Episode Transcript
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0:15
Pushkin a
0:20
warning before we start. This cautionary
0:22
tale discusses death by suicide.
0:26
If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
0:28
having suicidal thoughts. Support is
0:30
available, for example, from the National
0:32
Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US.
0:38
Fargo is a town in North
0:40
Dakota. It's also a
0:42
classic movie from nineteen ninety
0:44
six, the blackest of comedies.
0:48
A car salesman attempts to swindle
0:51
his wealthy father in law by
0:53
paying a couple of criminals to kidnap
0:55
his wife and demand a ransom.
0:58
It ends up with five innocent people
1:00
dead and one of the kidnappers
1:03
trying to dispose of his partner's body
1:05
by feeding it into a wood chipper.
1:09
Famously, the movie starts with
1:11
these words, this
1:14
is a true story. At
1:16
the request of the survivors. The
1:18
names have been changed out
1:21
of respect for the dead. The
1:23
rest has been told exactly
1:25
as it occurred. Fargo
1:30
isn't a true story. The shoote
1:32
was well underway when the directors, the Coen
1:35
Brothers, casually mentioned this to the cast.
1:38
One of the movie stars, William H. Macy,
1:41
was taken aback. You can't
1:43
say it's a true story if it wasn't, said
1:45
Macy, Why not, came
1:47
the reply. In
1:50
the movie, one of the hapless
1:52
kidnappers hides nearly a million
1:54
dollars by burying it in snow.
1:57
It's a comically stupid idea.
2:00
The landscape's generic and featureless as
2:02
far as the eye can see. How
2:04
will he ever find his way back to the spot.
2:07
He won't, and not
2:10
just because he ends up in a wood chipper,
2:13
and none of the movies other characters know
2:15
that cash is there. Hold
2:18
on, though, if the movie is told
2:21
exactly as it occurred, does
2:23
the money exist? Is
2:26
it still where the kidnapper left it? Undiscovered?
2:29
In real life? Five
2:32
years after the film was released, a
2:34
young woman turned up at the police station
2:36
in Bismarck, North Dakota.
2:39
She had just flown in from Tokyo. It
2:41
was the middle of winter, but she was wearing
2:44
a short black skirt and Thai high
2:46
boots. She was clutching
2:48
a simple map that showed nothing
2:50
but a road and a tree. The
2:53
police tried to understand what she wanted,
2:55
but they spoke no Japanese and her
2:57
English wasn't great. They
2:59
could make out one word, though fargo.
3:04
One policeman recalled, we'd tried
3:06
to explain to her that it was a fictional movie.
3:09
Really wasn't any treasure. The police
3:11
weren't sure if the message had got through,
3:14
but they took her to the bus station where she
3:16
could catch a greyhound to Fargo,
3:19
several hours to the east, across a
3:21
vast and empty landscape. A
3:24
couple of days later, they got
3:26
a call from another police department. In
3:29
some woods not far from Fargo.
3:32
On a freezing cold morning, a
3:34
hunter had found the body of
3:37
a young Japanese woman. Takakokanishi's
3:41
death was reported
3:43
around the world. Cult
3:46
film sparked Hunt for a Fortune.
3:50
You can't say it's a true story if
3:52
it wasn't, can you.
3:57
I'm Tim Harford, and
3:59
you're listening to cautionary
4:02
tales, you
4:24
must know the story of Hansel and
4:27
Grettel, made famous by the brothers
4:29
Grim. A great famine
4:32
sweeps the land. A poor
4:34
woodcutter can no longer afford to
4:36
feed his family. One
4:38
night, his new wife persuades
4:41
him that they must take his children into
4:43
the forest and abandon
4:45
them. They set
4:47
off early the next morning, the sun
4:50
glinting off the chimney of the woodcutter's
4:52
cottage, deep
4:54
into the woods. The man builds
4:57
a fire to keep his children warm.
5:00
Wait, hip, I won't be too far away. You'll
5:03
be able to hear me chopping trees. That
5:06
the sounds young handsland Grettel can
5:08
hear don't come from their father's
5:11
axe. He's tied a branch
5:13
to a tree trunk in such a way that
5:15
the wind will cause it to keep flacking.
