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.
This reminds of a person I read about on HN years ago - a Russian guy who escaped from the USSR jumping off a cruise liner and swimming a couple of days to Philippines.
> 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.
The greatest trick authoritarianism ever pulled [0] was convincing people it was competent, rational, or efficient.
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
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.
It is interesting how dictatorships for resourceless countries needed to keep the people in like east germany or czechoslovakia. But current dictatorships with natural resources like Venezuela or Iran let dissent go. It makes them more stable sadly.
Since West Germany considered East Germany to be occupied territory, East Germans had automatic citizenship in the west. This made it uniquely easy to emigrate into the much wealthier country.
From the reports I'd read and the interviews I'd seen, it's not that Venezuela let people go so much as it couldn't stop them. Many people who fled the country state they had to hide their property and children to prevent it from looking like they were not coming back when crossing the border. This might have been an agreement with Columbia, since Columbia doesn't want mass migration into their country. In some cases it was starve, jail, die or flee which is not the same as "let go".
Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
As a Venezuelan, I think the difference is not the Natural Resources, or at least is not the main difference. In 2017, the shortages and economic crisis generated by 15 years of communist policies has pushed around 4 million people out, and then, the regime "elected" a Constitutional Assembly which has the power to create a new Constitution and to overrid any previously elected organism (as it was at the time the opossition controled National Assembly).
At that point I leaved Venezuela inmediatly with my 2 minor aged kids, because for me it was a NO BRAINER that the first thing they will do was to limit the emigration and the free ciruculation. My train of tought was very simple. As any other Socialist Dictatorship before, this one needs to halt the staggering loss of skilled proffesionals like Medics, Engineers or whatever they deemed of National Security, I mean, you still need Doctors, you still need the Electricity and Water to get into the industries and houses, and specially for Venezuela, you need to keep the Oil flowing off the earth...
BOY WAS I WRONG, they never put a formal limit to the emigration and at least another 5 million people leaved Venezuela (so far). It did not matter at all that the already in shambles Public Health system collapsed, they doctors that stayed were private and they attended only the capacity that could pay for the scarse services, the basic services did not matter that much either, as people got use to get them once or twice per week, and even a country wide blackout of 3 weeks was not the end of the regime, and the Oil, well, does not matter either because what was once 3.5 million barrels per day went to be as low as 300.000 bpd.
So, what was the difference? well, for all its downfalls, it seems to me that the XX century Communist/Socialist dictatorships were guided by Ideology, they really thought theirs ideas were for the better of their people, so having no Healthcare was a REAL PROBLEM, having no public services was a REAL PROBLEM. Of course, their recipes were doomed as their political ideals, but at least they tried.
The Venezuelan Regime has no Ideology (it has some in form of propaganda, but that is different that actions) as the latest news can attest, They couldn't care less about the people and the wellness. They did not use any "Natural Resouces" to keep any level of living conditions, they just let loose the ruins of the economy they had messed so badly to let the most savage neoliberalism to correct the course while they stayed in power to keep leaching two sources of income, whatever oil they could produce and the drugs operations revenue, alongside their cut on any business their allies (AKA "Enchufados) could come up in the "liberalized" economy.
All the people that leaved the country (including me) just made them easier to keep control of whatever was left. Ever decreasing political or social opposition, less pressure of the shambles public services and so on and on...
The Natural Resources is just a part of their Income, it does not affects the hability to control or to even extract richness from the system.
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
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
There were many "escapes", some weren't so romantic. E.g. for some escapees the drive to what they viewed as freedom was so intense that they did not hesitate to kill someone, e.g. a stewardess on a hijacked plane.
To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
Now calculate the necessary rate of fuel burn and fuel requirement for a given trip; tensile and tear strength needed for the balloon material and seams.
Tbf they probably didn't do all these calculations, but should have. They risked their lives by getting some of these things wrong.
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).
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.
For me, this is the maxim that governs speaking with someone defending a totalitarian regime.
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
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.
The Wikipedia page references Günter Wetzel's website. Reading https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/missverstaendnis.html , he's written down more information - apparently they came to a disagreement about the story, and on that page there's more detail, from his point of view: for the first attempt they did everything in Wetzel's house (whose oldest kid was 4), because of concerns the Strelzyks' children (who were 10 and 14) could blurt something out. After some disagreements (Strelzyks told some relatives about the balloon, Wetzel thinks the balloon was too small) Wetzel gave Strelzyks all they've built (he was also worried about getting caught with the stuff, especially since now the relatives have heard about it) and decided to follow the concept of a ultralight airplane.
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
Wouldn't "registration" as used in the article mean the purchase details were sent to the authorities, so they could investigate/stop a potential escape attempt?
