Throughout Michael Longo’s The Picnic, I was fascinated by the relationship between Austria and the Hungarian resistance. Early on in the book, we see young activists embrace Otto von Habsburg, the would-be heir of their former imperial force. To these young revolutionaries, Austria represented freedom and life beyond repressive communist rule. I understood both their initial skepticism and their eventual admiration; there was a palpable sense of hope and even shared identity.

What surprised me a bit was the way Austrian officials seemed to meet this sentiment with a sense of responsibility. As the Eastern German refugees of Hungary finally broke through the Iron Curtain, they were met immediately with warmth and acceptance from the Austrian government, taken to inns, given food, and being transported to Vienna (Longo 161). I was initially taken aback when I read this, and then tried to understand why I had reacted that way. In my lifetime, aside from perhaps a short period after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I have never seen a population of refugees greeted with such immediacy, responsibility, and even an apparent sense of joy. Granted, this was a single paragraph from an author’s perspective detailing one mayor at a heightened and momentous occasion. But the reception still felt different to the headlines I grew up reading about Syrian or Central American families fighting for a space to exist.

Reading Jessica Goudeau’s The Last Border helped to verbalize some of these swirling questions and the context behind them. Borders have always existed out of fear for the other. The first immigration restrictions in the U.S. were born out of intense fear of the “cultural threat” that Chinese immigrants brought to California in the 1880s (Goudeau 95). Eugenics drove the quota systems of the early 20th century (Goudeau 97). And the iron curtain was “A shield defending them from the forces of capitalism and unrepentant fascism inherent to the west” (Longo 23). The immigration history I have learned about for years is one of cruel, racist, eugenetic and harshening restrictions on those trying to enter the United States.

I hadn’t learned about the period that Goudeau describes directly after WWII, where the U.S. threw open its doors to displaced Europeans. I was fascinated by the way it happened, built upon an identity of powerful benevolence and heroic saviorism. Was this replicated in Austria? Did it welcome Eastern German refugees to show itself as a symbol of freedom and opportunity? Or was there a true, lingering identity of kinship? Did the welcome last as more refugees came? Was this a universal reaction or was there opposition? How did that feeling change once the wall came down for good? This is a part of the world and story I know very little about, I look forward to exploring it through the lens of reporting. Journalists were present at every stage of these stories, capturing people in intimate, often tragic moments. What is a journalist’s responsibility in these moments? When are they being exploitative?