October 22, 2021 • 36 mins
Was the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel - the story of a woodcutter’s children abandoned in the woods and left at the mercy of a witch - in fact, early true crime? A hit book - The Truth About Hansel and Gretel - said that historical records pointed to the story being based on fact. Are we too quick to dismiss the truth behind tall stories? Or are we always falling for tales that are too good to be true?
The first of two special Halloween editions of Cautionary Tales. Next up... The Mummy's Curse.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
having suicidal thoughts. Support is available, for example, from the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US. Fargo is a
(00:39):
town in North Dakota. It's also a classic movie from
nineteen ninety six, the blackest of comedies. A car salesman
attempts to swindle his wealthy father in law by paying
a couple of criminals to kidnap his wife and demand
a ransom. It ends up with five innocent people dead
(01:01):
and one of the kidnappers trying to dispose of his
partner's body by feeding it into a wood chipper. Famously,
the movie starts with these words, this is a true story.
At the request of the survivors. The names have been
changed out of respect for the dead. The rest has
(01:23):
been told exactly as it occurred. Fargo isn't a true story.
The shoote was well underway when the directors, the Coen Brothers,
casually mentioned this to the cast. One of the movie stars,
William H. Macy, was taken aback. You can't say it's
a true story if it wasn't, said Macy, Why not,
(01:47):
came the reply. In the movie, one of the hapless
kidnappers hides nearly a million dollars by burying it in snow.
It's a comically stupid idea. The landscape's generic and featureless
as far as the eye can see. How will he
ever find his way back to the spot. He won't,
(02:09):
and not just because he ends up in a wood chipper,
and none of the movies other characters know that cash
is there. Hold on, though, if the movie is told
exactly as it occurred, does the money exist? Is it
still where the kidnapper left it? Undiscovered? In real life?
(02:31):
Five years after the film was released, a young woman
turned up at the police station in Bismarck, North Dakota.
She had just flown in from Tokyo. It was the
middle of winter, but she was wearing a short black
skirt and Thai high boots. She was clutching a simple
map that showed nothing but a road and a tree.
(02:52):
The police tried to understand what she wanted, but they
spoke no Japanese and her English wasn't great. They could
make out one word, though fargo. One policeman recalled, we'd
tried to explain to her that it was a fictional movie.
Really wasn't any treasure. The police weren't sure if the
message had got through, but they took her to the
(03:15):
bus station where she could catch a greyhound to Fargo,
several hours to the east, across a vast and empty landscape.
A couple of days later, they got a call from
another police department. In some woods not far from Fargo.
On a freezing cold morning, a hunter had found the
(03:36):
body of a young Japanese woman. Takakokanishi's death was reported
around the world. Cult film sparked Hunt for a Fortune.
You can't say it's a true story if it wasn't,
can you. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales,
(04:24):
you must know the story of Hansel and Grettel, made
famous by the brothers Grim. A great famine sweeps the land.
A poor woodcutter can no longer afford to feed his family.
One night, his new wife persuades him that they must
take his children into the forest and abandon them. They
(04:47):
set off early the next morning, the sun glinting off
the chimney of the woodcutter's cottage, deep into the woods.
The man builds a fire to keep his children warm. Wait, hip,
I won't be too far away. You'll be able to
hear me chopping trees. That the sounds young handsland Grettel
(05:08):
can hear don't come from their father's axe. He's tied
a branch to a tree trunk in such a way
that the wind will cause it to keep flacking. By
the time his children realize that he's gone, he thinks
they'll never find their way home. He doesn't realize that
the children overheard the plan. Hansel sneaked out in the
(05:30):
dead of night to fill his pockets with pebbles, and
as they walked, he dropped them. By following the trail
of pebbles, Hansel and Gretel get back home. Their wicked
stepmother is furious that night she locks them in. The
Next morning, they set off again. Hansel has no pebbles,
(05:54):
but he does have a hunk of bread, and so
instead he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. This time, when
the children try to follow their trail back home, disaster
birds have eaten all the crumbs. Hansel and Gretel wander
(06:15):
the forest, starving and lost. Eventually they chance across a
house made from gingerbread and begin to eat it. There
comes a soft voice from inside. Nibble, nibble, little mouse,
who is nibbling at my house? A woman as old
(06:37):
as the hills creeps out of the door. She invites
the children inside with the promise of more food. But
she's a wicked witch, and she captures them. She keeps
Hansel in a cage and forces Grettel to work preparing
food for her brother. When he's fattened up, I'm going
to eat him. The witch's eyesight is bad, so every
(07:01):
day she asks Hansel to stick a finger through the
cage for her to feel how fat he's got. Hansel
tricks her he finds a bone on the floor in
every day he pokes that through the cage instead. Eventually
the witch loses patience. She announces she'll cook Hansel fat
or not, and secretly decides to cook Gretel too. This time,
(07:24):
Gretel tricks her climb into the overn and see if
it's hot enough. Yet I don't understand. How can I
climb inside the oven? Replied Gretel, innocently. Stupid girl like this?
Do I have to show you everything? Gretel shoves her in,
slams the door, and bars it with an iron rod.
(07:45):
The witch howls as the flames consume her. Gretel lets
Hansel out of the cage, and the children again look
for the way back home. A magical duckling helps them
across a great body of water, and they arrive home.
Their wicked stepmother is dead, and their regretful father is
overjoyed to have them back. The three live happily ever after.
(08:13):
Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale, much like the
tales I tell. But Hansel and Gretel is for children,
a warning about stranger danger. Or so it seems. The
tales I tell are for grown ups, and the tales
I tell are true. Hansel and Gretel isn't true? Or
(08:37):
is it? The fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel fascinated
a young boy growing up in the nineteen twenties near
the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. Georg Osseg's grandparents owned
a rare early edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, published in
(08:59):
eighteen eighteen. It was beautifully illustrated with intricate drawings. Young
George read it and reread it until every page was
seared in his memory. Oseg grew up to be a teacher.