5:18
By the time his children realize that he's gone,
5:21
he thinks they'll never find
5:23
their way home. He doesn't
5:25
realize that the children overheard
5:28
the plan. Hansel sneaked
5:30
out in the dead of night to fill his pockets
5:32
with pebbles, and as they walked,
5:35
he dropped them. By following
5:37
the trail of pebbles, Hansel
5:40
and Gretel get back home. Their
5:45
wicked stepmother is furious that
5:48
night she locks them in. The Next
5:50
morning, they set off again. Hansel
5:53
has no pebbles, but he does
5:56
have a hunk of bread, and
5:58
so instead he leaves a trail
6:00
of breadcrumbs. This
6:03
time, when the children try to follow
6:05
their trail back home, disaster
6:09
birds have eaten all
6:11
the crumbs. Hansel
6:14
and Gretel wander the forest, starving
6:17
and lost. Eventually
6:20
they chance across a house made from gingerbread
6:23
and begin to eat it. There
6:25
comes a soft voice from
6:27
inside. Nibble, nibble,
6:30
little mouse, who is
6:32
nibbling at my house? A
6:35
woman as old as the hills
6:38
creeps out of the door.
6:41
She invites the children inside with the
6:43
promise of more food. But
6:46
she's a wicked witch, and she
6:48
captures them. She keeps Hansel in a cage
6:50
and forces Grettel to work preparing
6:53
food for her brother. When he's fattened
6:55
up, I'm going to eat him.
6:58
The witch's eyesight is bad, so
7:00
every day she asks Hansel to stick
7:03
a finger through the cage for her to feel
7:05
how fat he's got. Hansel
7:07
tricks her he finds a bone
7:09
on the floor in every day he
7:12
pokes that through the cage instead. Eventually
7:15
the witch loses patience. She
7:17
announces she'll cook Hansel fat
7:20
or not, and secretly decides
7:22
to cook Gretel too. This
7:24
time, Gretel tricks her climb
7:27
into the overn and see if it's hot enough.
7:29
Yet I don't understand. How
7:32
can I climb inside the oven? Replied
7:34
Gretel, innocently. Stupid
7:37
girl like this? Do I have to show you everything?
7:40
Gretel shoves her in, slams
7:42
the door, and bars it with an iron rod.
7:45
The witch howls as the flames
7:47
consume her. Gretel lets Hansel
7:49
out of the cage, and the children again
7:51
look for the way back home. A
7:54
magical duckling helps them across
7:56
a great body of water, and
7:59
they arrive home. Their wicked
8:01
stepmother is dead, and their regretful
8:03
father is overjoyed to
8:06
have them back. The three live
8:08
happily ever after. Hansel
8:14
and Gretel is a cautionary tale, much
8:16
like the tales I tell. But
8:19
Hansel and Gretel is for children, a
8:21
warning about stranger danger. Or so
8:23
it seems. The tales
8:26
I tell are for grown ups,
8:28
and the tales I tell are
8:31
true. Hansel
8:33
and Gretel isn't true?
8:37
Or is it?
8:42
The fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel
8:44
fascinated a young boy growing up
8:47
in the nineteen twenties near the
8:49
border of Germany and Czechoslovakia.
8:52
Georg Osseg's grandparents
8:55
owned a rare early edition of Grimm's
8:57
Fairy Tales, published in eighteen
9:00
eighteen. It was beautifully
9:02
illustrated with intricate drawings.
9:05
Young George read it and reread
9:07
it until every page
9:10
was seared in his memory. Oseg
9:14
grew up to be a teacher. He got
9:16
a job in a Schaffenburg near Frankfurt.
