European Culture Award 2006

“Culture creates Tolerance – Spreading peace with the help of culture”. To serve this motto by creating an opportunity for choirs from all over the world to meet and compete in peace and harmony is a remarkable accomplishment. And it is an achievement to which the INTERKULTUR organization can rightly lay claim since it has been organizing such events for far over a decade now.

This achievement includes the initiation and organization of the Olympics of Choral Music, the WORLD CHOIR GAMES, an event which has grown in stature and importance over the years and continues to do so. Culture, including music, is something that can transcend borders and bring people of different nationalities and cultures together. It represents a stone in the colorful mosaic of world cultures and is truly worthy of promotion. Music is a valuable element in the overall cultural and social heritage of each and every individual state and it is vital that we integrate and use it, especially at a time when intellectual, cultural and social aspects that contribute to the realization of this idea are under threat from nationalistic tendencies that overlook the value of this community as a whole.

It is both a privilege and a pleasure for me to announce, that the INTERKULTUR organization, represented by its President Günter Titsch, has been awarded the KulturPreis Europa 2006 (European Culture Award 2006).

KulturPreis Europa 2006 (European Culture Award 2006). The KulturPreis Europa has been awarded every year since 1993. The winner of 2006 is a worthy and natural successor to the previous laureates, Annemarie Renger, former President of the German Bundestag, Prof. Dr. Helmut Zilk, mayor and state governor of Vienna, Prof. Dr. Dr. Dimitris Th. Tsatsos, a specialist in international law from Greece, Johannes Rau (former state Premier of North-Rhine Westphalia and former President of the Federal Republic of Germany), 3sat, the international public broadcaster run in co-operation by ZDF, ORF, SRG and ARD, (D,A,CH), Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna, and the American author Jeff Baron, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (Turkey), the European Broadcasting Union/EUROVISION (CH), the Budapest Spring Festival (HU) and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, former German Foreign Minister (D).

This prize is awarded by the KulturForum Europa to people who devote their energies to the European idea and its distribution. These laureates make sure that more people realize that the European idea provides a chance to set an example of peaceful co-existence of many different people, whose diversity is viewed as a welcome virtue, a valuable contribution, an opportunity to help solving the diverse upcoming problems we face today, and not as something terrible, something alien, that needs to be destroyed.

Europe and the Olympic ideal of peace go hand in hand and the INTERKULTUR organization has a vital role to play in achieving this European goal for the world.

Dieter Topp

President KulturForum Europa