Trabant parade remembers the first crack in Berlin Wall

(AP)

A procession of restored Trabant cars streamed through a replica of a metal gate this weekend, commemorating the place and time, 20 years ago, when Hungary and Austria opened the first breach in the Iron Curtain and, in former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl's words, "took the first brick out of the Berlin Wall".

In the summer of 1989, this rural area was one of the most tense places in the world, as central Europeans tested the will of Mikhail Gorbachev's Kremlin to preserve the Soviet empire. On 27 June, the tension was suddenly defused when the foreign ministers of the two countries but the barbed wire with giant bolt-cutters.