Believing in a God means
understanding the question of the meaning of Life.
Believing in a God means
seeing that the facts of the world are not over yet.
Believing in a God means seeing that life has a meaning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Dear friends of the European Weeks,

This year our festival will be held under the motto “À Dieu – In Zeiten spiritueller Unruhe” (“À Dieu – In Times of Spiritual Upheaval”). It will be held during the period 23 June to 31 July in the most beautiful churches, abbeys and castles of the border triangle comprised of East Bavaria, Bohemia and Upper Austria. The programme features 83 events from the realms of music, theatre, reading, film, lecture, exhibition, panel discussion and natural history hike on the topic of spiritually related to the theme “God and Man”. For us the question of the meaning of life is also associated with the question pertaining to the ‘wherefrom and whereto’ of our mutual path as mankind, as well as the question pertaining to our personal freedom and limitations, and above all, our responsibility for ourselves, for our fellow human beings and not least, for the entirety of creation. A focal point of the programme – with which disorientation, increasing materialistic thinking and loss of values in our society shall also be counteracted – is placed on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who arguably like no other person stands for the spirituality and religiosity of an artist. The involvement of such important contributors as, among others, the theologian Johann Baptist Metz and the philosophers Robert Spaemann and Rémi Brague shows what it shall be about. We are very happy that our theme has been positively accepted and is welcomed by quite a few outstanding artists of our time. Among the personalities to be mentioned are the conductors Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Enoch zu Guttenberg and Andrea Marcon, the mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, the tenor Ian Bostridge, the flutist Massimo Mercelli, the clarinettists Sabine Meyer and Giora Feidman, the trumpeter Alison Balsom, the violinists Baiba Skride, Sophia Jaffé and Shlomo Mintz, the cellist Daniel Müller-Schott, the harpist Xavier de Maistre, the pianists Grigory Sokolov, Martin Stadtfeld, Ragna Schirmer, Evgeni Koroliov, Anna Gourari, Antti Siirala, Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen as well as the actors Erika Pluhar, Marianne Sägebrecht, Lambert Hamel and Stefan Hunstein.

For us it is a particularly great pleasure and honour that we have been able to acquire Dr. h.c. mult. Joachim Gauck – Chairman of the nationwide association “Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e. V.” (“Against Forgetting – For Democracy) – as patron for the 2011 festival. It also pleases us that he will deliver the commemorative speech for the opening ceremony. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to him and the Bavarian State Minister of Sciences, Research and the Arts, Dr. Wolfgang Heubisch, who will open our festival. Our very special thanks also goes out to our grant donors, at their vanguard the Free State of Bavaria and the City of Passau, then the Cultural Foundation of Lower Bavaria, the Diocese of Passau, all festival administrative districts, cities, municipalities and market towns, the Province of Upper Austria, the District of South Bohemia and the German-Czech Future Fond. We would also like to sincerely thank all our cooperation partners, the elected political representatives and above all the over 350 sponsors from the local, supra-regional and international economy, headed by our principal sponsors, the BMW Plant Dingolfing, Deutsche Bank Foundation, KNORR-BREMSE Commercial Vehicle Systems and ZF Friedrichshafen AG. Without their generosity and willingness to donate money – borne by a considerable feeling of responsibility for human beings and for the cultural life in our three-country region – we would not have been able to preserve the expected high artistic quality of the programme. All media who benevolently accompany our festival are also expressly thanked at this point.

In conclusion, we invite you, our venerated public, to study our programme with pleasure and to take part in all our events.