Imaginary Worlds - True Crime Fairy Tale

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

Was the tale of Hansel and Gretel inspired by a real crime in German history? It would make for a great story, if it were true. This week’s episode comes from the podcast Cautionary Tales, where host Tim Harford looks at how misinformation can cast a spell on us like a fairy tale, and he connects the dots from The Brothers Grimm to The Coen Brothers. This episode is sponsored by Brilliant and Nord VPN. Visit brilliant.org/imaginaryworlds to get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. And go to nordvpn.com/imaginaryworlds to get a discount off your NordVPN Plan and one additional month for free. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. Over the last few years, whenever I would lie awake at night and worry about the future of

democracy, what I kept thinking about is why so many people believe hoaxes and misinformation, especially when the lies are so transparent. And when I was mulling this over, I'd often think back to this episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Cautionary Tales. The host, Tim Harford, tells stories from the past, pointing out valuable lessons in history's greatest mistakes, disasters, and fiascos. And in an episode called The Truth About Hansel and Gretel, Tim looked at whether the story of Hansel and Gretel was based on a true crime from the 1700s. But the episode is really about misinformation and how it can cast a spell on us like a fairy tale. And Tim actually makes a connection between the Brothers Grimm and the Coen Brothers.

And after listening to the episode, I realized that even people like me who think we're skeptical, fact-based media consumers, we can be easily fooled by a story that's not true, but works really well as a story. So I'm going to play this episode of Cautionary Tales in its entirety. But first, I should let you know it does deal with the subject of suicide. Okay, here's the episode hosted by Tim Harford. Okay, here's the episode hosted by Tim Harford. Fargo is a town in North Dakota.

It's also a classic movie from 1996, 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 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 been told exactly as it occurred. Fargo isn't a true story. The shoot was well underway when the directors, the Coen brothers, casually mentioned this to the cast. One of the movie's stars, William H. Macy, was taken aback. You can't say it's a true story if it wasn't, said Macy. Why not, 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. And not just because he ends up in a woodchipper. And none of the movie's other characters know the 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? 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 thigh-high boots. She was clutching a simple map that showed nothing but a road and a tree. 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 and there really wasn't any treasure. The police weren't sure if the message had got through, but they took her to the 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 body of a young Japanese woman. Takako Konishi'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. You must know the story of Hansel and Gretel,

made famous by the Brothers Grimm. 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 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 here. I won't be too far away.

You'll be able to hear me chopping trees. But the sounds young Hansel and Gretel 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 thwacking. By the time his children realise that he's gone, he thinks, they'll never find their way home. He doesn't realise that the children overheard the plan. Hansel sneaked out in the 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. The next morning they set off again. Hansel has no pebbles, 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 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 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 Gretel 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 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,

and 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 Gretel tricks her. Climb into the oven 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. 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. 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 is it? The fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel fascinated a young boy growing up in the 1920s, near the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia. Georg Oseg's grandparents owned a rare early edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, published in 1818. It was beautifully illustrated, with intricate drawings.

Young Georg read it and re-read it, until every page was seared in his memory. Oseg grew up to be a teacher. He got a job in Aschaffenburg near Frankfurt. He spent his weekends hiking in the Spessart, a nearby range of low, wooded mountains. One spring day in 1962, 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 Hexenwald, the witch's forest. I hadn't 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? Ossag thought for a moment. How could that be? Oseg thought for a moment. Then it hit him. He realised that he'd recognised the scene from an illustration in his grandfather's book. Oseg compared the drawing with the view from the footpath. There could be no doubt. The trees had grown, of course, but the oaks, the spruces and the beaches 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 a faithful depiction of a real place. What else about the story might be real? of a real place. What else about the story might be real? Georg Ossag 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 1963 book about Georg Ossag. It was called Die Wahrheit über Hansel und Gretel, The Truth About Hansel and Gretel, and it caused a sensation. In the book, the author Hans Traxler describes what Ossag did next. The illustration showed the path along which Hansel and Gretel'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? Oseg walked east, and he found a newly built autobahn connecting Frankfurt with Würzburg. But what had been there before? The records must exist. Traxler describes how Ossag tracked them down to the Röhrbrunn Railway Maintenance Depot. He leafed through the dusty files until he found a note of a court decision from November 4th, 1954. A dispute over the compensation due from the Federal Motorways Administration to a man called Georg Scheidhauer, who'd owned the land at the east end of that forest path. The court awarded Scheidhauer 18,760 Deutschmarks for his property, a half-timbered house with a barn and a garden with 18 fruit trees.

