Activities and affiliations

Diplomacy and international organization Hungary state institutions 1932–2013 ○ Illness

Hungarian foreign minister who cut the Iron Curtain, and reform prime minister

On 27 June 1989, Horn and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire fence on the Hungarian-Austrian border, cutting the first hole in the Iron Curtain before the cameras of the world.

A Hungarian reform-communist diplomat who became prime minister after democratization, Horn as foreign minister in June 1989 took bolt cutters to the barbed-wire border fence with Austria alongside Alois Mock, staging the iconic image of the Iron Curtain's demise. He drove the decision to open Hungary's border to East German refugees seeking passage to West Germany, a breach that helped trigger the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Leading the Hungarian Socialist Party to a landslide in 1994, he served as prime minister and imposed the Bokros austerity package, laying the framework for Hungary's market-economy transition. His political life embodied the contradictions of 20th-century Hungarian socialism, suspended between his service in the armed militia that crushed the 1956 revolution and his historic 1989 opening of the border.

Diplomacy and international organization Hungary state institutions 1941–

A historian who carried the memory of 1956 into diplomacy

At fifteen, he took part in the 1956 Revolution without a weapon.

Géza Jeszenszky is a historian who experienced the 1956 Revolution and a statesman who helped shape Hungary’s diplomacy during the transition from state socialism. He estimated that about 350 people were executed after the revolution, contributing to public memory of the repression’s scale. As a scholar he wrote on international-relations history and Hungary’s image abroad, while as a founding member of the Hungarian Democratic Forum he pursued new relations with the West.