The picnic that changed history The first holes in the Iron Curtain appeared on the Austrian-Hungarian border on August 19, 1989. The occasion was a peace demonstration called the Pan-European Picnic which saw the border gate symbolically opened for three hours. It happened on the road from Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland (Austria) to Sopronkőhida (Hungary). German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, speaking in 1990, said it was this event in Hungary that saw "the first stone knocked out of the [Berlin] wall."