Austria

Did you know? The last crown prince of Austria-Hungary helped open the Iron Curtain: Otto von Habsburg was patron of the "Pan-European Picnic" on 19 August 1989 at the Hungarian-Austrian border. When the gate was opened for one symbolic hour, around 660 East Germans fled to the West – one of the first cracks in the Wall, months before it fell.

Did you know? Christine Nöstlinger grew up in the bombed-out Vienna of the Second World War — a child who learned early what fear and resistance meant. Her very first book, "Die feuerrote Friederike" (1970), told the story of a red-haired girl who turned the mockery she suffered into magic power. It launched one of the great voices in children's literature — always on the side of the small and the excluded.