European Leaders Remember Picnic That Opened Iron Curtain

E.U. countries remember the Pan European Picnic, one of the key events that led up to the Collapse of Communism, today. Twenty years ago a picnic on the Austro-Hungarian border led to an exodus of East Germans.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, as well as Hungarian President László Sólyom and Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai will be present at the unveiling of Miklós Melocco’s statue Breakthrough, Statue of European Freedom. The occasion marks the 20th anniversary of the first time tourists from the then East Bloc countries were able to cross into the West, according to the Hungarian-language site, Magyar Nemzet. The holders of the Pan European Picnic planned to have it in No-Man’s Land, but could only sit on either side of the border. However, the border was opened for a few hours, and despite Hungarian Border Guards’ standing orders to shoot border-crossers, East German tourists in Hungary took the chance to cross into Austria.

Lobenwein Tamás/Paneurópa Piknik

The First Of Many East Germans Taste Freedom

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The numbers of East Germans taking the route through Czechoslovakia into Hungary, and then crossing into Austria kept increasing and eventually resulted in crises in East Germany itself, known then as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and ultimately contributed to the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent Collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Bloc.