The Picnic

In August 1989, three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-Soviet activists in Hungary won the permission of their reformist government - and tacitly of Gorbachev himself - to mount something unthinkable: a picnic in the no-go zone of the Iron Curtain, where people from either side of the border would come together for a one-off afternoon of togetherness. A cocktail of factors, including the determination and bravery of a handful of individuals, led instead to one of the largest ever breaches in the border as 600-1000 East Germans made a heart-stopping break for freedom.Through the story of this relatively unknown event, this taut, moving book explains how the fall of the wall and the end of Communism finally came about. It interweaves an in-the-room account of politics at the highest level, the pressure from underground activism, the cat-and-mouse activity of the border guards working on behalf of the Stasi and the lives of the families and couples who risked everything that day. It then traces their stories in the decades after the fall of the wall - the collapse of love affairs, the bitter reunions with abandoned parents, the ostracisation of 'Ossis' - throwing into question what kind of freedom they attained.Drawing on an astonishing array of interviews with all involved, The Picnic is a remarkable and intensely moving reconstruction of a pivotal moment when the tide of history turned, revealing the fragility of power and how all we take for granted can evaporate in an instant.