The Picnic
The Picnic won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2024 and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown. In August 1989, a group of 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.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- Random House
- Year
- 2024
- ISBN-13
- 9781529920994
- Genre
- History
- Topics
- Cold WarFall of the Berlin WallEast German escape
Awards
If you liked The Picnic, you could also like these
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
Anna Funder
1 win · 12 score
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War
Deborah Cohen
1 win · 5 score
Resistance: The Underground War in Europe 1939-1945
Halik Kochanski
1 win · 8 score
Orwell’s Roses
Rebecca Solnit
0 wins · 7 score
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism
Tina Rosenberg
2 wins · 24 score
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956
Anne Applebaum
1 win · 8 score
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Benjamin Nathans
1 win · 15 score
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941
Stephen Kotkin
1 win · 5 score
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
Rebecca Donner
1 win · 10 score
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
Kapka Kassabova
0 wins · 8 score
Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism: 1919–1945
Julia Boyd
1 win · 8 score
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Tony Judt
0 wins · 11 score
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
David Remnick
1 win · 16 score
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955
Harald Jähner
0 wins · 7 score
Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference
Herbert Feis
1 win · 12 score
Similar Topics
The Fate of the Earth
Jonathan Schell
1 win · 20 score
Cold War
...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
Walter A. McDougall
1 win · 16 score
Cold War
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
Frances FitzGerald
1 win · 16 score
Cold War
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
William Taubman
1 win · 12 score
Cold WarPostwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Tony Judt
0 wins · 11 score
Cold War
A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War
Melvyn P. Leffler
1 win · 8 score
Cold War
Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
McGeorge Bundy
0 wins · 8 score
Cold WarIron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956
Anne Applebaum
1 win · 8 score
Cold War
The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
Odd Arne Westad
1 win · 8 score
Cold War
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
Richard Rhodes
0 wins · 4 score
Cold War