This is a story of enormous egos and enormous mustaches,

of fraud and financial ruin of hubris and despair.

It's a story of death on a massive scale and of understated genius. What's this story all about? A war, a revolution?

No, a canal. I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast and this amazing tale is exclusively for Pushkin Plus subscribers.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or by visiting Pushkin.

F.M. slash Plus.

Bush. Yeah. Now, let's talk about, you're the fascinating thing about that guy, Krieger, who goes from Germany to Arkansas. Yes he does. To Fayetteville. Yes.

I'm talking to a professor at Yale Law School, James Q Whitman, about an all-but-forgotten figure named Heinrich Krieger.

In the early 1930s, Krieger was a student in Dusseldorf, an intellectual, who set out for his semester abroad.

We have no pictures of him, so we'll have to use our imaginations.

A proper upper-class European waistcoat, little round glasses,

bowler hat, in his briefcase, a better copy of Nietzsche's

beyond good and evil.

I'm guessing he's never been to America before.

He takes a steam ship from Hamburg to New Orleans, the SS Westmoreland, his

heart beating furiously with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. He disembarked, takes a train north and west and arrives in Fairville, Arkansas.

Rent a room in the house of a German professor, name of Gustav on Maple Street.

Right by the University of Arkansas School of Law.

The law school was only 10 years old.

Classes were held in the old chemistry building on campus.

Today, Fayetteville has a hundred thousand people.

Back then, it's just over seven thousand. A dusty little place, a whole world away from

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