Cracks in the Iron Curtain: Remembering Hungary’s ‘Pan-European Picnic’

“Hungary was where the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall” ~ former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, speaking to mark the reunification of Germany on October 4th 1990.

Today marks the anniversary of  another key event linked to the collapse of communism across East Europe in 1989. Twenty years ago today, 19th August 1989, was the date of the Pan-European Picnic organised along the Austro-Hungarian border, in a field  just outside the Hungarian city of Sopron.

The premise of the picnic was fairly simple: organised by members of the growing anti-communist opposition parties in Hungary, the event was planned as a peaceful event to demonstrate increasing Hungarian freedom under Glasnost, and to promote friendship between East and West. Austrian and Hungarian authorities agreed to open a small stretch of the common border at  Sopronpuszta for just three hours, at 3pm, in order to allow small delegations representing both countries to conduct ‘an ordinary exchange of greetings between local populations’ on either side of the Iron Curtain. On the day, however,  hundreds of East Germans arrived at the picnic to attempt to walk across the border into Austria. A sizeable  group of around 600 people made it across the border that afternoon, in the first large-scale exodus of East German citizens to the West since the construction of the Berlin Wall back in 1961.

Cracks in the ‘Iron Curtain’ between Austria and Hungary were increasingly evident in the months leading up to August 1989 – most notably demonstrated on 27th June when then Austrian and Hungarian Foreign Ministers Alois Mock and Gyula Horn were photographed using bolt cutters to tear holes in part of the barbed wire fence marking the border between their countries:

Cutting the Iron Curtain: Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counderpart Alois Mock work together to dismantle part of the 'Iron Curtain' between Austria and Hungary in June 1989.

However, the border between Austria and Hungary was not officially thrown open until September 11th 1989, and at the time of the Pan European Picnic, the Hungarian border guards were still officially working under orders to ’shoot to kill’ anyone who attempted to cross into Austria illegally. Thus the events of 19th August were seen (as former Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth described earlier this week) as ‘a test of Gorbachev’s word‘ that he would not intervene militarily to prevent the cross-border movements of people, as the Hungarians remained unsure how Moscow would react. When confronted with the large group of Germans intent on attempting to breach the border,  Lt. Col. Arpad Bella, acting commander of the Hungarian border guards on duty at Sopronpuszta that day,  described how he had “just a few seconds” to decide what course of action to take in the absence of any clear orders from above. He decided that he “did not want to be a mass murderer” so he would “do the right thing“, and ordered his guards to stand aside and allow the people to pass, observing the reactions of those who had made it safely onto Austrian soil:

“What I saw on the other side was amazing. There were people who in their panic kept running further even though they were on Austrian land. There were people who just sat down on the other side of the border and just either cried or laughed”.

19th August 1989: 600 East Germans cross the border from Hungary into Austria at the Pan-European Picnic.

Laszlo Nagy, one of the main organisers behind the picnic, has claimed that at the time ‘we didn’t feel like we were making history‘ describing the events of 19 August 1989 as ‘just the world’s greatest garden party‘. In the intervening twenty years however, and in the context of events that took place later in 1989, the significance imbued on that day has increased. Earlier this week, Jose Manuel Barroso (current President of the European Commission) issued a statement claiming that the events at Sopronpuszta had ‘helped to change the course of European History’ marking ‘the beginning of the end of the division of Europe by the Cold War‘, while  Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt (representing the current EU Presidency) also referred to the anniversary in his online blog, where he stated that:

“What happened attracted enormous attention and set in motion the process which saw the wall fall in Berlin on November 9 … for the appearance of a hole in the Iron Curtain means that the curtain in its entirety became worthless. It was like a gigantic dam which suddenly had developed a little hole somewhere. And it was at Sopron where everything really begun to crack in all seriousness”.

To mark the anniversary of the Pan-European picnic an official ceremony is being held today at Sopronpuszta, where Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom, Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel are making commemorative speeches, meeting with some of the East Germans who crossed the border twenty years ago, and unveiling a monument called ‘Breakthrough’ to formally mark the 20th anniversary of events.

You can read more about Border Guard Arpad Bella’s account of the events of that day here,  in a recent article from The Times Online, (published on 14th August 2009):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6795400.ece

While former Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth spoke to the BBC World Service about his decision to open the border here:

Miklos Nemeth on Opening Hungary to the West

And the BBC Website also hosts this video clip, of the first East Germans to cross from Hungary to Austria twenty years ago today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8210356.stm

Building the Berlin Wall

48  years ago today, the world witnessed the birth of one of the most iconic and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

13th August 1961: On this morning 48 years ago,  residents of the German capital Berlin awoke to find barricades had been erected across their city overnight, dividing East from West. These hastily constructed barbed wire barriers later assumed more permanency when they were rebuilt as a solid concrete structure that came to be known as the Berlin Wall.