He got a job in a Schaffenburg near Frankfurt. He
(09:19):
spent his weekends hiking in the Spessart, a nearby range
of low wooded mountains. One spring day in nineteen sixty two,
he was exploring a part of the woods he'd never
been to before. A local farmer had told him it
was known as the Hexenvald, the Witch's Forest. I hadn't
(09:43):
been out for half an hour when suddenly I had
a strange feeling. I felt as if I had walked
this path before. How could that be? Osseg thought for
a moment. Then it hit him. He realized that he'd
recognized the scene from an illustration in his grandfather's book.
Osseg compared the drawing with the view from the footpath.
(10:07):
There could be no doubt the trees had grown, of course,
that the oaks, the spruces, and the beeches were all
in exactly the same configuration. The line of the hills
on the horizon was unmistakable. That illustration in Hansel and
Gretel hadn't just come from an artist's imagination. It was
(10:28):
a faithful depiction of a real place. What else about
the story might be real? George Osseg decided to do
something that no one had thought of before. He read
the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel as if it
were a factual report. That's a line from a nineteen
(10:49):
sixty three book about Georg Osseg. It was called di
varheite uber Hansel and Gretel The Truth about Hansel and Gretel,
and it caused a sensation. In the book, the author
Hans Trasler describes what Oseg did next. The illustration showed
(11:10):
the path along which Hansland Grettel's father had taken them
into the forest. In the story, the children look back
at the morning sunlight glinting off the chimney of the
woodcutter's cottage. The sun rises in the east. So if
Oseg followed the path east, would it lead him to
the woodcutter's cottage. Osg walked east, and he found a
(11:34):
newly built autobahn connecting Frankfurt with Wurtzburg. But what had
been there before? The records must exist. Tracksler describes how
Oseg tracked them down to the Rubrun railway maintenance depot.
He leafed through the dusty files until he found a
note of a court decision from November the fourth, nineteen
(11:57):
fifty four, a dispute over the compensation due from the
Federal Motorway's administration to a man called Georg Scheidhauer, who'd
owned the land at the east end of the forest path.
The court awarded Scheidehauer eighteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty
Deutsche marks for his property, a half timbered house with
(12:21):
a barn and a garden with eighteen fruit trees. Oss
Egg had found the Woodcutter's cottage. Cautionary tales will return
in a moment. Georg oss Egg was now a man
(12:49):
with a mission. He had located the site of the
woodcutter's cottage from hansland Grettel. He had found the path
along which the children had been led. Next, he looked
for the place where they'd been abandoned. The story mentions
that the woodcutter made a fire to keep the children warm.
(13:10):
No forester would make a fire in the thick of
the trees, so that must have meant a clearing. Oseg
explored to the west until he found one. In the story,
the woodcutter ties a branch to a tree so the
wind will make it swack and sound like an axe.
Oseg spent two days inspecting every tree near the clearing
(13:34):
until he came across an old oak with a wound
in the trunk where a cord had been tied around it.
He had the tree felled and the cord radio carbon
dated it came from the sixteen forties. What about the
Witch's house? Did that exist and could Oseg find it?
(13:56):
According to the story, Hansel and Gretel crossed a body
of water between the witch's house and their own that
could only refer to the river Ashaft. Oseg got a map,
divided it into squares, and methodically searched each one. After
two months, he found ruins of a building made from bricks.
(14:19):
The footprint of those ruins looked like it exactly matched
another illustration in his grandparent's book showing the which his
four brick ovens. Osseg grabbed his spade and started to dig.
Within the foundations of one of the ovens, he found
the charred remains of a woman's skeleton. He brought in
(14:43):
academic specialists who concluded the woman was thirty five years
old and she had been strangled before she had been
thrown in the oven. Osseg dug some more. He found
a broken hinge had the murderers forced their way in?
(15:04):
He found a small iron chest. It contained a hand
written recipe for gingerbread. But who had the murdered woman been.
Osseg turned now to linguistic analysis. In the Grimm's telling
of the tale, the witch speaks in a dialect which
(15:25):
has distinctive roots in the town of werniged Oda. Osseg
travels to the town and searches through its records. He
discovers reports of a trial from sixteen forty seven, The
year ties right in with the radio carbon dating. A
baker called Katerina Schraderin is accused of witchcraft by a
(15:48):
man whose proposal of marriage she's spurned. Soon after another trial,
Katerina has been murdered and the man and his sister
are accused. The man is called Hans Metzler, his sister Gretta.
(16:13):
Hans and Gretta Osg pieced together what had happened. Katerina
was famous for her gingerbread. Hans was a baker too.
He had wanted to marry Katerina to get his hands
on her recipe. When she turned him down, he and
his sister went to her house in the woods and
(16:36):
murdered her. But they didn't find her recipe because she'd
hidden it in the iron chest. So the story of
Hansel and Grettel was based on real events, albeit loosely.
The protagonists weren't abandoned children, they were cold blooded murderers
motivated by greed. And the woman who burned in the
(16:59):
oven wasn't a wicked witch with a magical gingerbread house,
but a talented baker with a sort after gingerbread recipe.
When Hans Traxler published his book about geyorg Osseg, The
Truth about Hansel and Gretel, he was stunned by the response.
(17:22):
What stunned him was that everyone took it seriously. I
was sure I'd hidden enough clues that it was all
a great big fib. Traxler was a professional satirist, a
writer and illustrator for a satirical magazine. Gayorg Osseg didn't exist,
(17:43):
but the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Requests
to translate it came in from eighteen countries. Reviewers in
Germany's newspapers gushed about the thoroughness of Oseg's research and
the gripping way. Traxler described it the book of the year,
maybe the book of the decade, said one The newspapers
(18:06):
in communist East Germany were just as impressed, perhaps because
they could blame capitalism for the murder. A criminal case
from the early capitalist era, appined Berlina Zeitung. What were
the clues Tracksler had left that he had made the
whole thing up. Some were subtle. Katerina's gingerbread recipe, for example,
(18:28):
Tracksler had copied it word for word from a popular
cookbook by doctor Utka. Other clues should have been harder
to miss. In one passage, Osg recruits an eight year
old boy, fills his pockets with pebbles and has him
walked down the path away from the motorway where the
woodcutter's house had supposedly stood. The pebbles run out before
(18:53):
he gets to the clearing, but when Osgg fills his
own pockets with pebbles, he does have enough to cover
the distance. The book includes a diagram helpfully showing how
tall people can see further and hence leave more space
between pebbles. Hansel and Gretel were not children at all.
