And here she was. Unbelievable. But here she was standing. Right in front of me. In natura. The German chancellor Angela Merkel, said to be the most important and most powerful woman in the world, was in Burgenland - no, at least a few steps away.

August 19th, 2009, the community of Sopron / Ödenburg celebrated the 20th anniversary of a remarkable event. Exactly 20 years before, a Paneuropa-Picknick (“Pan-European Picnic”) was held at the Austrian-Hungarian border between St. Margarethen and Sopronköhida. The idea was an innocuous get-together of people from both sides of the border. Don´t forget that then the Iron Curtain was still there, although in a few kilometers distance the barbed wire had already begun to be removed. But there was the gate, as wide as the road was. And the gate was to be opened for just three hours, from 3 to 6 in the afternoon. They were supposed to be three hours of freedom.
Between 600 and 700 East Germans (citizens of the “GDR”, the “German Democratic Republic”) used to flee to the West after they had first been alerted by leaflets of the organizers of the Pan-European Picnic. The Hungarian border guards, however, reacted calmly to the impending mass exodus and did not interfere. This was a very hard decision, especially for Arpád Bella, the chief border officer. Lack of clear instructions from his superiors, he ordered his border guards to simply ignore the illegal cross-border walkers. He told his subordinates just to turn away from what happened and so not notice what was going on there. But doing so he violated his duty and risked a prison sentence, but otherwise almost certainly prevented a bloody escalation of the situation. If anything had happened here, if just someone had shot and any person had been injured, things had been taking another issue.
Some thousand citizens of the GDR were waiting some kilometers behind the border. They didn´t trust the rumors and so, for the present, had to stay in Hungary. A few weeks later the Hungarian government opened the borders definitively.

Last August, hundreds of people came to that place to celebrate this historic event of 1989, among them Carl Bildt, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden, László Solyom, Federal President of Hungary, and Angela Merkel. And many of the former refugees have also made their way to St. Margarethen.
It was a great day for the audience on both sides of the festival square. We happened to catch a view of so many important European politicians, but we also got a small glimpse of what had happened in 1989.

Mag. Walter Dujmovits jun.