9:19
He spent his weekends hiking in the
9:21
Spessart, a nearby range
9:24
of low wooded mountains. One
9:26
spring day in nineteen sixty two,
9:29
he was exploring a part of the woods he'd
9:31
never been to before. A
9:33
local farmer had told him
9:35
it was known as the Hexenvald,
9:39
the Witch's Forest. I
9:43
hadn't been out for half an hour when suddenly
9:46
I had a strange feeling. I felt as
9:48
if I had walked this path before. How
9:51
could that be? Osseg thought
9:53
for a moment. Then it
9:56
hit him. He realized that he'd
9:58
recognized the scene from an illustration
10:00
in his grandfather's book. Osseg
10:03
compared the drawing with the view from the
10:05
footpath. There could be no
10:08
doubt the trees had grown,
10:10
of course, that the oaks, the spruces,
10:12
and the beeches were all in exactly
10:15
the same configuration. The
10:17
line of the hills on the horizon was
10:20
unmistakable. That
10:22
illustration in Hansel and Gretel hadn't
10:25
just come from an artist's imagination.
10:28
It was a faithful depiction of
10:30
a real place. What
10:33
else about the story might be real? George
10:37
Osseg decided to do something
10:39
that no one had thought of before. He
10:41
read the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel
10:44
as if it were a factual
10:46
report. That's a line
10:49
from a nineteen sixty three book about
10:51
Georg Osseg. It was called di
10:54
varheite uber Hansel and Gretel
10:56
The Truth about Hansel
10:59
and Gretel, and it caused
11:01
a sensation. In
11:04
the book, the author Hans Trasler
11:07
describes what Oseg did next. The
11:09
illustration showed the path along which
11:11
Hansland Grettel's father had taken
11:13
them into the forest. In the story,
11:16
the children look back at the morning
11:18
sunlight glinting off the chimney of
11:20
the woodcutter's cottage. The
11:22
sun rises in the east. So
11:25
if Oseg followed the path east,
11:27
would it lead him to the woodcutter's
11:29
cottage. Osg walked
11:31
east, and he found a
11:34
newly built autobahn
11:37
connecting Frankfurt with Wurtzburg.
11:39
But what had been there before? The
11:42
records must exist. Tracksler
11:44
describes how Oseg tracked them down
11:47
to the Rubrun railway maintenance
11:50
depot. He leafed through
11:52
the dusty files until he found a note
11:54
of a court decision from November the
11:56
fourth, nineteen fifty four, a
11:58
dispute over the compensation
12:01
due from the Federal Motorway's administration
12:03
to a man called Georg Scheidhauer,
12:06
who'd owned the land at the east end
12:08
of the forest path. The
12:11
court awarded Scheidehauer eighteen
12:14
thousand, seven hundred and sixty
12:16
Deutsche marks for his property, a
12:18
half timbered house with
12:21
a barn and a garden with
12:24
eighteen fruit trees. Oss
12:27
Egg had found the
12:29
Woodcutter's cottage. Cautionary
12:35
tales will return in
12:37
a moment. Georg
12:47
oss Egg was now a man
12:49
with a mission. He
12:51
had located the site of the woodcutter's
12:53
cottage from hansland Grettel. He
12:56
had found the path along which the children
12:59
had been led. Next, he
13:01
looked for the place where they'd been abandoned.
13:05
The story mentions that the woodcutter made
13:07
a fire to keep the children warm.
13:10
No forester would make a fire in the
13:12
thick of the trees, so that
13:15
must have meant a clearing.
13:18
Oseg explored to the west until
13:20
he found one. In the story,
13:23
the woodcutter ties a branch to a
13:25
tree so the wind will make it swack
13:27
and sound like an axe. Oseg
13:30
spent two days inspecting
13:32
every tree near the clearing until
13:35
he came across an old oak with
13:37
a wound in the trunk where a cord
13:40
had been tied around it. He
13:42
had the tree felled and the cord radio
13:45
carbon dated it came
13:47
from the sixteen forties. What
13:51
about the Witch's house? Did
13:53
that exist and could Oseg
13:55
find it? According to the
13:57
story, Hansel and Gretel crossed
14:00
a body of water between the witch's
14:02
house and their own that could
14:04
only refer to the river Ashaft.