(19:14):
Tracksler describes osggers, concluding, to put it scientifically, they must
have been the size of an adult scientific Indeed, also
very scientific was a photograph of OSG's radiocarbon dating equipment.
You don't have to look too closely to see that
(19:34):
it consists of an upside down lasagna tray, a length
of coax cable from a television, a child's microscope, and
some jars from the kitchen spice rack. Tracksler was bewildered
that nobody picked up on this unsubtle clue. Real apparatus
to do carbon dating is the size of a train.
(19:57):
He pointed out. Some of the images in the book
show gay org osgg in action. It's Tracksler himself in
the silliest of disguises, wire rimmed glasses and a fake mustache.
Tracksler took a photographer to a Frankfurt construction site, where
they jumped into a ditch to shoot the excavation. At
(20:20):
the witch's house, tracks Ler posed inspecting the side of
the ditch with a pastry brush. The photographer and I
lay on the ground laughing, but when the book was
published the joke was lost. Excited letters flooded in gay Org.
Oseg was invited to give lectures. A Japanese academic expressed
(20:44):
earnest interest in how the new field of fairy tale
archaeology could improve cross cultural understanding. Readers flocked to the
scenic woods of the spec Art, trying to decipher Oseg's
descriptions and locate the witch's house for themselves. Schools hired
(21:05):
buses and took entire classes. One made the ten hour
journey from Denmark. Hahns Traxler started to wander what had
done in our social media age, Mistaking satire for serious
(21:29):
reporting is a surprisingly common problem. President Trump once retweeted
a news story from the satirical website The Babylon Bee,
without seeming to be aware that The Babylon Bee is
a satirical website. Twitter had suffered an outage, and the
Bee jokingly reported that the network had decided to shut
(21:52):
itself down to slow the spread of negative news about
Joe Biden. Trump wasn't chuckling at the joke. He was
demanding to know why Twitter had done this. How many
voters also struggled to spot tricks and jokes. When researchers
from Ohio State presented voters with a selection of stories
(22:14):
from the Babylon b They found that up to twenty
eight percent of Republicans thought the stories were real. Democrats
were less likely to be fooled, But the reverse was
true when the researchers tried stories from another satirical website,
arguably one with a different political perspective, the Onion. The
(22:35):
researchers were looking for ways to minimize the spread of
misinformation over social networks. In twenty nineteen, they ran an experiment.
They flagged posts on Facebook in one of three ways.
The first type of flag said that independent fact checkers
had said story wasn't true. The second type said that
(22:57):
other Facebook users had raised doubts about it. Neither type
of flag made the studies subjects any less likely to
share the story, but the third type did. When a
story was flagged as being from a satirical website, people
were less likely to part it on. It wasn't a
(23:18):
huge effect, but it was something. Clearly Labeling satire as
satire did seem to prevent some people from sharing fake news.
When the truth about the truth about Hansel and Gretel
finally emerged, some of Tracksler's readers were not amused. An
(23:39):
angry couple from North Rhine West Failure sent me the
petrol bill for the trip they'd made to the SPEs Art.
Then Trackxler received a letter from a lawyer in herborn.
If you want to do business with a parody, then
you have to label your parody as such. I have
therefore decided to bring the case to the attention of
(24:02):
the public prosecutor or. As William H. Macy would put it,
can't say it's a true story if it wasn't Hahn's.
Traxler was summoned to the police station. Cautionary tales will
be back soon. If you want to do business with
(24:29):
a parody, then you have to label your parody as such,
so said the irate German lawyer. Facebook seems to agree.
It has now rolled out the flags on satirical stories.
They join other algorithmic warnings, from disputed claims on Twitter
(24:50):
to suspected spam on emails and texts. We're constantly assailed
by people trying to fool us because they want to
influence our vote or part us from our money. Any
reminders to consider the source of information have to be
a good thing, and yet I can't help feel that
the lawyer from Herborne was being too dogmatic in demanding
(25:14):
that paradies must always be labeled. Phishing emails and troll
farm tweets can be hard to spot. Even for the algorithms,
we can't rely on them being flagged. We have to
think for ourselves. A clever hoax can act a bit
like a vaccine, a benign way to prime our critical
(25:36):
thinking immune system, to make us more alert against the
threats that matter. And a hoax can't work if it
has to announce itself up front. What does it take
for a hoax to earn our indulgence? I think there
are three things. First, the hoax has to be good.
That means it must be plausible if you're not paying attention,
(25:58):
but obvious if you are. That's harder than it sounds.
Attempts at satire are often either too clunkily apparent on
the first read or too well discussed on the second.
Hans Trackler seems to have got the balance exactly right.
He was amazed by how many letters he received from
readers who'd spotted one piece of nonsense in his account
(26:22):
of georg Oseg's research, but who hadn't. Then questioned everything else.
Those letters said things like, dear mister Tracksler, I believe
gay org Osegg must have been mistaken when he says
he found the woodcutter's cord in the tree twenty five
meters above the ground, because the tree had grown so much.
