233-Flight to Freedom
Futility Closet
Greg Ross
4.8 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2019
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1978 two families hatched a daring plan to escape East Germany: They would build a hot-air balloon and sail it by night across the border. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow their struggles to evade the authorities and realize their dream of a new life in the West.
We'll also shuffle some vehicles and puzzle over a perplexing worker.
Intro:
In 1993 Tom Peyer and Hart Seely found that Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto's utterances can be cast as free verse.
Jane Austen wrote three novels on a tiny table in her family's sitting room, subject to continual interruption.
Sources for our story on the East German balloon escape:
Jürgen Petschull, With the Wind to the West, 1980.
John Dornberg, "Freedom Balloon," Popular Mechanics 153:2 (February 1980), 100-103, 150.
Kate Connolly, "Film of Daring Balloon Escape From East Revives German Identity Debate," Guardian, Oct. 7, 2018.
"Man Who Fled East Germany in a Homemade Balloon and Whose Story Was Made Into a Film Dies," Sunday Express, March 15, 2017.
"Fleeing Communism in a Hot Air Balloon," BBC World Service, June 18, 2015.
Donata Von Hardenberg, "Escaping the East by Any Means," McClatchy-Tribune Business News, Nov. 12, 2009.
"Great Escapes," National Post, Nov. 7, 2009.
Scott Dick, "Those Who Risked It All on a Flight to Freedom," Daily Telegraph, April 13, 2004.
Alice Demetrius Stock, "Homemade Craft Made Daring Escape," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 3, 1995.
Paul Martin, "The House at Checkpoint Charlie: A Little West Berlin Museum Celebrates the Ingenuity of Those Who Conquered the Wall," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 7, 1986.
Victoria Pope, "Berlin Wall, 20 Years Later: People Still Try to Flee," Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 13, 1981.
"East-West: The Great Balloon Escape," Time, Oct. 1, 1979.
Michael Getler, "Harrowing Flight From East Germany," Washington Post, Sept. 28, 1979.
"Eight Flee East Germany in Homemade Balloon," UPI, Sept. 17, 1979.
"Günter Wetzel Und Peter Strelzyk," Haus de Bayerischen Geschichte Museum (accessed January 6, 2019).
Listener mail:
Wikipedia, "Road Space Rationing" (accessed Jan. 10, 2019).
Wikipedia, "Vehicle Restriction in São Paulo" (accessed Jan. 10, 2019).
Reddit legaladvice (accessed Jan. 12, 2019).
"I trained an AI to generate /r/legaladvice post titles, and it asks 'Is it legal for me to get in legal trouble?'," Reddit legaladviceofftopic (accessed Jan. 11, 2019).
Wikipedia, "Keyforge: Call of the Archons" (accessed Jan. 10, 2019).
"Archon Names," Fantasy Flight Games, Nov. 9, 2018.
"The Amazing KeyForge Deck Names," Heavy Punch Games (accessed Jan. 19, 2019).
Dave Lawrence posts lists of neural net outputs on his blog, Aardvark Zythum.
This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Peter Wilds, who sent this related link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle).
You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss.
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Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.
If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening!
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Futility Closet Podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. |
| 0:14.1 | Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from Phil Rizzuto's poetry to |
| 0:19.9 | Jane Austen's writing table. |
| 0:21.8 | This is episode 233. I'm Greg Ross. |
| 0:24.6 | And I'm Sharon Ross. |
| 0:26.4 | In 1978, two families hatched a daring plan to escape East Germany. |
| 0:31.6 | They would build a hot air balloon and sail it by night across the border. |
| 0:36.0 | In today's show, we'll follow their struggles to evade the authorities |
| 0:39.2 | and realize their dream of a new life in the West. |
| 0:43.1 | We'll also shuffle some vehicles and puzzle over a perplexing worker. |
| 0:53.8 | In 1978, East Germany was approaching its 30th anniversary as a sovereign state. |
| 0:59.4 | 17 million people lived behind a long, fortified border with the West. |
| 1:03.4 | They faced strong penalties for trying to escape, but each year thousands tried, |
| 1:07.6 | usually through unspectacular means such as traveling through a third country. |
| 1:11.7 | In the town of Persnake, 18 miles from the border, lived a man named Peter Streltsig, who was |
| 1:15.9 | increasingly unhappy with his lot. At age 37, he'd built a good life for himself, first as an aircraft |
| 1:21.6 | mechanic, and then as a self-employed electrician. His family had a comfortable life in the |
| 1:26.0 | upper middle class, with a car, a television |
| 1:28.1 | set, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. But during his lifetime, conditions in East Germany |
| 1:32.9 | had got progressively worse. Prices had spiraled, even basic consumer goods were now hard to find, |
| 1:38.2 | and freedom of thought and speech were tolerated less and less. He said later, it was always a |
| 1:42.8 | torture for me because each discussion |
... |
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