When a helicopter flew over, a shock passed through the crowd. Parents grabbed their children and hunched over them to shield them from potential gunfire. It was 19 August 1989, and there was great fear among the East Germans who were walking through a field in Hungary towards the border with Austria. From there, they were going to flee to West Germany.
Farther on, Hungarian soldiers were stationed at what had long been a heavily guarded border, part of the dreaded Iron Curtain separating Eastern and Western Europe. Would they open fire on them? The group started running towards the fence that marked the border crossing. The final metres felt endless to Annette, an East German woman in the group. Along with the hundreds of fellow refugees, she sprinted towards the fence, which collapsed under their weight.
‘Then she heard a bang, very loud, and close,’ writes Leiden assistant professor of political science Matthew Longo in his recently published book The Picnic. ‘As though someone had opened fire. This is it, she thought, this is how it ends.’ But it was not bullets Annette had heard, but a champagne bottle being uncorked by an Austrian. ‘”You made it”, he said. “You’re free.”’
DOUBTING BORDER GUARDS
In The Picnic, which was met with glowing reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among others, Longo describes how a barbecue at the Hungarian-Austrian border played a part in bringing about the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He outlines how, in the late 1980s, more and more holes appeared in the Iron Curtain. The story closely follows the key players of that time: the doubting border guard, the fearful refugee, the brave organisers of the barbecue and the pondering politicians. Once the Wall has fallen, it soon becomes clear that the newly gained freedom is very relative.
‘I’m a border nerd’, says Longo. ‘At a conference in Budapest, I spoke about my previous book which focuses on the border between Mexico and the US. There, the Hungarian László Nagy gave a lecture on the 1989 Pan-European Picnic on the border between Hungary and Austria which he had helped organise. I didn’t know about that event at the time, and as a border expert, that’s unacceptable, of course.’
The idea was to organise a party in a field near the Hungarian city of Sopron to celebrate European unity and freedom, a cheerful protest against the communist leaders with goulash, sausages, dancing and music. In the end, it became much more than just a barbecue. Hundreds of East Germans, who, after seeing the flyers, had travelled to Hungary via Czechoslovakia, crossed the border. The border guards decided not to intervene, although there was absolutely no certainty beforehand that they would not pull the trigger.
This created the largest hole in the Iron Curtain since the start of the Cold War. It was ‘the place where the first stone was removed from the Wall’, as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl would later say.
WEAK SPOT
Together with Nagy, Longo visited the remote field where the picnic was organised. ‘After all these years, he was still baffled that the East Germans had ended up in such an obscure place in his country. He called it the anus of the world.’ Why it was precisely this place that became the weak spot in the border with the West was not just due to the activists who organised the barbecue, but also to Hungarian politicians. ‘The picnic could be seen as the spark that ignited it all, but the hay and petrol were already there.’
One of the political leaders was Miklós Németh. Hungary’s last communist prime minister wanted to implement reforms. The only question was what Soviet leader Gorbachev would do if he were to cut holes in the curtain. Because in 1956, the Hungarian uprising against authoritarian regime in the country had been brutally crushed by the Soviets. This had caused a national trauma. ‘But this catastrophe motivated Hungarians to realise that dream of freedom after all.’
On the way back, Németh realizes that it is not Gorbachev who poses a threat to Hungary, but the possibility that hardliners in the Kremlin are going to depose the Soviet leader. And so, he proceeds to implement reforms as quickly as possible, before it is too late.
In the GDR, the situation was very different from that in Hungary. Political leader Erich Honecker and the feared Stasi still seemed to have the country in an iron grip. The fact that only a few months after the picnic, the GDR regime would collapse practically overnight, is something hardly anyone expected. Tens of thousands of East Germans made their way to Hungary in hopes of finding a way to the West. Longo spoke to some of them who crossed the border into Austria in the summer of 1989.
One of the most remarkable stories is that of East German Katja and West German Oskar. They met at the age of 17 in 1987 in the Soviet Union while on a school trip. Once they got back home, they kept writing each other letters and fell in love. Eventually, they crawled through the hole in the fence together shortly after the picnic. The shock of life in the West was intense for Katja. When she was looking to buy sanitary pads in a supermarket, she came back out crying. The sheer number of products, colours and prices was too overwhelming, says Longo. She simply didn’t know what to do.’
NOVEL’S PLOT
The stress of the new-found freedom drove the couple apart. The relationship ended in 1989 and Katja and Oskar did not speak to one another for years. ‘Here in the West, we’re obsessed with the importance of what we consider freedom. But the fact that not everyone shares that perception is difficult for us to understand. We find it hard to accept when people say: “No, no, no, I don't want this.”
But in 2000, when they both had families, the two reconnected. In 2010, they met again to look at their Stasi files together, and in the summer of 2015, they visited the place where they crossed into Austria. That rekindled their love. That night, Oskar asked Katja to marry him. She said yes.
Longo: ‘It sounds like something you might write as a plot for a novel, but this actually happened.’
Matthew Longo, The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain. Vintage, 320 pgs. €22,95
In Matthew Longo’s The Picnic, numerous bizarre tactics are described by which the communist regime tried to keep the population or reformist politicians under control.
Margret, one of the East Germans who was interviewed by Longo, lived on the border with West Germany. Western TV signals could easily be received there, but it was strictly forbidden. To check whether people were secretly watching enemy TV, the authorities had devised a trick. The children’s TV series Unser Sandmännchen was broadcast in both countries, but in different versions. In each episode, a vehicle was introduced: a bicycle, a lorry, or a rocket: in the GDR, the vehicle would appear on its own, in the West, it would arrive on a cloud.
At schools in the East, teachers would ask the children what they had seen the night before. If they mentioned the cloud, their parents would be reported to the authorities.
On the political level too, fear of change sometimes led to surreal situations, Longo writes. The reformist Hungarian prime minister Miklós Németh was not popular among his fellow leaders. Especially Romanian dictator Ceaușescu wanted nothing to do with him and would rather see him gone.
It was in 1989 that Németh had to attend the Warsaw Pact summit in Bucharest. The Hungarian delegation had been allocated a number of villas in the city. Before the prime minister entered, security performed a check. The team came back out with disturbing news: radioactive material had been found, in lethal doses.
‘Those were well-known tactics in those days,’ explains Longo. ‘The delegation decided to sleep in the garden. They didn't have tents, so they slept on mats under the open sky. Fortunately, it was a balmy summer night.’
