Thank you very much for your laudation, dear Ms Goulard,

sehr geehrter Herr Mirow, sehr geehrter Herr Voßkuhle, wehrte Mitglieder der Jury, sehr geehrte Frau Ministerpräsidentin Rehlinger.

Dear Mr Kiefer, the topic of borders is also a very important and very touching one for us.

When we first walked through the crowded hangar halls of the emergency shelter of the former Tempelhof Airport in 2016 to invite the newly arrived children to make music with our string instruments, we could not have imagined receiving this award today with our orchestra.

HANGARMUSIK and "Demos" played a concert on 22 January this year in the middle of Anselm Kiefer's artworks at the Pantheon Paris, without knowing that this day would bring us together.

We are happy to receive the sponsorship award with our friends from the orchestra project Demos of the Philharmonie de Paris. Already in 2018, a Demos orchestra from Montbéliard was our guest in the customs garage of the airport. On the occasion of France's EU Presidency, we travelled to Paris for the first time in 2022 to be part of the orchestra Demos Europe.

I grew up in Saarland on the German-French border. As a child, when I looked at the world map on the wall in my father's room, I always asked myself: Why was I born right here? Although we had to pass through a border control, I felt that France was part of my homeland. Later I experienced that border can have a completely different meaning, that was in Greece. It was a shock!

In 2021, we spent nine months there in the hotspot Vial at the so-called European external border, working with refugee children and young people on violins and cellos on music by Beethoven and Mahler. And all this in the midst of misery, hardship, despair and ongoing pushbacks in which refugees continue to lose their lives in the Mediterranean to this day. Three weeks ago, this situation reached a shocking, unimaginable scale.

Zadie Smith writes in the epilogue to Toni Morrison's story "Recitative":

"Wanting to be heard is what makes people human. If we are not heard, we are nobodies. As soon as one consciously turns away from any form of suffering, one transforms the boundary between us and the rest of humanity, which should actually be permeable, into something rigid and death-bringing. One claims not to want to be bothered with the history of the nobodies, with the suffering of the nobodies."

The young musicians who play here today may come from a wide variety of countries around the world, but Berlin has become a home for all of them. It is all the more incomprehensible that some of our orchestra members, even after years, still have no prospects of staying, or are not even allowed to leave Berlin, despite good grades at school as integrated Berliners.

Due to a political decision in 2015, refugee families and their children were able to come to us across the borders. Will this still be possible in the future? Is it fate or random luck to be born in Europe? Can humanity have limits?

There are no borders in music. We can play it together anywhere without speaking the same language. Out of love for music, empathy, humanity and responsibility for the people forced to flee, a musical community has emerged.

(Leila Weber)

"Sound miracle machine made of people" – So hat Nikolaus Harnoncourt defined what an orchestra is. Here sits such a "sound wonder machine". "Children play orchestral music". With this credo we have created a musical sanctuary where children, young people and adults make music together: HANGARMUSIC.

Empty strings D,A - D,A, plucked on a string instrument are immediately part of a sequence from Gustav Mahler's 1st Symphony - in the original key! This enables beginners and professionals to make music together from day one. You will hear this in a moment in our last musical contribution.

Creating one's own sound within a community is also a deeply democratic process. It promotes the awareness that "my voice" counts, my "contribution" is noticed. At the same time, it teaches responsibility for the community. Because a tone that is missing is a loss for all! The beauty of orchestral music is that even where it contains dissonance, in the end there remains common ground. That is also the difference to sport. In sport there is competition, the fastest wins. With us, the fastest never wins.

Orchestral music cannot be categorised nationally either. It reflects the history of humanity as well as the history of the musicians. We all know the term: "Made in Germany". Today we hear music "Made in Germany" - and in the end no one will ask: "Made from which nationality?"

Let us therefore expand the term "nation": Nation, that is we who together enrich this country, we who together make music resound and listen to it.

Leila Weber has just pointed out the alarming political situation within which our work operates. In the writings of Fritz Bauer we have found a leitmotif for this. Mr Voßkuhle, you know what we are talking about. More than 60 years ago, he formulated a compass to guide human action:

"We cannot make heaven out of the earth, but each of us can do something to prevent it from becoming hell."

By honouring Demos and HANGARMUSIK, you are drawing attention to the art form of orchestral music, whose potential as an integrative and social force is still given far too little attention in this country. France is already a big step ahead with the DEMOS project.

We would like to thank the children and young people of HANGARMUSIK as well as our team for their enthusiasm for making music together, the private sponsors without whom we could not realise HANGARMUSIK. We are happy that some of you are here.

And of course we thank the German National Foundation, you Mr Mirow, Mr Voßkuhle and the jury, you Ms Goulard and Ms Klaus with your team.

From the bottom of our hearts we thank Anselm Kiefer! For your generosity, and for opening our senses with your work. What you make possible through the prize money is far more than the promotion of musical work with children and young people.

They enable us to make the world more humane after a hell.

Thank you!!!

(Andreas Knapp)