14:07
Oseg got a map, divided
14:09
it into squares, and methodically
14:12
searched each one. After
14:14
two months, he found ruins of a
14:16
building made from bricks. The
14:19
footprint of those ruins looked
14:21
like it exactly matched another illustration
14:24
in his grandparent's book showing
14:26
the which his four brick ovens.
14:30
Osseg grabbed his spade and started
14:33
to dig. Within the foundations
14:35
of one of the ovens, he found
14:38
the charred remains
14:40
of a woman's skeleton. He
14:43
brought in academic specialists who
14:45
concluded the woman was
14:47
thirty five years old and
14:51
she had been strangled before
14:53
she had been thrown in the oven. Osseg
14:56
dug some more. He found
14:58
a broken hinge had
15:01
the murderers forced their way
15:03
in? He found a small
15:05
iron chest. It contained
15:08
a hand written recipe
15:11
for gingerbread. But
15:15
who had the murdered woman been. Osseg
15:18
turned now to linguistic analysis.
15:21
In the Grimm's telling of the tale, the
15:23
witch speaks in a dialect which has
15:25
distinctive roots in the town of werniged
15:28
Oda. Osseg travels to the town
15:30
and searches through its records. He
15:33
discovers reports of a trial from
15:35
sixteen forty seven, The
15:38
year ties right in with the radio carbon
15:41
dating. A baker called
15:43
Katerina Schraderin is accused
15:46
of witchcraft by a man
15:48
whose proposal of marriage she's
15:50
spurned. Soon
15:53
after another trial,
15:56
Katerina has been murdered
15:59
and the man and his sister are
16:02
accused. The man
16:05
is called Hans Metzler,
16:09
his sister Gretta.
16:13
Hans and Gretta
16:17
Osg pieced together what had
16:19
happened. Katerina was
16:21
famous for her gingerbread. Hans
16:24
was a baker too. He had wanted to marry
16:26
Katerina to get his hands on
16:28
her recipe. When she turned him
16:31
down, he and his sister
16:33
went to her house in the woods and
16:36
murdered her. But they didn't
16:39
find her recipe because she'd
16:41
hidden it in the iron chest. So
16:44
the story of Hansel and Grettel was based
16:47
on real events, albeit loosely.
16:50
The protagonists weren't abandoned children,
16:52
they were cold blooded murderers
16:56
motivated by greed. And
16:58
the woman who burned in the oven wasn't
17:00
a wicked witch with a magical gingerbread
17:03
house, but a talented
17:05
baker with a sort
17:07
after gingerbread recipe. When
17:12
Hans Traxler published his book about geyorg
17:15
Osseg, The Truth about
17:17
Hansel and Gretel, he was
17:19
stunned by the response. What
17:22
stunned him was that everyone
17:25
took it seriously. I
17:28
was sure I'd hidden enough clues that it was
17:30
all a great big fib.
17:34
Traxler was a professional
17:36
satirist, a writer and illustrator
17:39
for a satirical magazine. Gayorg
17:41
Osseg didn't exist, but
17:44
the book sold hundreds of
17:46
thousands of copies. Requests
17:48
to translate it came in from eighteen
17:51
countries. Reviewers in Germany's
17:53
newspapers gushed about the thoroughness
17:55
of Oseg's research and the gripping
17:57
way. Traxler described it the
18:00
book of the year, maybe the book
18:02
of the decade, said one The
18:05
newspapers in communist East Germany
18:07
were just as impressed, perhaps
18:10
because they could blame capitalism for the murder.
18:13
A criminal case from the early capitalist
18:15
era, appined Berlina
18:18
Zeitung. What were
18:20
the clues Tracksler had left that
18:22
he had made the whole thing up. Some
18:24
were subtle. Katerina's
18:26
gingerbread recipe, for example, Tracksler
18:29
had copied it word for word
18:31
from a popular cookbook by doctor Utka.
18:34
Other clues should have been harder to miss.
18:37
In one passage, Osg recruits
18:40
an eight year old boy, fills
18:42
his pockets with pebbles and has
18:44
him walked down the path away
18:47
from the motorway where the woodcutter's house
18:49
had supposedly stood. The
18:51
pebbles run out before
18:53
he gets to the clearing, but when
18:56
Osgg fills his own pockets with pebbles,
18:59
he does have enough to cover the distance.
