What a beautiful summer’s day! A perfect day for a picnic outdoors, surrounded by friends and family. Spreading out blankets on the lawn, listening to music, playing cards, enjoying tasty morsels, spending a carefree and happy time together. Everyone brings something with them.
So what are we waiting for?
, many people asked 35 years ago today. You can just picture what it must have looked like when people were invited to the Pan-European Picnic, with flyers bearing handwritten directions promising hot and cold food on site
; what it sounded like here, cheerful and lively, like a traditional dance house
; what it smelt like here, like bacon and camp fires
and goulash of all kinds. Everything you needed for a picnic was there.
But the visitors attending the picnic from the GDR, who were enjoying their summer holidays in Hungary with their families, brought two more things with them: their passports. And all their courage.
There’s a saying in Hungarian: Sok kicsi sokra megy.
Translated literally, this means, or so I am told, many small things add up to a lot
. Or, as we might say in English, constant dropping wears away a stone
. What began here in Debrecen and in Sopron was something of a catalyst for what was brewing, providing impetus for what happened next – right up until the fall of the Iron Curtain 35 years ago. A picnic on a summer’s day turned into the largest mass exodus from the GDR since the Wall was built. The Pan-European Picnic marked the first crack in the Berlin Wall. Barely three months later, it, the Wall, had fallen.
There were, to my mind, two reasons why German unity was to take a decisive step forward in Hungary of all places:
Germans from East and West loved their holidays in Hungary. Family reunions between Germans from both sides of the inner-German border took place here each summer from the mid-1960s onwards. Quite understandably so, since, for the citizens in the GDR, the Alster in Hamburg was much further away than Lake Balaton. What is more, it was also particularly beautiful here.
A travel guide from 1988 put it thus: Each and every evening, Germans from East and West fraternise and play Doppelkopf. […] Hungary – a meeting point, transit country, bridge between East and West. The country plays host to thousands of disorderly encounters in a world that is otherwise so neatly divided into camps and cultures.
You could say that, in Hungary, Germans from East and West were reunited – under the grimly watchful eye of the Stasi at times – during the summer – via their shared love for the land of thermal baths, sun-ripened tomatoes and sweet wine.
But the second reason was still more important. The second reason was the Hungarians themselves. What began here on the border with Austria went hand in hand with societal upheavals. Hungary opened up to the West, joined the IMF and the World Bank, later on also the Geneva Refugee Convention, and as early as January 1988, Hungarians were able to travel freely thanks to what were known as "world passports". The Hungarians’ quest for freedom and democracy positively electrified the entire continent and made the country a driver of reform, a pioneer of change. And it made Hungarians themselves supporters of people who wanted to flee the GDR. In the weeks that followed the Pan-European Picnic, thousands of GDR citizens embarked on the journey to freedom via Hungary. From here, Hungary opened a window to the entire world. That is something we in Germany will never forget. And we will always be grateful to the Hungarian people for this.
The Pan-European Picnic, along with the singing human chain in the Baltic region and the Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, number among the pivotal freedom movements of the year 1989. Without Hungary, without the irrepressible, indomitable thirst for freedom of the people of Central and Eastern Europe, without their resistance to heteronomy and subjugation, without all that, German unity would have been inconceivable. We owe this unity also to the Hungarian people’s love of freedom and their passion for Europe. We need this passion for Europe also today!
Sopron is a symbol of European solidarity, of freedom and unity. Of self-determination as opposed to isolationism. These values unite us Europeans. And Hungary has been a member of the European Union since 2004. More than 83 percent of the people here voted to join the EU at the time. And also 20 years later, almost as many Hungarians say that they feel that they are citizens of the European Union.
I hope that we – Hungarians and Germans alike – will take this anniversary of Sopron as an opportunity to reflect once again on our common European purpose. I firmly believe that Hungarians and Germans need each other and that we both need the European Union. We developed the EU together and we want to shape it in the future together – as partners and as friends in the spirit of Sopron: with courage, underpinned by solidarity, freedom and unity.
