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.