19:02
The book includes a diagram helpfully
19:04
showing how tall people can see
19:07
further and hence leave more space
19:09
between pebbles. Hansel
19:11
and Gretel were not children at all. Tracksler
19:14
describes osggers, concluding, to
19:17
put it scientifically, they must
19:19
have been the size of an adult
19:22
scientific Indeed, also
19:26
very scientific was a photograph
19:28
of OSG's radiocarbon dating
19:31
equipment. You don't have to look
19:33
too closely to see that it consists
19:35
of an upside down lasagna
19:37
tray, a length of coax
19:40
cable from a television, a
19:42
child's microscope, and some
19:44
jars from the kitchen spice rack. Tracksler
19:48
was bewildered that nobody
19:50
picked up on this unsubtle
19:52
clue. Real apparatus
19:54
to do carbon dating is the size of
19:56
a train. He pointed out. Some
19:59
of the images in the book show gay
20:02
org osgg in action. It's
20:05
Tracksler himself in the silliest
20:07
of disguises, wire rimmed
20:10
glasses and a fake mustache.
20:13
Tracksler took a photographer to a Frankfurt
20:15
construction site, where they jumped
20:17
into a ditch to shoot the excavation.
20:20
At the witch's house, tracks
20:22
Ler posed inspecting the side
20:24
of the ditch with a pastry brush.
20:27
The photographer and I lay on
20:29
the ground laughing, but
20:33
when the book was published the joke
20:35
was lost. Excited letters
20:38
flooded in gay Org. Oseg
20:40
was invited to give lectures. A
20:42
Japanese academic expressed earnest
20:45
interest in how the new field
20:47
of fairy tale archaeology could
20:50
improve cross cultural understanding.
20:54
Readers flocked to the scenic
20:56
woods of the spec Art, trying
20:58
to decipher Oseg's descriptions and
21:01
locate the witch's house for themselves.
21:04
Schools hired buses and took entire
21:07
classes. One made
21:10
the ten hour journey from
21:13
Denmark. Hahns
21:16
Traxler started to wander
21:19
what had done
21:24
in our social media age, Mistaking
21:28
satire for serious reporting
21:30
is a surprisingly common problem.
21:33
President Trump once retweeted
21:35
a news story from the satirical website
21:38
The Babylon Bee, without
21:40
seeming to be aware that The Babylon
21:43
Bee is a satirical website.
21:46
Twitter had suffered an outage, and
21:48
the Bee jokingly reported that the network
21:51
had decided to shut itself down to
21:53
slow the spread of negative news about
21:55
Joe Biden. Trump
21:58
wasn't chuckling at the joke. He
22:00
was demanding to know why Twitter
22:02
had done this. How
22:04
many voters also struggled
22:07
to spot tricks and jokes. When
22:10
researchers from Ohio State presented
22:12
voters with a selection of stories from
22:14
the Babylon b They found that
22:17
up to twenty eight percent of
22:19
Republicans thought the stories
22:21
were real. Democrats
22:23
were less likely to be fooled, But the
22:25
reverse was true when the researchers tried
22:28
stories from another satirical website,
22:30
arguably one with a different political perspective,
22:33
the Onion. The researchers
22:35
were looking for ways to minimize the spread
22:38
of misinformation over social networks.
22:41
In twenty nineteen, they ran an
22:43
experiment. They flagged
22:46
posts on Facebook in one of three
22:48
ways. The first type of
22:50
flag said that independent fact
22:52
checkers had said story wasn't
22:54
true. The second type
22:56
said that other Facebook users had raised
22:59
doubts about it. Neither
23:01
type of flag made the studies subjects
23:04
any less likely to share
23:06
the story, but
23:08
the third type did. When a story
23:11
was flagged as being from a satirical
23:13
website, people were less
23:16
likely to part it on. It
23:18
wasn't a huge effect, but it was something.
