Pan-European Picnic

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 19th of August 1989, a few hundred people gathered at a border meadow near Sopron, Hungary, for what was advertised as a peaceful outdoor picnic. The event had a wooden stage, wine, beer, grilled food, and goulash. Its official emblem was a dove breaking through barbed wire. By early afternoon, the border gate swung open. Within hours, the Iron Curtain had cracked. The Pan-European Picnic was the moment that started a chain reaction ending with German reunification, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and the close of the Cold War. But how did a picnic accomplish that? Who planned it, who knew about it, and who deliberately looked the other way? The answers involve a Habsburg prince, a reformist Hungarian prime minister, thousands of East Germans stranded by a lake, and a KGB-trained Soviet leader who simply chose not to pick up the phone.

• 2. The Idea and Its Authors

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  At a dinner following Otto von Habsburg's speech at the University of Debrecen on the 20th of June 1989, two representatives of the Hungarian Democratic Forum sat across from the heir apparent of the House of Habsburg. Mária Filep and Ferenc Mészáros proposed holding a picnic at the Austro-Hungarian border to celebrate the bonds between the two nations. Habsburg had addressed the audience that evening on the subject of Europe without borders; the picnic idea grew directly from that conversation.

  Habsburg had been active in this region for years. The Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union, which Karl von Habsburg had led since 1986, had been supporting opposition and freedom movements across Central and Eastern Europe. The Hungarian secret police, known as Department III, recorded the first trace of the picnic idea on the 10th of July 1989, noting that the thought arose during Habsburg's Debrecen visit. By the 31st of July, the department had been informed of active preparations.

  The idea was brought to Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh, who embraced it. Németh and Habsburg both understood the picnic as a way to probe how the Soviet Union would respond to a border opening on the Iron Curtain. The patrons they recruited, Habsburg and reformist Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, planned not to attend the event themselves. That distance was part of the design: if Moscow reacted badly, the picnic would appear to have been a minor local affair beyond their control.

• 3. East Germans at the Lake

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  Each summer, East German citizens vacationed on Lake Balaton in Hungary, where they could meet relatives and friends from West Germany. In the summer of 1989, many simply did not go home. Prime Minister Németh described receiving news that after two or three weeks of holiday, a growing number of GDR citizens had decided to stay. Camping sites around Lake Balaton and Budapest were described as completely packed, including along the roads, with no facilities nearby.

  By Németh's estimate, roughly 100,000 East Germans were effectively stranded in Hungary. Hungarian law did not permit him to simply send them west; doing so would have provoked East German leader Erich Honecker and hard-liners in Moscow. Sending them back east meant returning them to possible imprisonment or serious harassment, a practice Németh said he had been obligated to carry out for years via special Stasi-organised flights. The numbers had grown far beyond that option.

  Earlier in 1989, GDR Interior Minister Friedrich Dickel had asked Hungary to restrict travel opportunities because of inadequate border security, but Stasi chief Erich Mielke had refused to press the issue. The Hungarian government had already been quietly dismantling its western border infrastructure. On the 27th of June, Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock and Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn had cut the border fence in a symbolic ceremony. The formal dismantling had begun on the 2nd of May. For Németh, the Pan-European Picnic offered a way to resolve the refugee problem while letting the Soviet Union's silence do the work of authorisation.

• 4. Leaflets and the Machinery of Invitation

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  The Pan-European Picnic was organised on the ground by four Hungarian opposition parties: the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Alliance of Free Democrats, Fidesz, and the Independent Smallholders, Agrarian Workers and Civic Party. The MDF handled local logistics, including permits, benches, a stage, and food. They also designed the leaflets that proved decisive.

  The MDF distributed Hungarian-language leaflets inside Hungary and German-language ones in Austria. The Austrian Paneuropa Union, under Karl von Habsburg's leadership, distributed thousands of German-language leaflets in Hungary itself, targeting the East Germans on holiday there. Radio Freies Europa also publicised the event. According to one account, leaflets were attached to parked cars at a Formula 1 Grand Prix near Budapest in early August. The advertised motto of the event was also "Dismantle and take with you", meaning every visitor was entitled to cut a piece of barbed wire from the old fence and keep it.

