The borders were closed even though they weren't at war?
Oh, yes. You needed an exit visa to get out. It wasn't even the Germans that arrested him, it was the Austrians (a friend who was with him and had a visa was also arrested because his sandwiches were wrapped in an old copy of a banned left-wing newspaper. The Austrian state was already well on the road to fascism before the Germans arrived).
I remember reading an SF story when I was a kid about the televising of terminally ill patients' deaths for entertainment, and being horrified. It has now happened.
I started writing this play a year and a half ago, and one of the things that kept me from finishing it was that real life kept trumping anything I could dream up. Like that Brazilian TV presenter of a True Crime show who paid hitmen to kill people so the TV cameras could get to the scene really fast. Or Natasha Kampusch hosting her own talk show. If Fritzl weren't so old he's bound to die in prison, I bet he'd be offered his own talk show when he came out.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-11-19 06:08 am (UTC)Oh, yes. You needed an exit visa to get out. It wasn't even the Germans that arrested him, it was the Austrians (a friend who was with him and had a visa was also arrested because his sandwiches were wrapped in an old copy of a banned left-wing newspaper. The Austrian state was already well on the road to fascism before the Germans arrived).
I remember reading an SF story when I was a kid about the televising of terminally ill patients' deaths for entertainment, and being horrified. It has now happened.
I started writing this play a year and a half ago, and one of the things that kept me from finishing it was that real life kept trumping anything I could dream up. Like that Brazilian TV presenter of a True Crime show who paid hitmen to kill people so the TV cameras could get to the scene really fast. Or Natasha Kampusch hosting her own talk show. If Fritzl weren't so old he's bound to die in prison, I bet he'd be offered his own talk show when he came out.