23:21
Clearly Labeling satire as satire
23:24
did seem to prevent some people from
23:26
sharing fake news. When
23:30
the truth about the truth about
23:32
Hansel and Gretel finally emerged,
23:35
some of Tracksler's readers were not
23:38
amused. An angry
23:40
couple from North Rhine West Failure
23:42
sent me the petrol bill for the trip they'd
23:44
made to the SPEs Art. Then
23:47
Trackxler received a letter from a
23:49
lawyer in herborn. If
23:51
you want to do business with a parody,
23:54
then you have to label your parody
23:57
as such. I have therefore decided
23:59
to bring the case to the attention
24:02
of the public prosecutor
24:05
or. As William H. Macy would put
24:08
it, can't say it's a true
24:10
story if it wasn't Hahn's.
24:13
Traxler was summoned to
24:15
the police station. Cautionary
24:19
tales will be back soon. If
24:28
you want to do business with a parody,
24:31
then you have to label your
24:33
parody as such, so
24:35
said the irate German lawyer.
24:38
Facebook seems to agree. It
24:41
has now rolled out the flags on satirical
24:43
stories. They join other algorithmic
24:46
warnings, from disputed claims
24:49
on Twitter to suspected
24:51
spam on emails and texts.
24:54
We're constantly assailed by people trying
24:56
to fool us because they want to influence
24:58
our vote or part us from our money.
25:01
Any reminders to consider the source
25:03
of information have to be a good thing,
25:06
and yet I can't help
25:08
feel that the lawyer from Herborne
25:11
was being too dogmatic in
25:13
demanding that paradies must always
25:16
be labeled. Phishing emails
25:18
and troll farm tweets can
25:21
be hard to spot. Even for
25:23
the algorithms, we can't
25:25
rely on them being flagged. We
25:28
have to think for ourselves. A
25:30
clever hoax can act a bit like a
25:32
vaccine, a benign way to prime
25:35
our critical thinking immune system,
25:37
to make us more alert against the
25:39
threats that matter. And a
25:41
hoax can't work if it has to
25:44
announce itself up front. What
25:47
does it take for a hoax to earn our
25:49
indulgence? I think there are three
25:51
things. First, the hoax
25:53
has to be good. That means it must
25:55
be plausible if you're not paying attention,
25:58
but obvious if you are. That's
26:01
harder than it sounds. Attempts at
26:03
satire are often either too
26:05
clunkily apparent on the first read
26:07
or too well discussed on the second.
26:11
Hans Trackler seems to have got
26:13
the balance exactly right. He
26:15
was amazed by how many letters he received
26:18
from readers who'd spotted one
26:20
piece of nonsense in his account of
26:22
georg Oseg's research, but who
26:24
hadn't. Then questioned everything else. Those
26:28
letters said things like, dear mister
26:30
Tracksler, I believe gay org Osegg
26:32
must have been mistaken when he says he
26:35
found the woodcutter's cord in the tree
26:37
twenty five meters above the ground, because
26:39
the tree had grown so much. You see,
26:42
trees sprout from the top, they
26:44
don't push up from the bottom, so the
26:46
cord would have been quite close to the ground.
26:49
Apart from that minor blemish,
26:51
I found mister Ossegg's work to be excellent.
26:55
Or the manuscript from Vinigaroda
26:57
can't have come from sixteen forty seven
26:59
because it refers to a famous event that
27:02
happened in eighteen eleven. Otherwise,
27:04
though, great job. These
27:07
are readers who really should
27:09
have felt their spidy senses tingling,
27:12
and when they discovered they'd been had,
27:15
they must have been embarrassed at their gullibility.
27:18
And that's a useful feeling, because
27:20
they'll resolve to think more critically
27:22
in future. The
27:24
second requirement of a satisfying hoax
27:27
is like a vaccine, it should
27:29
do no harm. I'm
27:31
not sure that's true about some satirical
27:34
stories from sites such as the
27:36
Babylon Bee. According
27:38
to the Ohio State Study For example,
27:40
twenty three percent of Republicans believed
27:43
the Bee's story that US Representative
27:45
Illan Omar said being
27:48
Jewish is an inherently
27:51
hostile act. You
27:53
can reach your own conclusions as
27:55
to whether this is or is not a hilarious
27:58
satire of the left wing of US politics.
