Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
+1 to this!
I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
I feel like it's a bit lame to just post (basically) a copy/paste of what's in the actual article, as if you were adding something to the conversation.
Both those movies, and a bunch more, are all listed at the end of the article.
I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.
If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!
I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Yes, was noticing the same. It was easy for them to sell the car and get a new one, so this meant a lot of connections and underground "jobs" for the extra revenue.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
I think a lot of that programming and political action was because at the time there was genuine fear of communism taking over in the US and other western nations (like it already had in Eastern Europe).
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources show higher figures for earlier years).
Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
Bahrain: Around 55%.
Singapore not far behind (~40% from memory), a one party state but with voting, sometimes described as essentially an elected recallable monarchy. Also note most of those countries have relatively low emigration rates of native citizens.
I think "immigrants" is the wrong statistic here, since it includes workers with no path to citizenship. (In some cases, they can't leave because their employer stole their passport.)
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
After they found the remains of the balloon from the first escape attempt, the Stasi put out a reward for information, I think everyone would take the story seriously at that point. It was why they decided they had to go through with the second attempt, because they were convinced the Stasi was going to catch them soon. But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt.
I would assume they did not tell them anything at all, until the time was there. And after the first failed attempt, they were probably shocked enough for real to understand the situation and keep their mouths shut.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection. Yet somehow, the left has managed to shift the overton
>Strelzyk and Wetzel began research into balloons. Their plan was to escape with their wives and a total of four children (aged 2 to 15). They calculated the weight of the eight passengers and the craft itself to be around 750 kilograms (1,650 lb).
That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.
The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.
The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.
(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c
The text in the link is nice to read. I did a Google Translate on it which you can read here: https://pastebin.com/SdkKQkC6
>Ballonfahrt in die Freiheit
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
I keep on thinking it was a lot smaller! Wow!
Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
The 2018 film is a really good movie, I would highly recommend checking it out!
+1 to this! I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
I watched Night Crossing in my german class in high school. I remember it being intense.
I feel like it's a bit lame to just post (basically) a copy/paste of what's in the actual article, as if you were adding something to the conversation.
Both those movies, and a bunch more, are all listed at the end of the article.
I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.
If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!
I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(* as have others, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652703)
The Damn Interesting podcast (no affiliation, just a huge fan) had an episode on this topic if you prefer to listen to this story: https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
You beat me to it :D love the podcast. Too bad they stopped uploading from a while ago. You got any suggestions of podcasts in similar space? Nothing ever could scratch the itch like Damn Interesting
I felt so tense and anxious listening to that.
One of favorite escapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Papago_Escape
They built boats to sail down the Salt River, to the Colorado River, and to Mexico. Of course the salt river is almost always just a dry river bed. It's shocking to me that no dramatization of this escape exists
Reminds me of George Gamow and his wife's attempts to escape from the Soviet union by kayaking across the Black sea (first attempt) and the Norwegian sea (second attempt) until he was lucky enough to be given permission to visit the Solvay conference and was able to defect using conventional methods (Simply not returning).
In Eastern Europe in 1979, those were big sums of money. What an extraordinary story
Yeah I'd be curious into how they acquired so much money
What I've read about the GDR is that money was rarely the problem. You couldn't spend the money if what you wanted to buy was simply not available (except maybe in "Intershops" where you needed to pay in Western currency, that was in fact very expensive). It really was a different system.
Likely black market deals/work I think. Also just getting a replacement car was not really easy for normal people.
Yes, was noticing the same. It was easy for them to sell the car and get a new one, so this meant a lot of connections and underground "jobs" for the extra revenue.
Anyways, fantastic story. First time reading despite living relatively close.
The investment, planning, danger, and dogged persistence… incredible story.
I first read about this in Reader's Digest back in the eighties.
Meanwhile in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelir_Ant%C3%B4nio_de_Carli
Poor family members though
My elementary school showed the Disney movie about this at least once a year.
That movie was also all over the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Many other movies have related messages.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.
I think a lot of that programming and political action was because at the time there was genuine fear of communism taking over in the US and other western nations (like it already had in Eastern Europe).
Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda.
It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages.
For example, "Don't Be a Sucker" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]
> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.
People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.
Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
> Propane gas tanks became registered products
I still remember the two gentlemen in their black, faux leather jackets who rang our doorbell and demanded to see our dinghy. (dinghies where registered products too) We showed them our dinghy, they said thank you and left.
Probably someone fled over the Baltic sea to Denmark in a dinghy. So the secret police went from door to door until they found someone who could no longer show it to them...
This was in the late 80s.
The GDR seems to be forgotten/misunderstood by many people. Which is a pity because it serves a warning about mass public surveillance plans that keep rearing their ugly head, even in Germany.
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
>People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was
Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
We hear far more about the precursor than the GDR, don't we? (Actually its immediate precursor was Allied Occupied Germany with the GDR being the Soviet zone.)