In essence, Berlin had already been divided for 16 years, ever since the post-War Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945), where the respective leaders of the victorious Allied powers (the USA, USSR and UK) formally agreed on the division of occupied Germany, and the German capital Berlin (which lay deep within the Soviet area of control), into four separate ‘zones of influence’.  As their wartime camaraderie quickly faded and the Cold War took hold, tensions soon became evident, as had been demonstrated by the Berlin Blockade (1948) and the Soviet crackdown on workers revolts in East Germany in 1953. The Berlin Wall, however, was something new. On the 12th August SED leader Walter Ulbricht signed an official order closing the border, and as a result, on the morning of 13th August 1961, residents of East Berlin awoke to find barriers cutting across streets and through neighbourhoods,  dividing them from their friends and family in the Western sector. Police and soldiers were on the streets patrolling the barricades, while most people reacted with confusion and after 15 years of communism, resigned acceptance, as some rather bemusedly waved to their former neighbours, people they could still see, but no longer reach. Berlin was now divided, not just ideologically and politically, but physically. On 15th August the first concrete blocks were laid, and construction of the famous wall began.

The Building of the Berlin Wall:

The border dividing Berlin soon developed from the rather rudimentary barbed wire rolls hurridly unfurled, to its more common recognisable form: comprising a 27 mile long concrete structure, marked by periodic watchtowers and staffed by armed guards who had orders to shoot anyone attempting to breach the wall on sight, while other guards undertook foot patrols along its perimiter, accompanied by trained guard dogs. Travel between East and West was only possible through official checkpoints, with a special travel permit issued by the SED required. The reality meant that most East Berliners would remain ‘walled in’ for the next 28 years, as the SED publically proclaimed that leaving the GDR was ‘an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity’, although this didn’t stop the SED sometimes forcibly shipping dissidents off into exile to West Berlin, essentially using it as a dumping ground for ‘troublesome elements’ within the GDR.

1963: US President Kennedy makes his famous ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech in West Berlin:

The official East German justification for the Berlin Wall was that it was an ‘anti-fascist protection mechanism’ built to protect East Berliners from evil outside forces that threatened to undermine the stability of their ’socialist people’s paradise’. In truth however, the wall was clearly erected to keep people in, rather than to keep people out. Between 1949-1961 almost 2.5 million East Germans had left for the West, and in July 1961 alone, shortly before the border was closed, 30,000 citizens of the GDR had crossed Berlin to enter the Western zone. Figures such as this meant the GDR risked ‘collapse by emigration’. This mass-exodus of Germans from East to West is the most popularly cited reason for the building of the Wall, and while it is clearly a valid argument, a recent book throws some new light on Ulbricht’s decision to close the border. In Driving the Soviets Up The Wall: Soviet-East German Relations 1953-1961 (2005, Princetom University Press) Professor Hope Harrison uses evidence from recently declassified Soviet and GDR documentation to argue that part of Ulbricht’s rationale behind building the Berlin Wall was to increase tensions with the West and thus ensure the Soviets were obligated to continue supporting the GDR. Overnight, the division of Berlin became a fait accompli and while the Western powers issued verbal condemnation of Ulbricht’s actions, they were unwilling to take any firm action that may risk a confrontation with the USSR (Kennedy was said to have remarked that ‘a wall is better than a war’ when told about developments in Berlin).

June 1987 – US President Ronald Reagan makes his famous speech demanding ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ at the Brandenburg Gate:

For the next 28 years, the Berlin Wall would act as the principal symbol of the Cold War division of Europe. Between its initial erection in August 1961 and the fall of the Wall in November 1989, many East Germans attempted to breach the Wall and cross into the West despite the obvious dangers:  using forged documentation, concealed in vehicles or even simply trying to climb over the wall and run across the border. Some were successful, but many others were not: official estimates state that around 136 people lost their lives in attempts to breach the wall, however earlier this week an activist  group estimated that the total number of people killed trying to flee from East to West Germany between 1945 and 1989 could total up to 1,347 (see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/world/europe/12briefs-Germany.html and  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=aLml6KENi4KI for details on both of these figures).

With so much attention focused on commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in November this year, itcould be easy to overlook the anniversary of  it’s initial construction, but earlier this week the 48th anniversary of the building of the Wall was commemorated in Berlin. On 12th August a service was held at the Chapel of Reconcilliation, part of the Berlin Wall Memorial Centre on Bernauer Streeet (the scene of some of the most dramatic attempts to escape ‘over the wall’), while in a separate ceremony a plaque was unveiled in memorium of some of the Wall’s victims, people who died trying to escape into West Berlin. Speaking at this memorial service, German Pastor Manfred Fischer perhaps summed up the legacy of the Wall most poignantly, when he stated that the Berlin Wall ‘divided our city right through its heart. It divided Germany. It divided Europe‘.