Hans- Peter von Kirchbach

Ex Commander of the German Armed Forces

Transcending borders, soldiers should be present.

The beginning starts with a vision

People are different. Their cultures are different. Their habits are different. Their religions are different. Their languages are different. Differences separate people, making it difficult for living together.
Rivers separate people, sometimes states from states. Borders separate states from states and people from people.

People of different cultures can live together. People of different habits can live together. People of different religions can live together. People from one side and the other of a river can live together. People from one side and the other of borders can live together.
Borders are surmountable. Rivers can be spanned via bridges. Bridges can bring people together.
Beyond differences, bridges between state and man can be constructed. Beyond the differences in people there is humanity.
Art can build bridges between people.

People make art. They paint, sketch, sculpt, photograph, and print. They compare their works, participate in contests and are motivated through the positive from the critic. They work all over the world. German or Polish, Czech or American, Latin American or Asian. They work impartially from their race, employment, or class - men and women, director and employee, officers and soldiers, masters and apprentices, boss and secretary, doctor and nurse.
They build bridges with their art, symbolic or real. They build bridges among each other and to each other, spanning and surmounting their differences. People span their borders from both sides through collective artwork. There is always many who constantly come to this place, working under the best guidance from world renown artists, comparing and sharing their works, finding and exercising a universal language; art, the artistic work, living in their creations. Regardless of any differences they live as a part of humanity together. What they achieve and experience changes them and their lives. They take their experiences with them and change their environment. They build bridges from man to man, state to state, culture to culture, and religion to religion. This is no unrealistic statement but is actually in reality proven and lived.

People from all over the world create a network. Prominent personalities from politics, science, economics, and culture belong to it. Presidents and ministers, artists and scientists, surgeons and generals, ambassadors and envoys, and for the long term harmony of living together, artists are the ones that make this possible.

The most prominent of these people, statesmen, writers, artists, and many others handwrite their personal texts while other artists illustrate them with their own works. Portfolios of such collective works are exceptionally produced, enriching the world and are submitted into such renown collections as that of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Czeslaw Milosz, Alvaro Mutis, Arthur Miller, Mark Strand, Hans Magnus Enzensberger are personalities who stand for the vision. Richard von Weizäcker, Julio Maria Sanguinetti, Kurt Biedenkopf, Wolfgang Clement, Hilmar Kopper or Wolfgang Ischinger and many others are bound in the promotion of its ideas.

All feel obligated towards the vision and use their status to contribute towards the overcoming of borders and the principle of peaceful coexistence. The Société Imaginaire stands for the vision, for the method of its development, for the known and unknown people whom in the progression of the vision are tied together.

Batuz, the world renown artist is the heart and soul of the idea and the vision. He has developed it, lives it and has not only brought people from the elite together but in all many, whom through the works of the Société Imaginaire have been tied close together. He stands for the method and the progressive activities that unites the people in the principle of peaceful coexistence. He stands for the organization of the Batuz Foundation which has been already for the past twenty years dedicated to the task of bringing together foreign cultures and societies in a long term relationship. Batuz is the heart and soul of this happening.

Soldiers can be part of this net that connects people of different cultures. Numerous soldiers share the mentioned visions, and they contribute visions of their own.
Soldiers of the Bundeswehr have participated in the visible implementation of this idea. On the Oder and the Neisse rivers they have, guided by Batuz, symbolically and visibly overcome those rivers by their artistically designed helmets. In this way they have demonstrated what has actually been achieved after 1990 by the Armed Forces of Poland and Germany as a consequence of the peaceful revolution in Germany and the political rearrangement in Europe. After the often documented and admired action on Oder and Neisse the helmets took a rest at a camp until they were integrated into a new work of art in an old industrial building which the city had placed at the disposal of the artist. The new creation, open to the public, thus makes permanently visible its central idea.
The range of tasks for the Bundeswehr has changed. Fighting for human rights even outside Germany has become central. Providing support for the creation and reformation of public life is often part of that task. When called to action in great catastrophes, the soldiers of the Bundeswehr have gained the respect of the people in Germany and far beyond.
Soldiers of the Bundeswehr always discharge their duties within an international setting. They operate within a framework of alliances and beyond that they are interconnected with the armed forces of many countries in partnership for peace.

I consider it important that soldiers of the Bundeswehr and from many other nations participate in the continued implementation of this idea. It is planned to create a new great art work from the helmets of various armies. The helmets are meant to be connected to certain persons identified by name. At the same time this envisioned art work is to be used to initiate a world-wide communication. This is made possible by the new world-wide means of communication.
This is a logical, ambitious, but realistically workable continuation of the Oder-Neisse project.

The name Batuz is guarantee for the artistic quality. The Société Imaginaire acquires a new symbol that makes its ideas visible. Thus, art does not only speak to all people, illustrates that borders can be overcome, but art also leads to direct world-wide communication of people beyond all borders. I wish the project its well earned success and advise strongly to participate.

(Hans-Peter von Kirchbach)