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Last broadcast on Mon, 9 Nov 2009, 23:00 on BBC Radio 3.
Synopsis
1989: Twentieth Anniversary
Series in which essayists from former Warsaw Pact nations reflect on the changing use and meaning of an apparently banal object.
Hungarian journalist Valeria Toth measures out her life in passports. We hear of the multiple passports of communist Hungary, with red for travel to Warsaw Pact nations, blue for travel outside the Soviet bloc and red with a blue stamp for non-aligned Yugoslavia. Special one-way passports are used to expel troublesome citizens. And passport anxiety continues into 1989, when thousands of East Germans enter Hungary and the ditch beside the border fills with discarded passports. Finally, a new era dawns in which - unthinkably - it's even possible to occasionally forget your passport.
Broadcast
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Mon 9 Nov 200923:00
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