The autobiographical graphic novel "Time Zones" by Sven Diekmann describes an attempted balloon escape from the GDR in 1977, but it was thwarted at the last minute [1].
It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.
I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.
Fascinating. Always enjoyed the near-history one can feel in east germany.
Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.
Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).
I recently read a book of interviews with people who escaped from North Korea, and what shocked me was the discovery that the relatives of those who escaped are often executed (publicly) and that even children are executed in North Korea. We live in a terrible world. I mean... you expect a book from North Korea to contain terrible things, but somehow it was even worse than I expected.
What is just awesome, to a tinkerer, is the great can-do spirit people had then. You couldn't buy it, so you made it yourself. They were going to do a helicopter, but for the lack of a suitable engine. As if the rest was just a solved problem, and may well have been, given the background of one of them.
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
I feel like hard situations force people to adapt. This was not a unique time in history, it continues today in warzones and places like Ukraine. It is only a few comfortable western countires who have such comfort of everything being a click and 1 days delivery away.
The engineering ingenuity and determination required to pull this off is truly mind blowing. Building a homemade balloon under such surveillance is an amazing feat.
I spoke with the people working at a German resort in Tunisia. I was there for a short stint as sound tech. The only way out of the country is smuggling. You don’t get permission to leave if you’re of working age and can contribute to the economy.
The USA doesn't literally prevent you from leaving, but it uses its unique control of the global banking system to still tax you when you move to another country.
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.
From the second sentence, "over a year and a half of preparations". The third paragraph gives a starting agreement date of 7 March 1978, and the successful flight was 16 September 1979.
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.
So much havoc caused by having a fascist/communist government in Russia, from partnering with Hitler to start WW2, through this stuff to Ukraine and it seems about half the evil in the world. I hope they fall one day and turn to something normal.
If I were in the US I would certainly leave to a more socialist country. I could not live there. Even before Trump.
However there is a spectrum between it. I don't think either extreme is great, neither American unrestricted capitalism nor full-on communism. A balance of both is needed. I was a lot happier in the 80s when Holland was a lot more socialist. Less things to worry about, a safety net, cheap housing and schooling, still the ability to run your own business if you really wanted to. We had a great combination.
However the VVD neoliberals (who idolize America) have destroyed it over the last decades and there are so many huge problems now because they always went for the quick fix.
With full-on capitalism you get lots of disenfranchised people angry at not having any upward mobility, corporations just dump all over the citizens, and differences in wealth get insanely high. With full-on communism you end up with a surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes. The secret sauce is in between IMO.
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.
Communism and socialism have always looked good when compared to the principles of other economic and political doctrines:
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality.
- it needs to suppress any other political alternative
- it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
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.
> That feat would be impossible for the average US family
Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
This true story moves us because it resembles much of human history, in which clever but powerless people struggle against morons -- morons who somehow gain control over a modern industrial state, then use that power to punish innocents who dare to assert simple human rights.
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
mkmk|1 month ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
neilv|1 month ago
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
qwertox|1 month ago
observationist|1 month ago
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.
nephihaha|1 month ago
NedF|1 month ago
[deleted]
snicky|1 month ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Kurilov
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alone-Ocean-Slava-Kurilov-S/dp/965555...
eastbound|1 month ago
thenaturalist|1 month ago
> 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.
solarexplorer|1 month ago
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.
nephihaha|1 month ago
Terr_|1 month ago
Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony looks impressive, but in the background sycophancy rules while expertise is wasted, and people who could be improving harvests and preventing floods are slaving away in the "Office of Subversive Objects" trying to figure out the source of the googly-eye scourge being traitorously installed on Dear Leader's statues.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/
mothballed|1 month ago
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.
coldtea|1 month ago
Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
martin-t|1 month ago
Way too often, connected ("powerful") people manage to escape proper punishment, sometimes in the name of a "peaceful transition of power".
nrjames|1 month ago
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
lukeweston1234|1 month ago
foota|1 month ago
CMay|1 month ago
wolvoleo|1 month ago
hungryhobbit|1 month ago
[deleted]
Squarex|1 month ago
fsh|1 month ago
CMay|1 month ago
Do they put the persecution and threat on so thick intentionally to encourage them to leave, so that if democracy did return in some way socialist ideology would be all but certain to win? I don't know.
gassius|1 month ago
At that point I leaved Venezuela inmediatly with my 2 minor aged kids, because for me it was a NO BRAINER that the first thing they will do was to limit the emigration and the free ciruculation. My train of tought was very simple. As any other Socialist Dictatorship before, this one needs to halt the staggering loss of skilled proffesionals like Medics, Engineers or whatever they deemed of National Security, I mean, you still need Doctors, you still need the Electricity and Water to get into the industries and houses, and specially for Venezuela, you need to keep the Oil flowing off the earth...
