?

We are at a time of unparalleled creativity… You can tell a story in a million ways. You can tell a story with a live video – with an edited video. You can tell a story with a photo album, you can tell a story with a list, or a long-form essay, or a breaking news post or a huge retrospective long-form feature piece. There are so many ways to tell a story right now that it’s like you should never be bored. You could tell a story on a Twitter thread! A super viral Twitter thread. You could tell a story in one Facebook post; you could tell a story in a YouTube channel… There are so many options. It’s up to journalists to learn how to use them because bad actors are doing it faster.

The fact that media organizations are dragging to keep up with that is embarrassing. Because it’s not complicated – these are all free things. It doesn’t cost any money to start a YouTube channel and then take your 22-year-old news desk person and say, “Can you vlog the news story for the next five days?” [A colleague] is trying an experiment on Instagram where if users ask questions a lot in the comment section of a post, she’ll then bring on one of our reporters, and they’ll just like do a Q&A on Instagram, and the engagement is huge!

It’s a really exciting time to do a million things… So that I’m optimistic about.

Ryan Broderick was a guest scholar at the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, which in 2018 focused on Re-Imagining Journalism: News and Storytelling in an Age of Distrust.