You see, trees sprout from the top, they don't push
(26:45):
up from the bottom, so the cord would have been
quite close to the ground. Apart from that minor blemish,
I found mister Ossegg's work to be excellent. Or the
manuscript from Vinigaroda can't have come from sixteen forty seven
because it refers to a famous event that happened in
eighteen eleven. Otherwise, though, great job. These are readers who
(27:08):
really should have felt their spidy senses tingling, and when
they discovered they'd been had, they must have been embarrassed
at their gullibility. And that's a useful feeling, because they'll
resolve to think more critically in future. The second requirement
of a satisfying hoax is like a vaccine, it should
(27:29):
do no harm. I'm not sure that's true about some
satirical stories from sites such as the Babylon Bee. According
to the Ohio State Study For example, twenty three percent
of Republicans believed the Bee's story that US Representative Illan
Omar said being Jewish is an inherently hostile act. You
(27:53):
can reach your own conclusions as to whether this is
or is not a hilarious satire of the left wing
of US politics. But the point is she never said it,
and when people believe she did, real damage is done
to political disc course. But with Hansel and Gretel, what
were the worst things that happened? A couple from North
(28:16):
Rhine Westphalia spent some money on petrol, a teacher from
Denmark looked like an idiot for organizing an international study visit,
and a humorless lawyer from Herborne made the Frankfurt police
call in Hans Tracksler for questioning. Although I'm happy to
report that Tracxler was cleared of any crime. The third
(28:38):
and final ingredient of a good hoax is that it
has a point. It draws our attention to something about
which we're more credulous than we should be. When the
Cohen Brothers added that screencrawl to Fargo, saying this is
a true story, they were poking fun at a trend
that began in the nineteen seventies, directors of gory, low
(29:00):
budget drive in flicks discovered their gross more if they
added words like based on real events to the poster,
however loose the connection might be. Hahns Tracksler was inspired
to write about Hansel and Gretel by reading a best
selling book called Gerta Graba Ungelerta God's Graves and Scholars.
(29:24):
It told of archeologists like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated the
site of ancient Troy in modern day Turkey, and made
the case that Homer's epic poem The Iliad was based
on historical events. There was a craze for pop archaeology
books in Germany like Undi Biebel Hoch de Rech and
(29:45):
the Bible Is Right. Researchers prove the historical truth. Trakxler
wandered if readers might not always be consuming books of
this genre with a sufficiently critical eye. He got his answer.
Both Tracksler and the Kohens are prompting us to ask
a deeper question. When we like to hear there's truth
(30:08):
in fix, what is it we really care about? Because
there is a truth behind Hansel and Grettel, but it's
nothing to do with tracks, less scoreless nonsense about a
murderous gingerbread baker. In thirteen fifteen, incessant rain ruined crops
(30:31):
across Europe. The Great Famine lasted for years. It's hard
to be sure of exactly what happened, but some harrowing
accounts survive. In Bristol, England, one writer tells of such
mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead,
(30:52):
and some eat their own children. In the Baltics, it
was said that mothers fed upon their sons. Perhaps it's
no surprise that the folklore of many countries has tales
Hansel and Gretel about famine, child abandonment, and cannibalism. I
(31:17):
said that Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale for
children about stranger danger. But perhaps these stories were also
cautionary tales for parents about unimaginable hunger and choices too
awful to contemplate. But what about Takako Kunischi. Doesn't her
(31:42):
death show the risks of dressing fiction as fact. Remember
in two thousand and one, Takaco had turned up in
North Dakota inappropriately dressed in the cold midwinter, clutching a
map and asking for directions to Fargo. The world's media
reported that she seemed to have believed the movie's claims
(32:03):
to truth and hoped she could find the hidden million dollars.
Cult film sparked hunt for a Fortune, said the UK's
Daily Telegraph. It was an astonishing story and the filmmaker
Paul Bursla wanted to find out more. Soon after reading
the news, he persuaded British television's Channel four to send
(32:25):
him to North Dakota with a cameraman and a Japanese actress.
Bursla planned to retrace Takako's final days to find the
people who had encountered her and recreate some scenes. They're
checked into the Quality Inn in downtown Fargo, where Tacco
had stayed before she died. Bursla spoke to the night clerk.
(32:50):
It's funny, he said, I was surprised when I heard
how she died looking for the ransom in the movie.
She never mentioned anything to me about Fargo or any
other kind of movie. She asked about seeing the stars,
which I thought was a little strange because it was
November and it isn't that warm outside in the middle
of the night. What about the policeman in Bismarck, who
(33:14):
told journalists how they'd tried to explain to Tacco that
Fargo was a fictional movie and there wasn't really any treasure.
I'd never seen the film Fargo, one of them explained,
But another officer in the station had seen it, and
he told me there was money buried in this movie.
And then we started to think that she had this
false impression. Takaco had never said anything about money to
(33:38):
the police either true. It wasn't unreasonable speculation. There's no
obvious reason why a Japanese woman would turn up in
North Dakota with a crudely drawn map asking about Fargo.
But it all turned out to have been a case
of two plus two making five. Burslo was now even
(34:00):
more intrigued. What was the real story. He flew to
Tokyo and tracked down Takaco's former landlady. She told him
Takiko had been a normal, happy girl until one day
everything changed. She started drinking heavily. It must have been
man trouble, the landlady thought. Bursler discovered that on her
(34:24):
last night in the hotel, Takiko had spent forty minutes
on the phone to Singapore. He found out the number
Takiko had called and dialed it himself. At the other
end of the line was an American businessman. Yes. The
man told Bursler he had known Takiko when he lived
(34:44):
in Tokyo. She'd wanted to go with him when he
moved to Singapore. He had said no. She was heartbroken.
He was from Fargo. Several weeks after Takiko died, the
police found out that she'd sent her parents a suicide note.
She hadn't come to North Dakota to seek her fortune,
(35:07):
she'd come to end her life. The media thought Tackerco
had been too credulous about Fargo. Instead, there'd been too
credulous about Takaco. The reports framed her tragic death as
a cautionary tale about gullibility, a warning to think critically
(35:29):
even when a story presents itself as true. That's exactly
what it was, but not in the way they'd imagined.
Essential sources for this episode were Hans Tracksler's book The
Truth About Hansel and Grettel, an article about the hoax
(35:52):
by Jordan Toderoff in at The Subscurer, and Paul Bursler's
documentary This is a true story. For a full list
of our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford
dot com. Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me
Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright. The show was
produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Pete Norton. The music,
(36:16):
sound design, and mixing are the work of Pascal Wise.
