The Essay - The World Turned Upside Down - Valeria Toth

Passports, garden chairs, cars or contraceptives. Four essayists from former Warsaw Pact nations reflect on the changing use and meaning of an apparently banal object - an object that unlocks a wider story about how daily life in their country was transformed by the dramatic events of 1989. In today's programme, the Hungarian journalist Valeria Toth measures out her life in passports. We hear of the multiple passports of communist Hungary, including 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. Producer: Julia Johnson.