Eat, drink and be free

Matthew Longo wasn’t there that historic day on August 19, 1989 next to the border to Austria, to the West and to deliverance from the scary clutches of communism. But he has recreated the event, talking to people who were present or who were directly involved, including then-Prime Minister of Hungary Németh Miklós, to organisers of that defiant day and to former East Germans among the hundreds who risked all to make their escape.

Longo is an American academic who received his PhD from Yale University in Connecticut and now is Senior Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He teaches political theory, focusing on problems of borders and migration, and examining sovereignty, authority and freedom. He says he is a child of the 1980s and did not hear of the story of the picnic until he had spent years researching the United States-Mexico border and its security expansion after 9/11, the Islamic suicide attacks on the US in 2001.

In his view the picnic in a field at Sopronpuszta has been largely omitted from history books because it is pushed aside by the macroscopic, ie large-scale, politics of the end of the Cold War – Gorbachev and Reagan, the machinations of Moscow and Washington.

He set out to discover more, not just the circumstances surrounding the occasion but the wider picture of how the triumph and liberties of 1989 are now slipping, not least in Hungary itself under the increasingly authoritarian grip of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but in the West too, riven by inequality. How, Longo, asks, did we get from the revolutionary fervour of tearing down the Berlin Wall to the present-day age of erecting barriers, not least by Orbán, the political firebrand of 1989, on the Hungary-Serbia border?

And so, it is autumn 2018 and Longo is on one of his first trips to the Hungarian borderlands, with László Nagy, secretary and unofficial ambassador for the Pan-European Picnic ’89 Foundation. But first the author turns to the genesis of the whole idea, which goes back to a young Hungarian radical, Ferenc Mészáros, in June 1989.

Mészáros was at a dinner in the Grand Hotel Aranybika Debrecen with Otto von Habsburg, heir to the long-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire, who in 1989 was vice-president of the European Parliament and President of the International Paneuropean Union. Habsburg was a guest lecturer at the Kossuth Lajos University founded before the First World War by his father, and he used the opportunity to connect over dinner with newly allowed political groups opposed to the communist government.

As the night grew longer and the drinks flowed, Mészáros floated to “Uncle Otto” his notion of a gathering near the Austrian border, perhaps an afternoon picnic, at which Hungarians and Austrians could be permitted to come together in a tiny gesture towards a new pan-European spirit. While the fledgling Hungarian democracy movement originally dismissed the plan as trivial, it gained support and traction over that summer.

When Mészáros raised his idea again at a meeting of the new Magyar Demokrata Fórum opposition group, they had more important items to deal with, but he gained the help of Mária Filep, who came from a long line of anti-communist dissidents. With Mészáros as a dreamer and Filep as a doer, they became the nucleus of a team to hold the picnic, in August.

As Longo points out, great geopolitical shifts always happen at both a macro and a micro scale. The possibility of relaxing border controls had been set in motion that March by Hungary’s communist but reformist leader Miklós Németh in a meeting in Moscow with the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who surprisingly suggested he would not stand in the way of greater openness.

Németh’s government took a series of tentative steps to test that commitment, first symbolically shutting off power to part of the electrified border fence in May 1989 then, shortly after, Németh sacked cabinet members he had inherited and put in his own men, the first autonomous government in the entire communist world. A week later, on May 18, Németh signed an official decree that the Iron Curtain would be dismantled in Hungary.

The following month a ceremony was convened for the reburial of Imre Nagy, the former Prime Minister who had been hanged by the Soviets for his role in the 1956 Uprising. Next, on June 27, 1989 Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn and his Austrian counterpart Alois Mock symbolically cut barbed wire at the border fence.

The political ripples of these provocations were the backdrop for the proposed picnic, a spontaneous possibility that would have seemed hopeless only a year before but which was now given tacit approval by Németh’s ministers. Longo met Németh at the latter’s retirement cottage beside Lake Balaton, and he interviewed other important political figures of the time, also Mészáros and Filep and some of the East Germans who found their lives transformed.

Mészáros had no real idea when he proposed his summer party that by the time it came about, tens of thousands of East Germans, sensing the change of political mood in Hungary, would have taken the opportunity to “holiday” there in the hope of escape to the West.

Németh’s earlier challenges to the Iron Curtain had been tolerated  because the border itself remained heavily controlled. Actually opening it at the moment was out of the question. Bonn, Washington and Moscow each basically said it was Hungary’s problem.

The East Germans were shadowed by scores of Stasi secret police and it took courage by couples and young families to wait in parks and campsites around Sopronpuszta. And so the picnic went ahead: “A brass band boomed across the field. Goulash cooked in giant pots over open flames; beer and wine were there for the taking. People danced around a bonfire.”

Longo sets some of the Germans’ stories alongside those of the Hungarian border guards – also interviewed by him – who, having been ordered to relax the sentry posts for a few hours so that invited Austrians could attend, found themselves instead facing a stampede through an opened gate. Those chaotic moments of split-second decision-making – to shoot or not to shoot – fell to Árpád Bella, whom Longo found still living in a village near Sopron. He was the commanding officer at the checkpoint, and became an unwitting hero by standing aside.

How many got into Austria – 600, 1000? No one counted. Later, some other people would claim unjustified credit for the greatest breach of the militarised border in Cold War history. Árpád Bella, though, was modest. Mészáros and Filep too, even though they were often overlooked for commemorative events.

For Longo, a whole field of political philosophy opens up. This is his second book, and it won the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He takes a slightly academic but nontheless very readable approach to his thoughtful account of the before, the during and the after of the momentous event in a Hungarian field on August 19, 1989.