The scripts were edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to
mil LaBelle, Carlie Mediori, Heather Fane, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg,
and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary Tales is a Pushkin Industry's production
Pushkin a warning before we start. This cautionary tale discusses
death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're
having suicidal thoughts. Support is available, for example, from the
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the US. Fargo is a
(00:39):
town in North Dakota. It's also a classic movie from
nineteen ninety six, the blackest of comedies. A car salesman
attempts to swindle his wealthy father in law by paying
a couple of criminals to kidnap his wife and demand
a ransom. It ends up with five innocent people dead
(01:01):
and one of the kidnappers trying to dispose of his
partner's body by feeding it into a wood chipper. Famously,
the movie starts with these words, this is a true story.
At the request of the survivors. The names have been
changed out of respect for the dead. The rest has
(01:23):
been told exactly as it occurred. Fargo isn't a true story.
The shoote was well underway when the directors, the Coen Brothers,
casually mentioned this to the cast. One of the movie stars,
William H. Macy, was taken aback. You can't say it's
a true story if it wasn't, said Macy, Why not,
(01:47):
came the reply. In the movie, one of the hapless
kidnappers hides nearly a million dollars by burying it in snow.
It's a comically stupid idea. The landscape's generic and featureless
as far as the eye can see. How will he
ever find his way back to the spot. He won't,
(02:09):
and not just because he ends up in a wood chipper,
and none of the movies other characters know that cash
is there. Hold on, though, if the movie is told
exactly as it occurred, does the money exist? Is it
still where the kidnapper left it? Undiscovered? In real life?
(02:31):
Five years after the film was released, a young woman
turned up at the police station in Bismarck, North Dakota.
She had just flown in from Tokyo. It was the
middle of winter, but she was wearing a short black
skirt and Thai high boots. She was clutching a simple
map that showed nothing but a road and a tree.
(02:52):
The police tried to understand what she wanted, but they
spoke no Japanese and her English wasn't great. They could
make out one word, though fargo. One policeman recalled, we'd
tried to explain to her that it was a fictional movie.
Really wasn't any treasure. The police weren't sure if the
message had got through, but they took her to the
(03:15):
bus station where she could catch a greyhound to Fargo,
several hours to the east, across a vast and empty landscape.
A couple of days later, they got a call from
another police department. In some woods not far from Fargo.
On a freezing cold morning, a hunter had found the
(03:36):
body of a young Japanese woman. Takakokanishi's death was reported
around the world. Cult film sparked Hunt for a Fortune.
You can't say it's a true story if it wasn't,
can you. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to cautionary tales,
(04:24):
you must know the story of Hansel and Grettel, made
famous by the brothers Grim. A great famine sweeps the land.
A poor woodcutter can no longer afford to feed his family.
One night, his new wife persuades him that they must
take his children into the forest and abandon them. They
(04:47):
set off early the next morning, the sun glinting off
the chimney of the woodcutter's cottage, deep into the woods.
The man builds a fire to keep his children warm. Wait, hip,
I won't be too far away. You'll be able to
hear me chopping trees. That the sounds young handsland Grettel
(05:08):
can hear don't come from their father's axe. He's tied
a branch to a tree trunk in such a way
that the wind will cause it to keep flacking. By
the time his children realize that he's gone, he thinks
they'll never find their way home. He doesn't realize that
the children overheard the plan. Hansel sneaked out in the
(05:30):
dead of night to fill his pockets with pebbles, and
as they walked, he dropped them. By following the trail
of pebbles, Hansel and Gretel get back home. Their wicked
stepmother is furious that night she locks them in. The
Next morning, they set off again. Hansel has no pebbles,
(05:54):
but he does have a hunk of bread, and so
instead he leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. This time, when
the children try to follow their trail back home, disaster
birds have eaten all the crumbs. Hansel and Gretel wander
(06:15):
the forest, starving and lost. Eventually they chance across a
house made from gingerbread and begin to eat it. There
comes a soft voice from inside. Nibble, nibble, little mouse,
who is nibbling at my house? A woman as old
(06:37):
as the hills creeps out of the door. She invites
the children inside with the promise of more food. But
she's a wicked witch, and she captures them. She keeps
Hansel in a cage and forces Grettel to work preparing
food for her brother. When he's fattened up, I'm going
to eat him. The witch's eyesight is bad, so every
(07:01):
day she asks Hansel to stick a finger through the
cage for her to feel how fat he's got. Hansel
tricks her he finds a bone on the floor in
every day he pokes that through the cage instead. Eventually
the witch loses patience. She announces she'll cook Hansel fat
or not, and secretly decides to cook Gretel too. This time,
(07:24):
Gretel tricks her climb into the overn and see if
it's hot enough. Yet I don't understand. How can I
climb inside the oven? Replied Gretel, innocently. Stupid girl like this?
Do I have to show you everything? Gretel shoves her in,
slams the door, and bars it with an iron rod.
(07:45):
The witch howls as the flames consume her. Gretel lets
Hansel out of the cage, and the children again look
for the way back home. A magical duckling helps them
across a great body of water, and they arrive home.
Their wicked stepmother is dead, and their regretful father is
overjoyed to have them back. The three live happily ever after.
(08:13):
Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale, much like the
tales I tell. But Hansel and Gretel is for children,
a warning about stranger danger. Or so it seems. The
tales I tell are for grown ups, and the tales
I tell are true. Hansel and Gretel isn't true? Or
(08:37):
is it? The fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel fascinated
a young boy growing up in the nineteen twenties near
the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. Georg Osseg's grandparents owned
a rare early edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, published in
(08:59):
eighteen eighteen. It was beautifully illustrated with intricate drawings. Young
George read it and reread it until every page was
seared in his memory. Oseg grew up to be a teacher.