  The Stasi was not unaware. Their ambassador in Budapest sent a warning on the 11th of August 1989 about the planned picnic and the border opening. The GDR Politburo discussed the event. But Honecker was absent due to illness, with Günter Mittag presiding, and no countermeasures were ordered. The operational group of the East German Ministry for State Security stationed in Hungary also had prior knowledge and also took no action. When the moment came, the Stasi's only task was to organise the return transport of the abandoned vehicles their citizens had left behind.

• 5. The Gate Opens

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  A border gate on the road from Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland in Austria to Sopronkőhida in Hungary was scheduled to open for three hours on the 19th of August. Walburga von Habsburg attended in her father's place, delivering his greetings. The Hungarian writer György Konrád, who until 1988 had only been permitted to publish his critical texts abroad, also spoke. Music was played from a wooden stage.

  Shortly before three in the afternoon, the first twenty or thirty East German citizens arrived at the still-guarded gate. They tore it open. Mostly young, they ran across to the Austrian side. An Austrian television camera crew was waiting. The crossing happened in three waves during the course of the picnic. The leading border officer on the scene, Árpád Bella, contributed significantly to the calm that followed; Hungarian border guards did not intervene. Thousands more GDR citizens waited further back, uncertain whether the border had truly opened, which is why the final tally that day was 661 people.

  In Budapest, Németh sat in his office all day. He recalled being nervous, very nervous, and waiting for a knock on his door from the Soviet ambassador, or a telephone call from Moscow. Neither came. That silence was louder than any official announcement. The very extensive media coverage that followed made clear to populations across Eastern Europe that the Soviet Union was not moving to stop what was happening, and that Eastern governments were losing the capacity for decisive action.

• 6. Honecker, Kohl, and the Opening of September

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  Erich Honecker told the Daily Mirror his version of events: Habsburg had distributed pamphlets right up to the Polish border, invited East German holiday-makers, and then given them presents, food, and Deutsche Marks before persuading them to go west. The statement achieved the opposite of its intention. European audiences read it as proof that the rulers of East Germany were powerless.

  On the night of the 21st-the 22nd of August, a 36-year-old East German from Weimar was killed at the border. The Hungarian government tightened controls again. But on the 22nd of August, Németh flew by helicopter to Bonn to meet with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and foreign secretary Hans-Dietrich Genscher. He told Kohl that Hungary would open its border and that all East Germans would be able to leave by mid-September. He recalled that Kohl, a big man, was moved to tears. Kohl then telephoned Gorbachev, who told him that Németh was a good man.

  On the 11th of September the Hungarian border opened fully, and 30,000 East Germans fled to the West in a single movement. After Hungary was effectively blocked, thousands more fled via Czechoslovakia, triggering a popular uprising. On the 17th of October Honecker was relieved of his position. On the 9th of November the gates to West Berlin opened. After his fall, Honecker said of Otto von Habsburg: "this Habsburg drove the nail into my coffin."

• 7. Commemoration and Contested Memory

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  The picnic site near Sopron now holds several monuments. A bell from the city of Debrecen stands there, alongside a pagoda from the Association of Japanese-Hungarian Friendship and a wooden monument unveiled by the organisers in 1991. In 1996, sculptor Gabriela von Habsburg erected a ten-metre stainless steel structure in Fertőrákos near Sopron. It represents a raised piece of barbed wire that, seen from a distance, takes the shape of a cross.

  On the northeast corner of the Reichstag building in Berlin, a memorial plaque marks the event. Annual commemorative ceremonies are held at the border on the 19th of August. In 2009, Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, attended the 20th anniversary festivities and thanked the Hungarians for their courage and foresight, saying that two enslaved nations together had broken down the walls of enslavement and that Hungarians had given wings to East Germans' desire for freedom. That same year, EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso described the picnic as something that helped change the course of European history.

  The history is not without dispute. The source notes ambiguities about the exact agreements between Habsburg, Németh, Pozsgay, and Kohl. Kohl himself is said to have remarked that it was all agreed beforehand. There are unresolved questions about whether the West German intelligence service BND and the Order of Malta, which had close ties to the Habsburgs, were involved in distributing leaflets to East Germans. The picnic has also been critiqued as a memory site shaped by politicians and media for their own purposes, with the role of the Hungarian opposition movement increasingly obscured while the Habsburg narrative was amplified. Walter Momper, mayor of West Berlin in 1989, offered a simpler observation: once East Germans could cross through Hungary and Austria, it became self-evidently absurd that there was still a wall right next to them in Berlin.