Oseg had found the woodcutter's cottage. Georg Oseg was now a man with a mission. He'd located the site of the woodcutter's cottage from Hansel and Gretel. He'd 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. 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 thwack and sound like an axe. Osegg spent two days inspecting every tree near the clearing 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 radiocarbon dated. It came from the 1640s. What about the witch's house? Did that exist and could Oseg find it?

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 Aschaf. 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. The footprint of those ruins looked like it exactly matched another illustration in his grandparents' book, showing the witch's four brick ovens. Osset 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 academic specialists who concluded the woman was 35 years old

and she'd been strangled before she'd been thrown in the oven. Oseg dug some more. He found a broken hinge. Had the murderers forced their way in? He found a small iron chest. It contained a handwritten recipe for gingerbread. But who had the murdered woman been? Oseg turned now to linguistic analysis.

In the Grimm's telling of the tale, the witch speaks in a dialect which has distinctive roots in the town of Wernigerode. Osegg travels to the town and searches through its records. He discovers reports of a trial from 1647. The year ties right in with the radiocarbon dating. A baker called Katharina Schraderin is accused of witchcraft by a 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, Greta. Hans and Greta. Oseg pieced together what had happened. Katerina was famous for her gingerbread. Hans was a baker too. He had wanted to marry Katharina to get his hands on her recipe. When she turned him down, he and his sister went to her house in the woods and murdered her. But they didn't find her recipe, because she'd hidden it in the iron chest. So the story of Hansel and Gretel 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 oven wasn't a wicked witch with a magical gingerbread house, but a talented baker with a sought-after gingerbread recipe. When Hans Traxler published his book about Georg Osegg, The Truth About Hansel and Gretel, he was stunned by the response. What stunned him was that everyone took it seriously. 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. Georg Osegg didn't exist.

But the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Requests to translate it came in from 18 countries. Reviewers in Germany's newspapers gushed about the thoroughness of Osegg's research and the gripping way Traxler described it. The book of the year, maybe the book of the decade, said one. The newspapers 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, opined Berliner Zeitung. What were the clues Traxler had left that had made the whole thing up? Some were subtle. that he'd made the whole thing up. Some were subtle. Katerina's gingerbread recipe, for example,

Traxler had copied it word for word from a popular cookbook by Dr Oetker. Other clues should have been harder to miss. In one passage, Oseg recruits an eight-year-old boy, fills his pockets with pebbles, and has him walk down the path away from the motorway where the woodcutter's house had supposedly stood. The pebbles run out before he gets to the clearing. But when Oseg 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, Traxler describes Osegg as concluding.

To put it scientifically, they must have been the size of an adult. Scientific, indeed. Also very scientific was a photograph of OSEG's radiocarbon dating equipment. You don't have to look too closely to see that 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.

a child's microscope and some jars from the kitchen spice rack. Traxler was bewildered that nobody picked up on this unsubtle clue. Real apparatus to do carbon dating is the size of a train, he pointed out. Some of the images in the book show Georg Osegg in action. It's Traxler himself in the silliest of disguises, wire-rimmed glasses and a fake moustache. Traxler took a photographer to a Frankfurt construction site, where they jumped into a ditch to shoot the excavation at the witch's house. Traxler posed, inspecting the side of the ditch with a pastry brush. Traxler 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. Georg Oseg was invited to give lectures. A Japanese academic expressed earnest interest in how the new field of fairy tale archaeology could improve cross-cultural understanding. Readers flocked to the scenic woods of the Spezart, trying to decipher Oseg's descriptions and locate the witch's house for themselves. Schools hired buses and took entire classes. One made the ten-hour journey from Denmark. Hans Traxler started to wonder what he'd done. In our social media age, mistaking satire for serious 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. 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 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 struggle to spot tricks and jokes? When researchers from Ohio State presented voters with a selection of stories from the Babylon Bee,

they found that up to 28% 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 researchers were looking for ways to minimize the spread of misinformation over social networks.