He got a job in a Schaffenburg near Frankfurt. He
(09:19):
spent his weekends hiking in the Spessart, a nearby range
of low wooded mountains. One spring day in nineteen sixty two,
he was exploring a part of the woods he'd never
been to before. A local farmer had told him it
was known as the Hexenvald, the Witch's Forest. I hadn't
(09:43):
been out for half an hour when suddenly I had
a strange feeling. I felt as if I had walked
this path before. How could that be? Osseg thought for
a moment. Then it hit him. He realized that he'd
recognized the scene from an illustration in his grandfather's book.
Osseg compared the drawing with the view from the footpath.
(10:07):
There could be no doubt the trees had grown, of course,
that the oaks, the spruces, and the beeches were all
in exactly the same configuration. The line of the hills
on the horizon was unmistakable. That illustration in Hansel and
Gretel hadn't just come from an artist's imagination. It was
(10:28):
a faithful depiction of a real place. What else about
the story might be real? George Osseg decided to do
something that no one had thought of before. He read
the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel as if it
were a factual report. That's a line from a nineteen
(10:49):
sixty three book about Georg Osseg. It was called di
varheite uber Hansel and Gretel The Truth about Hansel and Gretel,
and it caused a sensation. In the book, the author
Hans Trasler describes what Oseg did next. The illustration showed
(11:10):
the path along which Hansland Grettel's father had taken them
into the forest. In the story, the children look back
at the morning sunlight glinting off the chimney of the
woodcutter's cottage. The sun rises in the east. So if
Oseg followed the path east, would it lead him to
the woodcutter's cottage. Osg walked east, and he found a
(11:34):
newly built autobahn connecting Frankfurt with Wurtzburg. But what had
been there before? The records must exist. Tracksler describes how
Oseg tracked them down to the Rubrun railway maintenance depot.
He leafed through the dusty files until he found a
note of a court decision from November the fourth, nineteen
(11:57):
fifty four, a dispute over the compensation due from the
Federal Motorway's administration to a man called Georg Scheidhauer, who'd
owned the land at the east end of the forest path.
The court awarded Scheidehauer eighteen thousand, seven hundred and sixty
Deutsche marks for his property, a half timbered house with
(12:21):
a barn and a garden with eighteen fruit trees. Oss
Egg had found the Woodcutter's cottage. Cautionary tales will return
in a moment. Georg oss Egg was now a man
(12:49):
with a mission. He had located the site of the
woodcutter's cottage from hansland Grettel. He had found the path
along which the children had been led. Next, he looked
for the place where they'd been abandoned. The story mentions
that the woodcutter made a fire to keep the children warm.
(13:10):
No forester would make a fire in the thick of
the trees, so that must have meant a clearing. Oseg
explored to the west until he found one. In the story,
the woodcutter ties a branch to a tree so the
wind will make it swack and sound like an axe.
Oseg spent two days inspecting every tree near the clearing
(13:34):
until he came across an old oak with a wound
in the trunk where a cord had been tied around it.
He had the tree felled and the cord radio carbon
dated it came from the sixteen forties. What about the
Witch's house? Did that exist and could Oseg find it?
(13:56):
According to the story, Hansel and Gretel crossed a body
of water between the witch's house and their own that
could only refer to the river Ashaft. Oseg got a map,
divided it into squares, and methodically searched each one. After
two months, he found ruins of a building made from bricks.
(14:19):
The footprint of those ruins looked like it exactly matched
another illustration in his grandparent's book showing the which his
four brick ovens. Osseg grabbed his spade and started to dig.
Within the foundations of one of the ovens, he found
the charred remains of a woman's skeleton. He brought in
(14:43):
academic specialists who concluded the woman was thirty five years
old and she had been strangled before she had been
thrown in the oven. Osseg dug some more. He found
a broken hinge had the murderers forced their way in?
(15:04):
He found a small iron chest. It contained a hand
written recipe for gingerbread. But who had the murdered woman been.
Osseg turned now to linguistic analysis. In the Grimm's telling
of the tale, the witch speaks in a dialect which
(15:25):
has distinctive roots in the town of werniged Oda. Osseg
travels to the town and searches through its records. He
discovers reports of a trial from sixteen forty seven, The
year ties right in with the radio carbon dating. A
baker called Katerina Schraderin is accused of witchcraft by a
(15:48):
man whose proposal of marriage she's spurned. Soon after another trial,
Katerina has been murdered and the man and his sister
are accused. The man is called Hans Metzler, his sister Gretta.
(16:13):
Hans and Gretta Osg pieced together what had happened. Katerina
was famous for her gingerbread. Hans was a baker too.
He had wanted to marry Katerina to get his hands
on her recipe. When she turned him down, he and
his sister went to her house in the woods and
(16:36):
murdered her. But they didn't find her recipe because she'd
hidden it in the iron chest. So the story of
Hansel and Grettel was based on real events, albeit loosely.
The protagonists weren't abandoned children, they were cold blooded murderers
motivated by greed. And the woman who burned in the
(16:59):
oven wasn't a wicked witch with a magical gingerbread house,
but a talented baker with a sort after gingerbread recipe.
When Hans Traxler published his book about geyorg Osseg, The
Truth about Hansel and Gretel, he was stunned by the response.
(17:22):
What stunned him was that everyone took it seriously. I
was sure I'd hidden enough clues that it was all
a great big fib. Traxler was a professional satirist, a
writer and illustrator for a satirical magazine. Gayorg Osseg didn't exist,
(17:43):
but the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Requests
to translate it came in from eighteen countries. Reviewers in
Germany's newspapers gushed about the thoroughness of Oseg's research and
the gripping way. Traxler described it the book of the year,
maybe the book of the decade, said one The newspapers
(18:06):
in communist East Germany were just as impressed, perhaps because
they could blame capitalism for the murder. A criminal case
from the early capitalist era, appined Berlina Zeitung. What were
the clues Tracksler had left that he had made the
whole thing up. Some were subtle. Katerina's gingerbread recipe, for example,
(18:28):
Tracksler had copied it word for word from a popular
cookbook by doctor Utka. Other clues should have been harder
to miss. In one passage, Osg recruits an eight year
old boy, fills his pockets with pebbles and has him
walked down the path away from the motorway where the
woodcutter's house had supposedly stood. The pebbles run out before
(18:53):
he gets to the clearing, but when Osgg fills his
own pockets with pebbles, he does have enough to cover
the distance. The book includes a diagram helpfully showing how
tall people can see further and hence leave more space
between pebbles. Hansel and Gretel were not children at all.
