Founded in 1951, the Goethe Institut is Germany's most important cultural institution. With a network of 144 institutes and centres in 78 countries, cultural societies, reading libraries, examination and German language teaching centres, the Institute has played a key role in cultural and educational policies abroad for the fast five decades. Its Department for Culture offers a wide variety of topics in such fields as literature, philosophy, cinema and the audiovisual media, the plastic arts, architecture and design, music, and dance and theatre, placing particular emphasis on the latest trends and on dialogue between creators and promoters of culture in the different countries that it works in. The Goethe Institut faces the political and cultural challenges of globalisation by proposing the use of mutual understanding to develop innovative concepts for a more humane world in which cultural variety is acknowledged as a form of wealth and enrichment.