ESCAPING THE FIRST COLD WAR TO LAND IN THE SECOND COLD WAR: 3/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West.
Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls?
Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment.
1956 BUDAPEST
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a CVSI on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Matthew |
| 0:08.2 | Matthew Longo. His new book is The Picnic, a dream of freedom in the |
| 0:12.1 | collapse of the iron curtain. The masters of |
| 0:15.4 | Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact, are not present. We're going to a campsite |
| 0:19.9 | called Ferto Rockish. It's on the edge of a lake that extends from Czechoslovakia and also reaches |
| 0:29.4 | into Austria. This is the border lands between Hungary and freedom. |
| 0:35.0 | The town nearby is Sofron, |
| 0:38.0 | and the gathering at the campsite |
| 0:41.0 | are people from Czechoslovakia from Hungary and the East Germany |
| 0:46.4 | known as the GDR those are the most important of all because they are the most |
| 0:52.1 | oppressed of all they've passed through Czechoslovakia |
| 0:55.8 | and camped at this place for a celebration that is to take place August 19th. It is the night |
| 1:02.1 | before. It is August 19th. It is the night before. It is August 18th. |
| 1:04.0 | Matt, what is the expectation of the next day when everybody gathers for the party? |
| 1:10.0 | So it's a particularly fraught moment. In the government, in the halls of power in Budapest, you have people sitting by the phones, terrified that the Soviets are going to move. Someone is going to shut everything down. All the organizers are terrified, so much so that |
| 1:26.0 | Maria, who had been on the phone with the border guards, have been planning things |
| 1:29.5 | for weeks at this point, even the day before, August 18th, still calls the border guards just to check the border |
| 1:37.9 | stays open because she didn't entirely believe it would go off without a hitch. You have a lot of tension in the campsites, so there's a very, in this story, the focus is on a particular campsite, which John mentioned outside Fertorakosh, which is filled with East Germans. These are East Germans fleeing the |
| 1:55.4 | GDR, which is the socialist half, or communist half of what is now unified Germany, who under the leadership of Eric Hanuker had become one of the most constrained states, |
| 2:08.0 | very tight in its controls. |
| 2:11.0 | But even that spring, people in East Germany had begun to receive some news that there had been some work done on the Iron Curtain and hungry, that the electric fencing had been rolled up, that maybe just maybe it would be possible to cross. |
| 2:27.4 | So by August 18th that summer, hundreds of thousands of East Germans had come to Hungary, |
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