BOY WAS I WRONG, they never put a formal limit to the emigration and at least another 5 million people leaved Venezuela (so far). It did not matter at all that the already in shambles Public Health system collapsed, they doctors that stayed were private and they attended only the capacity that could pay for the scarse services, the basic services did not matter that much either, as people got use to get them once or twice per week, and even a country wide blackout of 3 weeks was not the end of the regime, and the Oil, well, does not matter either because what was once 3.5 million barrels per day went to be as low as 300.000 bpd.
So, what was the difference? well, for all its downfalls, it seems to me that the XX century Communist/Socialist dictatorships were guided by Ideology, they really thought theirs ideas were for the better of their people, so having no Healthcare was a REAL PROBLEM, having no public services was a REAL PROBLEM. Of course, their recipes were doomed as their political ideals, but at least they tried.
The Venezuelan Regime has no Ideology (it has some in form of propaganda, but that is different that actions) as the latest news can attest, They couldn't care less about the people and the wellness. They did not use any "Natural Resouces" to keep any level of living conditions, they just let loose the ruins of the economy they had messed so badly to let the most savage neoliberalism to correct the course while they stayed in power to keep leaching two sources of income, whatever oil they could produce and the drugs operations revenue, alongside their cut on any business their allies (AKA "Enchufados) could come up in the "liberalized" economy.
All the people that leaved the country (including me) just made them easier to keep control of whatever was left. Ever decreasing political or social opposition, less pressure of the shambles public services and so on and on...
The Natural Resources is just a part of their Income, it does not affects the hability to control or to even extract richness from the system.
russdill|1 month ago
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
hn_throwaway_99|1 month ago
The thing that makes this balloon escape story is so enthralling is that it actually worked.
mallomarmeasle|1 month ago
VelNZ|1 month ago
Isuckatcode|1 month ago
Waterluvian|1 month ago
Mikhail_Edoshin|1 month ago
To see a bigger picture let's juxtapose these escapes with the life of Luke of Simferopol (N. F. Voyno-Yasenetsky). He was a surgeon and a bishop of the Orthodox church. He opposed the anti-church policies of the Soviet government, was sent into an exile into Siberia and nearly died there. Then the war came. So he wrote a letter to Soviet officials asking to be sent to work in a hospital near the front, where his surgical skills would be of much use. At the end he added: "When the war is over I'm ready to go back to exile".
jryle70|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people
refurb|1 month ago
I met a guy in the East Bay who escaped Vietnam in 1978. Family sold everything to bribe the government to look the other way.
Boat trip lasted a week - people died, mostly the youngest and oldest, their bodies thrown overboard. Thai pirate came and stole anything of value they had left and raped the women. Boats passed by and did nothing.
They finally make it to Malaysia and spent almost a year in a refugee camp before coming to the US.
Now multiply that story by 2,000,000 with 200,000-400,000 dying along the way. A total of 4-5% of the entire population tried to escape by boat. The lucky ones fled before 1975, some later one.
A massive human tragedy that few people know much about.
WalterBright|1 month ago
baud9600|1 month ago
toephu2|1 month ago
freakynit|1 month ago
Vibe-coded an online calculator for future escapists: https://balloon-lift-calculator.pagey.site
mfld|1 month ago
svara|1 month ago
Tbf they probably didn't do all these calculations, but should have. They risked their lives by getting some of these things wrong.
decimalenough|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethke_brothers
yde_java|1 month ago
Ironic. Still quite an adventure. Thanks for sharing!
adharmad|1 month ago
gnatman|1 month ago
martin-t|1 month ago
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.)
mothballed|1 month ago
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.dmaa|1 month ago
If the person has no issue that people have to be kept by force INSIDE for the country to function, then we have a fundamental disagreement on what is good and what is bad and any further discussion is a waste of time.
unknown|1 month ago
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reflexe|1 month ago
mothballed|1 month ago
netsharc|1 month ago
That's the reason the first attempt was just the Strelzyks...
drcode|1 month ago
SV_BubbleTime|1 month ago
Ha. Someone does a thing and the state moves in to regulate. Same as it ever was, apparently.
Item registration… not used to prevent crime, just to make it easier to document after it happens.
justinclift|1 month ago
Wouldn't "registration" as used in the article mean the purchase details were sent to the authorities, so they could investigate/stop a potential escape attempt?
layer8|1 month ago
hmokiguess|1 month ago
nephihaha|1 month ago
hmng|1 month ago
car|1 month ago
It is a powerful book, quite chilling as it describes life under the totalitarian puppet government of East Germany. I also often found it eerily reminiscent of our current times.
I can highly recommend it, both for the suspenseful narrative and great visual storytelling. A great read for HS/college kids that are into history too.