28:01
But the point is she never said
28:03
it, and when people believe she
28:05
did, real damage
28:07
is done to political disc course. But
28:10
with Hansel and Gretel, what
28:12
were the worst things that happened? A
28:15
couple from North Rhine Westphalia
28:17
spent some money on petrol, a
28:19
teacher from Denmark looked like an idiot
28:22
for organizing an international study visit,
28:24
and a humorless lawyer from Herborne
28:27
made the Frankfurt police call in Hans
28:29
Tracksler for questioning. Although
28:32
I'm happy to report that Tracxler
28:34
was cleared of any crime. The
28:37
third and final ingredient of a good
28:40
hoax is that it has a
28:42
point. It draws our attention
28:44
to something about which we're more credulous
28:47
than we should be. When
28:49
the Cohen Brothers added that screencrawl
28:51
to Fargo, saying this is
28:53
a true story, they were poking
28:55
fun at a trend that began in the nineteen
28:57
seventies, directors of gory,
29:00
low budget drive in flicks discovered
29:03
their gross more if they added
29:05
words like based on real events
29:07
to the poster, however loose
29:09
the connection might be. Hahns
29:12
Tracksler was inspired to write about
29:15
Hansel and Gretel by reading a best
29:17
selling book called Gerta Graba
29:19
Ungelerta God's Graves
29:22
and Scholars. It told
29:24
of archeologists like Heinrich
29:26
Schliemann, who excavated the
29:28
site of ancient Troy in modern
29:30
day Turkey, and made the case
29:33
that Homer's epic poem The
29:35
Iliad was based on historical
29:37
events. There was a craze
29:39
for pop archaeology books in Germany
29:42
like Undi Biebel Hoch de
29:44
Rech and the Bible Is
29:46
Right. Researchers prove the historical
29:49
truth. Trakxler wandered
29:51
if readers might not always be consuming
29:54
books of this genre with a sufficiently
29:57
critical eye. He got his answer.
30:00
Both Tracksler and the Kohens
30:03
are prompting us to ask a deeper question.
30:06
When we like to hear there's truth in fix,
30:10
what is it we really care about? Because
30:13
there is a truth behind Hansel
30:16
and Grettel, but it's nothing
30:18
to do with tracks, less scoreless
30:20
nonsense about a murderous gingerbread
30:22
baker. In
30:27
thirteen fifteen, incessant
30:29
rain ruined crops across
30:31
Europe. The Great Famine
30:34
lasted for years. It's
30:36
hard to be sure of exactly what happened,
30:39
but some harrowing accounts
30:41
survive. In Bristol,
30:43
England, one writer tells of
30:46
such mortality
30:48
that the living could scarce suffice
30:51
to bury the dead, and some
30:54
eat their own children.
30:57
In the Baltics, it was said that mothers
31:00
fed upon their sons. Perhaps
31:04
it's no surprise that the folklore
31:06
of many countries has tales
31:09
Hansel and Gretel about
31:11
famine, child abandonment,
31:14
and cannibalism.
31:17
I said that Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary
31:19
tale for children about stranger danger.
31:22
But perhaps these stories were
31:25
also cautionary tales for
31:27
parents about
31:30
unimaginable hunger and
31:32
choices too awful
31:35
to contemplate. But
31:39
what about Takako Kunischi. Doesn't
31:42
her death show the risks of dressing
31:44
fiction as fact. Remember
31:48
in two thousand and one, Takaco had
31:50
turned up in North Dakota inappropriately
31:53
dressed in the cold midwinter, clutching
31:55
a map and asking for directions
31:57
to Fargo. The
32:00
world's media reported that she seemed to
32:02
have believed the movie's claims to truth
32:04
and hoped she could find the hidden million
32:07
dollars. Cult film sparked
32:09
hunt for a Fortune, said
32:11
the UK's Daily Telegraph.
