1989

Old Pozsony road at the Austrian border between Sopronpuszta and Sankt Margarethen, north of Sopron, Western Transdanubia (Sopron)

Border Gate on the Old Pozsony Road, Sopron

Shortly before three in the afternoon of 19 August 1989, during a 'Pan-European Picnic' on the Austrian border near Sopron, several hundred East Germans push through a rusty, wooden-framed wire gate on the old Pozsony road and run into Austria while the Hungarian border guards stand aside. The largest escape from East Germany since 1961 helped bring down the Berlin Wall less than three months later.

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Year: 1989
Where: Western Transdanubia (Sopron) · HU
Era: Contemporary
Coordinates: 47.757, 16.622

The moment

A three-hour opening in the Iron Curtain

The plan was symbolic. For three hours on Saturday 19 August 1989, Austria and Hungary agreed to open an old gate on the road from Sankt Margarethen in Burgenland to Sopronkőhida, north of Sopron, during a "Pan-European Picnic".

The picnic was organised by Hungarian opposition parties, among them the Hungarian Democratic Forum and Fidesz, under two patrons: Otto von Habsburg and Imre Pozsgay, the reformist minister of state. On the meadow stood a wooden stage and trestle tables with beer, wine and goulash, under banners showing a dove breaking through barbed wire.

The gate gave way shortly before three

Shortly before three in the afternoon, several hundred East Germans rushed the gate: a rusty wire gate on a wooden frame across the narrow road, still padlocked. They forced it open and ran into Austria, where journalists and an Austrian television crew were waiting.

The four Hungarian border guards on duty stood aside. Their commanding officer, Árpád Bella, did not intervene, and whether a shoot-to-kill order was still in force that day remains disputed. Between 600 and 700 people crossed that day; one count gives 661.

It was the largest escape from East Germany since 1961, the year the Berlin Wall went up. The danger had not passed. During the night of 21 to 22 August a 36-year-old East German, Kurt-Werner Schulz, was killed trying to cross the Austro-Hungarian border.

The fence had been cut in June

Hungary had already begun to take down its part of the Iron Curtain. On 27 June 1989 the foreign ministers Gyula Horn of Hungary and Alois Mock of Austria cut through the border fence together, a symbolic act that announced its dismantling.

Along the road, the old barbed-wire fence had been partly cut away by visitors taking pieces home.

After the picnic, events moved fast. On 11 September Hungary opened its border to East Germans, and some 30,000 left for the West. On 9 November, less than three months after the picnic, the Berlin Wall fell.

Hungary's gift to German unity

Hungarians remember the picnic as their gift to German unity.

On 4 October 1990, the day after reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl reminded Germans in Berlin that it was in Hungary that "the first stone was knocked out of the Wall".

The field by the old border is now a memorial park, and the site carries the European Heritage Label. At nearby Fertőrákos stands a stainless-steel sculpture by Gabriela von Habsburg, put up in 1996. The gate itself was a flimsy thing of wire and wood. What went through it that afternoon was not.

Sources

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