[1] https://store.bookbaby.com/book/time-zones
[2] Authors website: https://www.svensiekmann.com/bio
mhh__|1 month ago
Europe is obviously very old e.g. I go to a pub back home that's 500 years old, but you can still sort of feel the concrete setting in some parts of Germany. Although saying that it might be that they haven't changed much since and I don't like the future chosen much elsewhere.
Or it's just the light temperature... In places that have kept their old street lighting I find it interesting to find angles that look the same now as they did in 1981 (or '71, etc).
tobyhinloopen|1 month ago
honzabe|1 month ago
MarkusWandel|1 month ago
And then to build a working hot air balloon that even looks pretty cool, entirely in clandestine conditions with improvised materials. In a museum in Germany you can even see a homemade twin-engine airplane that was planned for an escape attempt (that didn't happen, maybe just as well) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_DOWA_81 ). Just incredible technical competence everywhere, that fades when the need is gone, when absolutely everything you could want is just an Amazon order away.
alt227|1 month ago
kstenerud|1 month ago
But not that surprising when you look at Russian history.
cbdevidal|1 month ago
potato3732842|1 month ago
That's faster than most professionals by a substantial margin. I guess when it matters you make it work.
bot_user_7a2b99|1 month ago
vee-kay|1 month ago
https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/
Also an audio podcast available for the article, that's more thrilling.
api|1 month ago
It’s astounding to me that this was a thing. The fact that it’s so rare now is one of the quiet ways we have in fact progressed.
olelele|1 month ago
__turbobrew__|1 month ago
immibis|1 month ago
PeterStuer|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
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exabrial|1 month ago
throw310822|1 month ago
youhatetheleft|1 month ago
appreciatorBus|1 month ago
jasonwatkinspdx|1 month ago
neilv|1 month ago
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.
unknown|1 month ago
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Nora23|1 month ago
mkl|1 month ago
TacticalCoder|1 month ago
nephihaha|1 month ago
prmoustache|1 month ago
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.
tim333|1 month ago
rottencupcakes|1 month ago
nephihaha|1 month ago
marcodiego|1 month ago
wolvoleo|1 month ago
However there is a spectrum between it. I don't think either extreme is great, neither American unrestricted capitalism nor full-on communism. A balance of both is needed. I was a lot happier in the 80s when Holland was a lot more socialist. Less things to worry about, a safety net, cheap housing and schooling, still the ability to run your own business if you really wanted to. We had a great combination.
However the VVD neoliberals (who idolize America) have destroyed it over the last decades and there are so many huge problems now because they always went for the quick fix.
With full-on capitalism you get lots of disenfranchised people angry at not having any upward mobility, corporations just dump all over the citizens, and differences in wealth get insanely high. With full-on communism you end up with a surveillance hellscape and inhumane processes. The secret sauce is in between IMO.
marginalien|1 month ago
anonnon|1 month ago
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.
ricksunny|1 month ago
justsomehnguy|1 month ago
yawns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_Soviet_Union_aliyah
lazysheepherd|1 month ago
immibis|1 month ago
chihuahua|1 month ago
fuckyah|1 month ago
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elbci|1 month ago
- Make communism look good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_nostalgia
petre|1 month ago
tirant|1 month ago
- No poor people; everyone supported by the State; Everyone works for the common good; shared resources no matter how lucky or unlucky you are…
From an intentional and moral perspective, nothing can beat it.
However it fails and will always fail because of a couple of important reasons:
- it requires the sacrifice of freedom and individuality. - it needs to suppress any other political alternative - it’s finally always implemented by humans (flawed by default) that have their own benefit as a goal.
Even with constant examples of countries demonstrating why communism always ends up being a perverse system, many people still romanticize the system. Interestingly usually only people in free capitalist societies.
anticommunist|1 month ago
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DefundPortland|1 month ago
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coldtea|1 month ago
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dullcrisp|1 month ago
wbobeirne|1 month ago
anonnon|1 month ago
Funny, except the US, despite being a supposed fascist dystopia, currently has the opposite problem: people trying to enter and stay illegally, hence the wall-building (to keep people out, rather than in) and ramping up of immigration enforcement. How bad must the GDR and its ilk have been (and in some cases, still are) that it's the other way around?
stackghost|1 month ago
> 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?
lukan|1 month ago
honzabe|1 month ago
A gentleman does not ask a lady's age.
lutusp|1 month ago
People in Moscow, in Gaza, in Tehran, in Minneapolis, are all saying, "How can I rise above this? -- where's my balloon?"
Too many morons. Too few balloons.
wtcactus|1 month ago
Man, you really went ahead and tried to compare Minneapolis with Teharan. This is got me laughing out loud.