February 2003 - Nr. 2
Spielberg Opens Youth Competition to Promote Tolerance
TWIG - During a news conference in Berlin on Sunday (January 26), U.S. film director Steven Spielberg invited German high school students to take part in a nationwide competition to promote cultural and religious tolerance. As head of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, dedicated to preserving the personal histories of Holocaust survivors, Spielberg said it had always been his goal "to overcome prejudice, intolerance and bigotry." The events of September 11, 2001 haven’t changed anything about the need to give tolerance a chance, he stressed. "We’ve been at the brink of many world crises ever since the Holocaust, and this is one more crisis," Spielberg remarked. "But the need for tolerance and education has always existed."
The contest challenges students to put together written, audio, or video accounts, build Internet sites or compose photo essays to promote understanding among countries, cultures and religions. The competition was first held in 2001, when the top prize went to a group of students from Hannover who worked with Jewish and Arab students from Israel to produce Gotthold Lessing’s Enlightenment drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) in three languages.
Education Minister Edelgard Bulmahn commended Spielberg on the contest and other contributions he has made through the Shoah Foundation. "It is our common responsibility to make sure that young people experience different cultures," Bulmahn said. "It is one of the most important contributions to our future." A CD-ROM featuring videotaped Holocaust accounts from the foundation’s archive has been adopted for use as a teaching tool in many German schools. Spielberg thanked Bulmahn for supporting the CD-ROM project. "I’d like to clone her," he quipped, "so that she could also do her outstanding work in the U.S., where tolerance education isn’t included in the curriculum." Bulmahn, who will serve on the jury of the youth competition, called on German citizens "to take care that today’s young people and the generations that follow come to grips with the Holocaust and its causes."