In 2019, 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 a story wasn't true. The second type said that other Facebook users had raised doubts about it. Neither type of flag made the study's 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 pass it on. It wasn't a huge effect, but it was something. Clearly labelling 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 Traxler's readers were not amused. An angry couple from North Rhine-Westphalia sent me the petrol bill for the trip they'd made to the Spezart. How uncomfortable it was for me! Then Traxler 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 the public prosecutor. Or, as William H. Macy would put it, you can't say it's a true story if it wasn't. Hans Traxler was summoned to the police station. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment. age-balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a

run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Let's hear the rest of the episode of Cautionary Tales. Let's hear the rest of the episode of Cautionary Tales. rolled out the flags on satirical stories. They join other algorithmic warnings from disputed claims on Twitter 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 feeling that the lawyer from Herborn was being too dogmatic in demanding that parodies must always be labelled. 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 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, 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 disguised on the second. Hans Traxler 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 of Georg Osegg's research, but who hadn't then questioned everything else. Those letters said things like, Dear Mr Traxler, I believe Georg Osegg must have been mistaken when he says he found the woodcutter's cord in the tree 25 metres above the ground because the tree had grown so much. You see, trees sprout from the top, they don't push up from the bottom, so the cord would have been quite close to the ground.

Apart from that minor blemish, I found Mr Osegg's work to be excellent. Or, the manuscript from Venigaroda can't have come from 1647 because it refers to a famous event that happened in 1811. Otherwise, though, great job. that happened in 1811. Otherwise though, great job. These are readers who really should have felt their spidey 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 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, 23% of Republicans believed the bees' story that US Representative Ilhan Omar said, being Jewish is an inherently hostile act. You 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 discourse. But with Hansel and Gretel, what were the worst things that happened? A couple from North Rhine, Westphalia spent some money on petrol, a teacher from Denmark looked like an idiot for organising an international study visit, and a humourless lawyer from Herborn made the Frankfurt police call in Hans Traxler for questioning,

although I'm happy to report that Traxler was cleared of any crime. The third 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 Coen brothers added that screen crawl to Fargo saying, this is a true story, they were poking fun at a trend that began in the 1970s. Directors of gory, low-budget drive-in flicks discovered they'd gross more if they added words like, based on real events, to the poster,

however loose the connection might be. Hans Traxler was inspired to write about Hansel and Gretel by reading a best-selling book called Goethe, Grabe und Geleute, Gods, Graves and Scholars. It told of archaeologists 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 Und die Bibel hockt der Rechte, and the Bible is right. Researchers prove the historical truth. Traxler wondered if readers might not always be consuming books of this genre with a sufficiently critical eye. He got his answer.

Both Traxler and the Coens are prompting us to ask a deeper question. and the Coens are prompting us to ask a deeper question. When we like to hear there's truth in fiction, what is it we really care about? Because there is a truth behind Hansel and Gretel. But it's nothing to do with tracksless, scurrilous nonsense about a murderous gingerbread baker. Gingerbread Baker. In 1315, incessant rain ruined crops 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 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 like Hansel and Gretel, about famine, child abandonment and cannibalism. I 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 Konishi? Doesn't her death show the risks of dressing fiction as fact? Remember, in 2001, Takako had turned up in North Dakota, Doesn't her death show the risks of dressing fiction as fact? Remember, in 2001, Takako 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 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 Bursler wanted to find out more. Soon after reading the news, he persuaded British television's Channel 4 to send him to North Dakota with a cameraman and a Japanese actress. Bursler planned to retrace Takako's final days, to find the people who'd encountered

her and recreate some scenes. They'd checked into the Quality Inn in downtown Fargo, where Takako had stayed before she died. Bursler spoke to the night clerk. 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 policemen in Bismarck, who told journalists how they'd tried to explain to Takako 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. Takako had never said anything about money to 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. Bursler was now even more intrigued. What was the real story? He flew to Tokyo and tracked down Takako's former landlady.

She told him Takako 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 last night in the hotel, Takako had spent 40 minutes on the phone to Singapore. He found out the number Takako had called and dialed it himself. At the other end of the line was an American businessman.

Yes, the man told Bursler, he'd known Takako when he lived in Tokyo. She'd wanted to go with him when he moved to Singapore. He'd said no. She was heartbroken. He was from Fargo. Several weeks after Takako 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. She'd come to end her life. The media thought Takako had been too credulous about Fargo. Instead, they'd been too credulous about Takako. The reports framed her tragic death as a cautionary tale about gullibility, a warning to think critically, even when a story presents itself as true.

That's exactly what it was, but not in the way they'd imagined. You can learn more about Cautionary Tales and this particular episode at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is produced by Pushkin, and you can listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman, and our website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.