○On August 19, 1989, about 20,000 people gathered in a field near the Hungarian city of Sopron, near the Austrian border, for an outdoor party. “The sound of a brass band echoed through the field. Goulash was cooked over an open fire in huge pots. Beer and wine were available. People were dancing around the bonfire.” The festival was held in Hungary It was jointly organized by several opposition parties and was billed as a pan-European picnic celebrating brotherhood between nations. Participants at the spree included a large contingent of refugees from the Communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), who had entered Hungary in their thousands earlier that summer. An estimated 600 East Germans broke through the border during the picnic and made their way to the West German embassy in Vienna. Importantly, border guards never fired.
As Matthew Longo explains in Picnic, this event would come to be seen as an omen. Three weeks later, the Hungarian government officially opened its borders. East German leaders called on the Soviet Union to intervene, raising fears of a repeat of 1956, when Soviet tanks entered Budapest and brutally suppressed a popular uprising. However, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused to intervene, saying border security was a Hungarian problem. Within days, approximately 30,000 East German refugees entered West Germany. Just a few months later, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The Border Patrol also chose not to use force that day.
Picnic is a lively and engaging account, told in a vivid combination of novelistic narration and reportage, and featuring interviews with many of the people closely involved in these historical events. Among them is pro-democracy activist Ferenc Meszaros, who invented the picnic. Miklós Nemes, Hungary's last communist prime minister. Arpad Vela, the commander in charge of border security that day. and Harald Jaeger, the East German border guard famous for opening the gates of the Berlin Wall on the day it fell. Longo, who teaches political theory at Leiden University, is interested in the unknown alchemy of transitional times and the philosophical predicaments faced by individual citizens. How do you weigh the demands of your conscience against your personal risks when the consequences of your actions could harm someone you love?”
Nemeth's reformism laid some of the foundations. Earlier that year, he signed an official decree declaring his intention to remove barbed wire along the border. A portion of it was cut in a symbolic ceremony in May. “From one day to the next, the Border Patrol went from being a respected standard-bearer for a nation to being (roughly) told to turn a blind eye to border violators,” Longo writes. . However, this word “gently'' is important. Change was gradual, piecemeal, and there was nothing certain or inevitable about it. “These were uncertain times full of risk.” On the day of the picnic, the border with Austria was heavily guarded, and technically the guards would have been within their rights to fire. “They chose to look the other way. This is also a moral position.”
It's an uplifting story, but Longo is careful not to make it overly sentimental. He situates Hungarian anti-communism within a broader tradition of nationalism that extends to the xenophobic politics of current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and in this page describes the young Orbán as a liberal upstart. is featured. Indeed, the cosmopolitan idealism that inspired the picnic's organizers feels almost quaint today. Although Hungary joined the EU in 2004, pan-Europeanism as a political project has little support in the former Soviet Union. Anti-Brussels resentment is particularly strong in the former East German states, including Prime Minister Orbán's Fidesz party and Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
After newsletter promotion
