Anniversary: 50 years of the Deutsche Welle
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The Humboldt Foundation is not the only one celebrating an anniversary this year: the Deutsche Welle, which broadcasts all over the world in more than 30 different languages, is also celebrating its 50th anniversary. And since June the two organizations have even become neighbours. Just a few hours after holding a reception for 500 Humboldtians and their families at the annual meeting, Federal President Johannes Rau opened the new broadcasting studios of the German foreign broadcasting service in Bonn.
On the 3 May 1953 the Deutsche Welle started broadcasting for the first time - radio in German on short-wave. At the launch, Federal President Theodor Heuss addressed "our dear fellow countrymen all over the world" and expressed the wish for a "relaxation" in Germany's foreign relations. Over the years, the station's cultural policy brief has been extended. The Deutsche Welle is supposed to "provide radio listeners abroad with a comprehensive picture of political, cultural, and economic life in Germany and present and explain German attitudes on important issues". This was how the Deutsche Welle Law of 1997 defined the station's task. In the current year it has a budget of 277 million Euros at its disposal.
In future the Deutsche Welle will make its range of programmes even more regional. "It is very important to us to intensify intercultural dialogue, particularly with the Islamic world", the director of the Deutsche Welle, Erik Bettermann, explained on the occasion of the anniversary. "But we don't only report on what is going on in Germany but in the target areas, too, of course. In this way, the foreign broadcasting service can function as a kind of preventive foreign and security policy. It ensures the free flow of information in war zones and trouble spots."
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