27.6.1989: An ever closer Europe

In the spring of 1989, Hungary – at that time still a communist dictatorship – started to dismantle the border fence between Austria and Hungary. On 27 June 1989, Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn made a powerful symbolic gesture: together, amid a flurry of camera flashes, they cut through the Iron Curtain at Klingenbach. The images were seen around the world and became icons of the upheaval of 1989 and the beginning of the end of the East-West division of Europe. The next day, Horn wrote to Mock about the example set „for the removal of all barriers that still separate the eastern and western parts of our continent.“

The event at the border did not fail to have an impact, as it could be seen on television in democratic West Germany (FRG) and in large parts of communist East Germany (GDR). The photos and television images became a „signal for change,“ as the Chancellor of the FRG, Helmut Kohl, put it. Tens of thousands of citizens of the GDR learned that this border was open. They fled to the West via Hungary and Austria during the summer, shaking the GDR regime to its foundations. The tearing down of the Iron Curtain was the beginning of an unstoppable dynamic that culminated in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.