(19:14):
Tracksler describes osggers, concluding, to put it scientifically, they must
have been the size of an adult scientific Indeed, also
very scientific was a photograph of OSG's radiocarbon dating equipment.
You don't have to look too closely to see that
(19:34):
it consists of an upside down lasagna tray, a length
of coax cable from a television, a child's microscope, and
some jars from the kitchen spice rack. Tracksler was bewildered
that nobody picked up on this unsubtle clue. Real apparatus
to do carbon dating is the size of a train.
(19:57):
He pointed out. Some of the images in the book
show gay org osgg in action. It's Tracksler himself in
the silliest of disguises, wire rimmed glasses and a fake mustache.
Tracksler took a photographer to a Frankfurt construction site, where
they jumped into a ditch to shoot the excavation. At
(20:20):
the witch's house, tracks Ler posed inspecting the side of
the ditch with a pastry brush. The photographer and I
lay on the ground laughing, but when the book was
published the joke was lost. Excited letters flooded in gay Org.
Oseg was invited to give lectures. A Japanese academic expressed
(20:44):
earnest interest in how the new field of fairy tale
archaeology could improve cross cultural understanding. Readers flocked to the
scenic woods of the spec Art, trying to decipher Oseg's
descriptions and locate the witch's house for themselves. Schools hired
(21:05):
buses and took entire classes. One made the ten hour
journey from Denmark. Hahns Traxler started to wander what had
done in our social media age, Mistaking satire for serious
(21:29):
reporting is a surprisingly common problem. President Trump once retweeted
a news story from the satirical website The Babylon Bee,
without seeming to be aware that The Babylon Bee is
a satirical website. Twitter had suffered an outage, and the
Bee jokingly reported that the network had decided to shut
(21:52):
itself down to slow the spread of negative news about
Joe Biden. Trump wasn't chuckling at the joke. He was
demanding to know why Twitter had done this. How many
voters also struggled to spot tricks and jokes. When researchers
from Ohio State presented voters with a selection of stories
(22:14):
from the Babylon b They found that up to twenty
eight percent of Republicans thought the stories were real. Democrats
were less likely to be fooled, But the reverse was
true when the researchers tried stories from another satirical website,
arguably one with a different political perspective, the Onion. The
(22:35):
researchers were looking for ways to minimize the spread of
misinformation over social networks. In twenty nineteen, they ran an experiment.
They flagged posts on Facebook in one of three ways.
The first type of flag said that independent fact checkers
had said story wasn't true. The second type said that
(22:57):
other Facebook users had raised doubts about it. Neither type
of flag made the studies subjects any less likely to
share the story, but the third type did. When a
story was flagged as being from a satirical website, people
were less likely to part it on. It wasn't a
(23:18):
huge effect, but it was something. Clearly Labeling satire as
satire did seem to prevent some people from sharing fake news.
When the truth about the truth about Hansel and Gretel
finally emerged, some of Tracksler's readers were not amused. An
(23:39):
angry couple from North Rhine West Failure sent me the
petrol bill for the trip they'd made to the SPEs Art.
Then Trackxler received a letter from a lawyer in herborn.
If you want to do business with a parody, then
you have to label your parody as such. I have
therefore decided to bring the case to the attention of
(24:02):
the public prosecutor or. As William H. Macy would put it,
can't say it's a true story if it wasn't Hahn's.
Traxler was summoned to the police station. Cautionary tales will
be back soon. If you want to do business with
(24:29):
a parody, then you have to label your parody as such,
so said the irate German lawyer. Facebook seems to agree.
It has now rolled out the flags on satirical stories.
They join other algorithmic warnings, from disputed claims on Twitter
(24:50):
to suspected spam on emails and texts. We're constantly assailed
by people trying to fool us because they want to
influence our vote or part us from our money. Any
reminders to consider the source of information have to be
a good thing, and yet I can't help feel that
the lawyer from Herborne was being too dogmatic in demanding
(25:14):
that paradies must always be labeled. Phishing emails and troll
farm tweets can be hard to spot. Even for the algorithms,
we can't rely on them being flagged. We have to
think for ourselves. A clever hoax can act a bit
like a vaccine, a benign way to prime our critical
(25:36):
thinking immune system, to make us more alert against the
threats that matter. And a hoax can't work if it
has to announce itself up front. What does it take
for a hoax to earn our indulgence? I think there
are three things. First, the hoax has to be good.
That means it must be plausible if you're not paying attention,
(25:58):
but obvious if you are. That's harder than it sounds.
Attempts at satire are often either too clunkily apparent on
the first read or too well discussed on the second.
Hans Trackler seems to have got the balance exactly right.
He was amazed by how many letters he received from
readers who'd spotted one piece of nonsense in his account
(26:22):
of georg Oseg's research, but who hadn't. Then questioned everything else.
Those letters said things like, dear mister Tracksler, I believe
gay org Osegg must have been mistaken when he says
he found the woodcutter's cord in the tree twenty five
meters above the ground, because the tree had grown so much.
