The Picnic

Winner of the Orwell Prize 2024- the exhilarating story of the greatest border breach in Cold War history

A gripping reconstruction of the daring escape to freedom of hundreds of East Germans in the summer of 1989 and how it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable- they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The stage was set for the greatest border breach in Cold War history. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union - the so-called end of history - all would flow from what happened next. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved, Matthew Longo reconstructs this world-shaping event and its tumultuous aftermath.