I'm John Bachelors, Professor Matthew Longo, his new book is The Picnic, a dream of freedom,

and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Thirty years later, there's a celebration for that. the In Domino fashion, the Iron Curtain countries fall.

The Berlin Wall, which is everybody's memory,

is November, early November that year,

Gorbachev hangs on for a little bit longer, but the

Soviet Union dissolves at the end of 1991.

It is now 30 years later and our intrepid professor scribe researcher Matthew Longo is visiting who remains

Nemeth for one, Agnes for another, who remains to remember and Lazzo Inage the man who is the

curator of documents from that moment and led Matt first to the border. So I'm interested to go to the border with

Matt today to this to the spot itself and what does it look like? The one thing and

this is a perverse irony of the Iron Curtain.

So for so many decades, the Iron Curtain was an area where there was no development.

That all there ever was was fencing and landmines and so, but there was never any kind of industry and there was no settlements.

That now the iron curtain is the most green part of Europe. In fact, for a lot of it's now a big green zone.

It's called a green belt because it's just essentially woodlands.

In Hungary, when you go to the site, what you see is the overgrown woods. The very woods,

the East Germans tried to pass through, this incredibly scary

dark wood at night when they're fleeing essentially armed guards, now is just

this beautiful pastoral space, its hills, its pastures, its trees, but it also has no sense of carrying this mark of history.

And so, Lazzlow has this profound way of referring to it as

Anus Mundi is how he describes it, this place that's completely unremarkable and

hidden into the into the bushlands between states in the peripheries.

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