Pan-European Picnic

Background

In the summer of 1989, tens of thousands of East German citizens were holidaying at Lake Balaton in Hungary. Hungary had already begun dismantling barbed wire and electronic surveillance along its western border that May, and on 27 June, Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock symbolically cut the border fence together. Rumours of a porous border spread quickly among East German vacationers.

The idea for the Pan-European Picnic originated in June 1989 conversations between Otto von Habsburg, last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary and President of the Paneuropean Union, and Ferenc Mészáros of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). They saw a border-opening ceremony as an opportunity to test Soviet tolerance, and Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh supported the plan. The official emblem was a dove breaking through barbed wire.

The Day

On the afternoon of 19 August, the border gate on the old Bratislava Road between Sankt Margarethen and Sopronkőhida was opened for three hours. Walburga von Habsburg represented her father, and dissident writer György Konrád addressed the crowd. Shortly before 3 p.m., hundreds of East Germans appeared over a hill, pushed open the gate, and poured into Austria. The commanding Hungarian border officer, Árpád Bella, instructed his guards not to intervene; a total of 661 people (some sources say roughly 700) crossed that day.

Németh later recalled: 'I was in my office all day, I was nervous, very nervous. Luckily, there was no knocking on my door by the Soviet ambassador, no telephone calls from Moscow.'

Aftermath

Hungary briefly restored border controls after the picnic, but on 22 August Németh flew to Bonn and told West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that returning East German refugees was out of the question. Kohl relayed the decision to Gorbachev, who called Németh 'a good man.' On 11 September Hungary opened its border fully to East German refugees; 30,000 fled to the West in the following weeks.

After his fall, Erich Honecker said of Habsburg: 'This Habsburg drove the nail into my coffin.' At the 20th-anniversary commemoration in 2009, Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked Hungarians: 'Two enslaved nations together broke down the walls of enslavement.' The event is commemorated annually at the Sopron memorial park, which has received the European Heritage Label.