“The pulling down of the Berlin Wall began in Sopron,” stated Lothar de Maiziere, East Germany’s last prime minister.
On the outskirts of Sopron, a small town on the border between Communist Hungary and democratic Austria, they had a picnic – a most unusual picnic. The organizers wanted to “act out the future in the present.”
The governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary first planned to build dams in Gabickovo, and Nagymaros as a large-scale navigation and hydroelectric power system in the 1950s. For the first thirty years of planning, the repressive politics of the Soviet regime kept dissent to a minimum.
In the 1840’s there were high tensions between Hungary and the Austrian Empire. Hungary, a part of the larger Austrian Empire, was characterized by nationalistic fervor and that feeling erupted in a violent insurgency in 1848. Franz Josef, the emperor of the Austrian Empire, forcefully put down the rebellion, with assistance from Russian military forces.
