How a picnic led to the fall of the Berlin Wall - CSM

[pampango]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0910/p06s15-woeu.html

There has long been speculation as to what was going on behind closed doors in Budapest, Moscow, and Berlin, and whether key decisionmakers were aware of the potential consequences. Recent research suggests that while former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev tacitly approved the arrangement, neither he nor his colleagues in Hungary and East Germany realized the full implications.

By mid-August, some 60,000 East German "tourists" were camped out in Hungary, refusing to go home and actively seeking escape routes into Austria. Their underpowered Trabant automobiles lined the streets in Budapest and the resorts of Lake Balaton, many with the first and third letters of their East German "DDR" automobile stickers crossed out, leaving a "D", the designation for West Germany.

What happened over the following three weeks is still a matter of dispute. When Moscow and East Berlin failed to react to the "picnic" escape, Nemeth has said his government quickly decided they would soon open the border altogether, allowing the remaining 60,000 East Germans to leave. But events in the border zone in late August suggest there may have been a power struggle between hard-liners and reformers.

In reality, the effect was prompt, profound, and longlasting. The mass escape after Sept. 10 encouraged more East Germans – most of them young, skilled, and educated – to flee their country in the coming weeks and months. On Nov. 9, 1989, increasingly desperate East German authorities opened the Berlin Wall for the same reason they had built it: to discourage a mass exodus.

[David__77]

1. There was no power struggle in Hungary in August.

There was a problem of coordinating new orders. For decades, Hungary adhered to its Warsaw Treaty "obligations" and "commitments" regarding visitors from other socialist countries; it took time for the new order to set in.

The whole concept of preventing emigration is terrible. The East German rulers justified it because they said that getting a free education and then fleeing was tantamount to "stealing." That is wrong. And even if it is stealing, criminalizing it is a social evil. You have to make your social system attractive. Millions of East Germans chose not to flee prior to 1962. The socialist countries remaining today, with the exception of North Korea, do not prevent emigration, and that is the right thing to do.