On 19 August 1989, some 20,000 people gathered in a field near the Hungarian city of Sopron, close to the border with Austria, for an outdoor party. “A brass band boomed across the field. Goulash cooked in giant pots over open flames; beer and wine were there for the taking. People danced around a bonfire.” The festival, jointly organised by several Hungarian opposition parties, was billed as a pan-European picnic, a celebration of brotherhood between nations. The revellers included a large contingent of refugees from the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), who had entered Hungary in their thousands earlier that summer. During the picnic, an estimated 600 East Germans breached the border and made their way to the West German embassy in Vienna. Crucially, the border guards never opened fire.
As Matthew Longo explains in The Picnic, the event would come to be seen as a harbinger. Three weeks later, the Hungarian government formally opened the border. The GDR leadership appealed to the USSR to step in, prompting fears of a repeat of 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest and brutally crushed a popular uprising. However, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, declined to intervene, saying the policing of the border was a matter for Hungary. Within days, around 30,000 East German refugees entered West Germany; just a couple of months later, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. That day, too, the border guards opted not to use force.
The Picnic is a brisk and engaging account, told in a lively blend of novelistic narration and reportage and featuring interviews with a number of people closely involved in these historic events. They include Ferenc Mészáros, the pro-democracy activist who conceived the picnic; Miklós Németh, Hungary’s last communist prime minister; Árpád Bella, the commanding officer in charge of border security that day; and Harald Jäger, the East German border guard who famously opened the gates of the Berlin Wall on the day it came down. Longo, who teaches political theory at Leiden University, is interested in the obscure alchemy of that period of transition, and the philosophical quandaries faced by individual citizens: “What do you do when you lose faith in the moral force of the law? How do you weigh the demands of conscience against personal risks, when the ramifications of your actions might hurt the ones you love?”
Németh’s reformism had laid some of the groundwork: earlier that year, he signed an official decree declaring his intention to dismantle the barbed-wire fencing along the border; a section of it was snipped in a symbolic ceremony in May. “From one day to the next,” writes Longo, “the border guards went from being respected standard-bearers of the state, to being told (loosely) to turn a blind eye to border transgressors.” But that “loosely” is key: change was gradual and piecemeal – there was nothing certain or inevitable about it: “This was a period of indeterminacy, beset with risk.” The border with Austria was very much in force on the day of the picnic, and the guards would have been technically within their rights to open fire. “They chose to look away. This is a moral stand too.”
It’s an uplifting tale, but Longo takes care not to oversentimentalise it. He situates Hungarian anti-communism within a broader tradition of nationalism that extends to the xenophobic politics of the incumbent prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who features in these pages in his youthful iteration as a liberal upstart. Indeed, the internationalist idealism that inspired the picnic’s organisers feels almost quaint today. Though Hungary joined the EU in 2004, pan-Europeanism, as a political project, has gained little purchase in the former Soviet sphere: anti-Brussels resentment has fuelled the popularity of Orbán’s Fidesz party as well as Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is particularly strong in former GDR states.
The vexed question of sovereignty – how exactly you define it, what you can and can’t do to defend it – is one of the defining political problems of our time. 1989, it turns out, was just the start.
• The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo is published by Bodley Head (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