You see, trees sprout from the top, they don't push
(26:45):
up from the bottom, so the cord would have been
quite close to the ground. Apart from that minor blemish,
I found mister Ossegg's work to be excellent. Or the
manuscript from Vinigaroda can't have come from sixteen forty seven
because it refers to a famous event that happened in
eighteen eleven. Otherwise, though, great job. These are readers who
(27:08):
really should have felt their spidy senses tingling, and when
they discovered they'd been had, they must have been embarrassed
at their gullibility. And that's a useful feeling, because they'll
resolve to think more critically in future. The second requirement
of a satisfying hoax is like a vaccine, it should
(27:29):
do no harm. I'm not sure that's true about some
satirical stories from sites such as the Babylon Bee. According
to the Ohio State Study For example, twenty three percent
of Republicans believed the Bee's story that US Representative Illan
Omar said being Jewish is an inherently hostile act. You
(27:53):
can reach your own conclusions as to whether this is
or is not a hilarious satire of the left wing
of US politics. But the point is she never said it,
and when people believe she did, real damage is done
to political disc course. But with Hansel and Gretel, what
were the worst things that happened? A couple from North
(28:16):
Rhine Westphalia spent some money on petrol, a teacher from
Denmark looked like an idiot for organizing an international study visit,
and a humorless lawyer from Herborne made the Frankfurt police
call in Hans Tracksler for questioning. Although I'm happy to
report that Tracxler was cleared of any crime. The third
(28:38):
and final ingredient of a good hoax is that it
has a point. It draws our attention to something about
which we're more credulous than we should be. When the
Cohen Brothers added that screencrawl to Fargo, saying this is
a true story, they were poking fun at a trend
that began in the nineteen seventies, directors of gory, low
(29:00):
budget drive in flicks discovered their gross more if they
added words like based on real events to the poster,
however loose the connection might be. Hahns Tracksler was inspired
to write about Hansel and Gretel by reading a best
selling book called Gerta Graba Ungelerta God's Graves and Scholars.
(29:24):
It told of archeologists like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated the
site of ancient Troy in modern day Turkey, and made
the case that Homer's epic poem The Iliad was based
on historical events. There was a craze for pop archaeology
books in Germany like Undi Biebel Hoch de Rech and
(29:45):
the Bible Is Right. Researchers prove the historical truth. Trakxler
wandered if readers might not always be consuming books of
this genre with a sufficiently critical eye. He got his answer.
Both Tracksler and the Kohens are prompting us to ask
a deeper question. When we like to hear there's truth
(30:08):
in fix, what is it we really care about? Because
there is a truth behind Hansel and Grettel, but it's
nothing to do with tracks, less scoreless nonsense about a
murderous gingerbread baker. In thirteen fifteen, incessant rain ruined crops
(30:31):
across Europe. The Great Famine lasted for years. It's hard
to be sure of exactly what happened, but some harrowing
accounts survive. In Bristol, England, one writer tells of such
mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead,
(30:52):
and some eat their own children. In the Baltics, it
was said that mothers fed upon their sons. Perhaps it's
no surprise that the folklore of many countries has tales
Hansel and Gretel about famine, child abandonment, and cannibalism. I
(31:17):
said that Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale for
children about stranger danger. But perhaps these stories were also
cautionary tales for parents about unimaginable hunger and choices too
awful to contemplate. But what about Takako Kunischi. Doesn't her
(31:42):
death show the risks of dressing fiction as fact. Remember
in two thousand and one, Takaco had turned up in
North Dakota inappropriately dressed in the cold midwinter, clutching a
map and asking for directions to Fargo. The world's media
reported that she seemed to have believed the movie's claims
(32:03):
to truth and hoped she could find the hidden million dollars.
Cult film sparked hunt for a Fortune, said the UK's
Daily Telegraph. It was an astonishing story and the filmmaker
Paul Bursla wanted to find out more. Soon after reading
the news, he persuaded British television's Channel four to send
(32:25):
him to North Dakota with a cameraman and a Japanese actress.
Bursla planned to retrace Takako's final days to find the
people who had encountered her and recreate some scenes. They're
checked into the Quality Inn in downtown Fargo, where Tacco
had stayed before she died. Bursla spoke to the night clerk.
(32:50):
It's funny, he said, I was surprised when I heard
how she died looking for the ransom in the movie.
She never mentioned anything to me about Fargo or any
other kind of movie. She asked about seeing the stars,
which I thought was a little strange because it was
November and it isn't that warm outside in the middle
of the night. What about the policeman in Bismarck, who
(33:14):
told journalists how they'd tried to explain to Tacco that
Fargo was a fictional movie and there wasn't really any treasure.
I'd never seen the film Fargo, one of them explained,
But another officer in the station had seen it, and
he told me there was money buried in this movie.
And then we started to think that she had this
false impression. Takaco had never said anything about money to
(33:38):
the police either true. It wasn't unreasonable speculation. There's no
obvious reason why a Japanese woman would turn up in
North Dakota with a crudely drawn map asking about Fargo.
But it all turned out to have been a case
of two plus two making five. Burslo was now even
(34:00):
more intrigued. What was the real story. He flew to
Tokyo and tracked down Takaco's former landlady. She told him
Takiko had been a normal, happy girl until one day
everything changed. She started drinking heavily. It must have been
man trouble, the landlady thought. Bursler discovered that on her
(34:24):
last night in the hotel, Takiko had spent forty minutes
on the phone to Singapore. He found out the number
Takiko had called and dialed it himself. At the other
end of the line was an American businessman. Yes. The
man told Bursler he had known Takiko when he lived
(34:44):
in Tokyo. She'd wanted to go with him when he
moved to Singapore. He had said no. She was heartbroken.
He was from Fargo. Several weeks after Takiko died, the
police found out that she'd sent her parents a suicide note.
She hadn't come to North Dakota to seek her fortune,
(35:07):
she'd come to end her life. The media thought Tackerco
had been too credulous about Fargo. Instead, there'd been too
credulous about Takaco. The reports framed her tragic death as
a cautionary tale about gullibility, a warning to think critically
(35:29):
even when a story presents itself as true. That's exactly
what it was, but not in the way they'd imagined.
Essential sources for this episode were Hans Tracksler's book The
Truth About Hansel and Grettel, an article about the hoax
(35:52):
by Jordan Toderoff in at The Subscurer, and Paul Bursler's
documentary This is a true story. For a full list
of our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford
dot com. Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me
Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright. The show was
produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Pete Norton. The music,
(36:16):
sound design, and mixing are the work of Pascal Wise.
The scripts were edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to
mil LaBelle, Carlie Mediori, Heather Fane, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg,
and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary Tales is a Pushkin Industry's production
Host
Tim Harford
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