Will I love The Picnic?

In August 1989, I helped some East Germans escape to the West and later wrote about this in Picnic at the Iron Curtain. I was a young reporter based in Hungary and those were chaotic days with momentous changes to cover every month. There was little time to step back and reflect, which is exactly what Matthew Longo has done with his excellent account of The Picnic some thirty years later.
This event, where hundreds of East Germans ran across the border in a human stampede from Communist Hungary to freedom in Austria was, according to the former German Chancellor… show more.

I’m a sucker for books about historical events that leave you keenly aware of how easily a big transformation could have turned out differently—or not happened. In this case, the end of Communist Party rule across the former Soviet Bloc is the transformation.

In providing a fresh perspective on this oft-covered subject, the author zeroes in on a small and largely forgotten incident: a picnic. It took place on the border between Hungary and Austria in 1989. It might never have happened if an Iron Curtain border guard had not decided to look the other way at a particular moment,… show more.