It has now been 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall — one of the most potent symbols of the division of the continent of Europe after the second world war. In that time, the optimism of 1989 and the steady accession to the EU of formerly communist central and eastern European countries in the 2000s has given way to democratic backsliding.
The shadow of eastern Europe’s communist past, and the history of its sometimes rocky relations with the west, is worth revisiting if we are to understand the region’s current predicament.
András Simonyi, a 67-year-old former Hungarian ambassador to Nato and the US, illuminates what life was like for a teenage boy growing up behind the Iron Curtain — and how western music defied the censors to reach a hungry audience.