32:14
It was an astonishing story and
32:17
the filmmaker Paul Bursla wanted to
32:19
find out more. Soon
32:21
after reading the news, he persuaded British
32:23
television's Channel four to send
32:25
him to North Dakota with a cameraman
32:28
and a Japanese actress. Bursla
32:31
planned to retrace Takako's final
32:34
days to find the people who
32:36
had encountered her and recreate some
32:38
scenes. They're
32:41
checked into the Quality Inn in downtown
32:43
Fargo, where Tacco had stayed
32:46
before she died. Bursla
32:48
spoke to the night clerk. It's
32:50
funny, he said, I was
32:53
surprised when I heard how she died looking
32:55
for the ransom in the movie. She never mentioned
32:57
anything to me about Fargo or any
33:00
other kind of movie. She asked
33:02
about seeing the stars, which
33:05
I thought was a little strange because it was November
33:07
and it isn't that warm outside in the
33:09
middle of the night. What
33:12
about the policeman in Bismarck, who told
33:14
journalists how they'd tried to explain
33:16
to Tacco that Fargo was
33:18
a fictional movie and there wasn't really any
33:20
treasure. I'd never seen
33:22
the film Fargo, one of them explained,
33:25
But another officer in the station
33:28
had seen it, and he told me there was
33:30
money buried in this movie. And then we started
33:32
to think that she had this false impression.
33:35
Takaco had never said anything about
33:38
money to the police either true.
33:40
It wasn't unreasonable speculation. There's
33:43
no obvious reason why a Japanese
33:45
woman would turn up in North Dakota
33:47
with a crudely drawn map asking
33:50
about Fargo. But it
33:52
all turned out to have been a case of
33:54
two plus two making five.
33:59
Burslo was now even more intrigued.
34:02
What was the real story. He
34:05
flew to Tokyo and tracked down Takaco's
34:07
former landlady. She
34:10
told him Takiko had been a normal, happy
34:12
girl until one day
34:15
everything changed. She
34:17
started drinking heavily. It must
34:19
have been man trouble, the landlady thought.
34:22
Bursler discovered that on her
34:24
last night in the hotel, Takiko
34:27
had spent forty minutes on the phone
34:30
to Singapore. He found
34:32
out the number Takiko had called and
34:34
dialed it himself. At
34:37
the other end of the line was an American
34:39
businessman. Yes. The
34:41
man told Bursler he had known
34:43
Takiko when he lived in Tokyo. She'd
34:46
wanted to go with him when he moved to Singapore.
34:49
He had said no. She was heartbroken.
34:53
He was from Fargo.
34:57
Several weeks after Takiko died, the
35:00
police found out that she'd sent her parents
35:02
a suicide note. She
35:04
hadn't come to North Dakota to seek her fortune,
35:07
she'd come to end her life. The
35:11
media thought Tackerco had been too
35:14
credulous about Fargo. Instead,
35:17
there'd been too credulous about Takaco.
35:21
The reports framed her tragic
35:23
death as a cautionary tale about gullibility,
35:26
a warning to think critically
35:29
even when a story presents itself as
35:31
true. That's exactly
35:34
what it was, but not
35:37
in the way they'd imagined. Essential
35:46
sources for this episode were Hans
35:48
Tracksler's book The Truth About
35:50
Hansel and Grettel, an article about the hoax
35:52
by Jordan Toderoff in at The Subscurer,
35:55
and Paul Bursler's documentary This
35:57
is a true story. For a full list
35:59
of our sources, see the show notes at Tim
36:02
Harford dot com.
36:06
Cautionary Tales is written and presented
36:08
by me Tim Harford, with help from
36:10
Andrew Wright. The show was produced
36:12
by Ryan Dilley with support from Pete Norton.
36:15
The music, sound design, and mixing are the
36:17
work of Pascal Wise. The scripts
36:20
were edited by Julia Barton. Special
36:22
thanks to mil LaBelle, Carlie Mediori,
36:25
Heather Fane, Maya Kanig, Jacob
36:27
Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary
36:30
Tales is a Pushkin Industry's production
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