Depends on the form of authoritarian. The two of the richest countries on a GDP PPP basis are Lichtenstein and Singapore, also some of the most free economically, yet they could probably be described as benevolent authoritarian systems. Dubai further behind, although some similar points.
It seems authoritarians that know how to use their authority to force the populace to accept (some forms of) freedom can perform better than democracies. To the point the reigning monarch of Lichtenstein is basically a straight up fuedal prince, although one that has a sort of half libertarian/ancap flavor to how he wields power. Yet very few people describe Lichtenstein as a dystopia, it just kind of quietly gets ignored as an example of authoritarian success in both wealth and freedom.
That makes sense to me. Authoritarian government is not inherently abusive of citizens, even though it often gets used in rhetoric as though that was the case. It's just that there are no guard rails against the whims of the people in charge, so you better hope you manage to keep good people in charge forever (and that is obviously not going to happen).
Dustpile of history, sure, but gallows first. Bleeding out on the pavement is also acceptable.
Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
A peaceful transition of power is nothing to sneer at. After a revolutionary change, they are rare.
Hm. I am not sure if a lynchmob and more blood would have helped the transition. The main important thing to the people was, that the wall was down and Stasi (secret police) out of power.
There has been prison time and the careers of anyone important connected to the Stasi ended.
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate.
Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
If that's the case the theocratic monarchy in UAE takes the cake, I think, although maybe there are similar amounts elsewhere.
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Singapore not far behind (~40% from memory), a one party state but with voting, sometimes described as essentially an elected recallable monarchy. Also note most of those countries have relatively low emigration rates of native citizens.I think "immigrants" is the wrong statistic here, since it includes workers with no path to citizenship. (In some cases, they can't leave because their employer stole their passport.)
It confuses "this is a good place to resettle" with "here I can arbitrage higher wages in order to send money back home."
I'm amazed most of all they were able to keep it under wraps with 4 children involved. I don't think you could pay my children at that age $1 million to keep their mouth shut even under the same risks.
I think it's such a crazy idea, even if a 5 year old tell a teacher about it or something, who's going to take the story seriously?
After they found the remains of the balloon from the first escape attempt, the Stasi put out a reward for information, I think everyone would take the story seriously at that point. It was why they decided they had to go through with the second attempt, because they were convinced the Stasi was going to catch them soon. But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt.
I would assume they did not tell them anything at all, until the time was there. And after the first failed attempt, they were probably shocked enough for real to understand the situation and keep their mouths shut.
Children put in serious situations are capable of much more serious behavior, than children who have only known comfort and safety.
Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.
One guy did use a plane to land in Red Square. Remember him?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Rust
>The family members included:
> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37
> Doris Strelzyk
> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15
> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11
> Günter Wetzel, aged 24
> Petra Wetzel
> Peter Wetzel, aged 5
> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2
Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
Not as of my knowledge. Coincidence I suppose, or desire by them to keep it private.
Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?
Remember the GDR called the Berlin Wall the "Antifascist Protection Barrier"
A communist country has never existed and never will so we will never know.
Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia due to human nature. We are nearly all motherfuckers who if given the chance will try to obtain more power or more wealth than our peers in a group of any size. Thus you can't have all citizens of a given country agree on abandoning private ownership and sharing wealth, work and power in equal terms. Any government that pretended to do that was just faking it and forced their citizens to pretend.
> Communism is a lovely idea on paper but a complete utopia
dystopia ?
The GDR was a showcase state that, much like the DPRK, being on the periphery of the communist block, was propped up by USSR so that direct comparisons with its capitalist neighbor wouldn't be so unflattering. One of the most important forms of assistance the GDR and other satellites received was cheap energy. In the case of the GDR, through the Friendship Pipeline. One only need look at the DPRK to see how vital this assistance was; it was only after the USSR collapsed and Russia turned off the spigot that North Korea started regularly suffering famines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
And yet even with the high (in comparison to other communist states) quality of life people in the GDR enjoyed, people still risked life and limb to escape. You could leave Brazil under its various juntas, Chile under Pinochet, Portugal under Salazar, and Spain under Franco, yet the only option for citizens of the GDR and other communist states (in some cases, still today, e.g., Cuba and the DPRK) was escape and defection. Yet somehow, the left has managed to shift the overton
>Strelzyk and Wetzel began research into balloons. Their plan was to escape with their wives and a total of four children (aged 2 to 15). They calculated the weight of the eight passengers and the craft itself to be around 750 kilograms (1,650 lb).
That feat would be impossible for the average US family
They could each have their own balloon. Your mom would be trapped in East Germany, however.
I loled
Although you're probably less inclined to try to escape your country in a hot air balloon if food is so easily and cheaply available that it's made you overweight.
Basic food was really cheap in eastern germany as well.
But cheap food is not everything.