“Culture creates Tolerance – Using Culture to spread Peace”. 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 Foundation, which has been organising such events for well over a decade now, can rightly lay claim.

This achievement includes the initiation and organisation 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 colourful 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 realisation 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 Foundation, represented by its president Günter Titsch, has been awarded the KulturPreis Europa 2006 (European Culture Award 2006).

The KulturPreis Europa has been awarded every year since 1993. The 2006 winner 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 award is presented by the KulturForum Europa to people who devote their energies to making sure that other people realise that the European idea provides a chance to set an example of peaceful co-existence by different peoples, whose diversity is viewed as a welcome virtue, a valuable contribution, an opportunity to help solve the many continuing 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 Foundation has a vital role to play in achieving this European goal for the world.

Dieter Topp

President KulturForum Europa