Events on August 19 in history

Several hundred East Germans cross the frontier between Hungary and Austria during the Pan-European Picnic, part of the events that began the process of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Pan-European Picnic (German: Paneuropisches Picknick; Hungarian: pneurpai piknik; Slovak: Paneurpsky piknik) was a peace demonstration held on the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron, Hungary on 19 August 1989. The opening of the border gate between Austria and Hungary at the Pan-European Picnic turned to be another initiative of widely building peaceful chain reaction, at the end of which there was the German reunification, the Iron Curtain fell apart and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. The communist governments and the Warsaw Pact subsequently dissolved, ending the Cold War. As a result, this also led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.The idea of opening the border at a ceremony and testing the Soviet Union's response came from Otto von Habsburg, the then President of the Paneuropean Union, and was brought up by him to Mikls Nmeth, the then Hungarian Prime Minister, who also promoted the idea.The Pan-European Picnic itself developed from a meeting between Otto von Habsburg and Ferenc Mszros of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) in June 1989. The local organisation in Sopron took over the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the other contacts were made via Habsburg and the Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay. The Austrian Paneuropean Union and the MDF took care of advertising the event with leaflets that were distributed in Hungary. The patrons of the picnic, Habsburg and Pozsgay, who were not present at the event, saw the planned event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev's reaction to an opening of the border on the Iron Curtain.The official emblem of the picnic was a pigeon breaking through the barbed wire. At the picnic several hundred East German citizens overran the old wooden gate, reaching Austria unhindered by the border guards around rpd Bella. It was the largest mass exodus since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. The Hungarian borders were opened on 11 September, and the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated in 1991.

East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, pronounced [ˈdɔʏtʃə demoˈkʁaːtɪʃə ʁepuˈbliːk] (listen), DDR, pronounced [ˌdeːdeːˈʔɛɐ̯] (listen)), was a state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in eastern Germany as part of the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. Commonly described as a communist state, it described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state". Its territory was administered and occupied by Soviet forces following the end of World War II—the Soviet occupation zone of the Potsdam Agreement, bounded on the east by the Oder-Neisse line. The Soviet zone surrounded West Berlin but did not include it and West Berlin remained outside the jurisdiction of the GDR.

The GDR was established in the Soviet zone while the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany, was established in the three western zones. A satellite state of the Soviet Union, Soviet occupation authorities began transferring administrative responsibility to German communist leaders in 1948 and the GDR began to function as a state on 7 October 1949, although Soviet forces remained in the country throughout the Cold War. Until 1989, the GDR was governed by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), although other parties nominally participated in its alliance organization, the National Front of the German Democratic Republic. The SED made the teaching of Marxism–Leninism and the Russian language compulsory in schools.The economy was centrally planned and state-owned. Prices of housing, basic goods and services were heavily subsidized and set by central government planners rather than rising and falling through supply and demand. Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviets, it became the most successful economy in the Eastern Bloc. Emigration to the West was a significant problem as many of the emigrants were well-educated young people and weakened the state economically. The government fortified its inner German border and built the Berlin Wall in 1961. Many people attempting to flee were killed by border guards or booby traps such as landmines. Those captured spent long periods of time imprisoned for attempting to escape. In 1951, a referendum in East Germany regarding the remilitarization of Germany was held, with 95% of the population voting in favour.In 1989, numerous social, economic and political forces in the GDR and abroad, one of the most notable being peaceful protests starting in the city of Leipzig, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the establishment of a government committed to liberalization. The following year, a free and fair election was held and international negotiations led to the signing of the Final Settlement treaty on the status and borders of Germany. The GDR dissolved itself and reunified with West Germany on 3 October 1990, with the former East German states reunified with the Federal Republic of Germany. Several of the GDR's leaders, notably its last communist leader Egon Krenz, were prosecuted by the Federal Republic after reunification for offenses committed during the Cold War.Geographically, the GDR bordered the Baltic Sea to the north, Poland to the east, Czechoslovakia to the southeast and West Germany to the southwest and west. Internally, the GDR also bordered the Soviet sector of Allied-occupied Berlin, known as East Berlin, which was also administered as the state's de facto capital. It also bordered the three sectors occupied by the United States, United Kingdom and France known collectively as West Berlin. The three sectors occupied by the Western nations were sealed off from the GDR by the Berlin Wall from its construction in 1961 until it was brought down in 1989.