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From: ekelly@acpub.duke.edu (Emily Kelly)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: The Tragi-Comical History of Gunther Burpus, Part the Nth
Date: 5 Jan 1996 22:37:03 -0500

On January 1, 1996, Barbara Hamel (bhamel@fas.harvard.edu) posted a summary of the publication history as we know it of the Gunther Burpus story, detailing as well her most recent and sadly unavailing efforts at tracking down the tale's source with a letter to Playboy. I won't repeat her post here. To find it, look in Deja News under the subject header "Re: Man stuck in cat flap".

Anyway, on to my contribution. Barbara's work inspired me to try to find out whether this story is, as I suspected, purely an English-language concoction, or whether it had actually been covered in Germany. I didn't remember any of our German office having done any work already on the tale, but if I'm forgetting anything or covering old territory, I hope someone will let me know.

On January 2, I sent a letter to the websites of both Der Spiegel (http://www.hamburg.pup.de/nda/spiegel/) and Die Welt (http://www.welt.de/), in German so rusty I refuse to subject it to the scrutiny of AFU. I briefly recounted the story, and asked whether they'd heard it, whether it was told in Germany as a news story (as opposed to as a joke), whether there was a man in Bremen named Gunther Burpus, and whether cat-flaps are at all common in the area. I must have been at least comprehensible, because On January 3, I got the following brief but effective response from Der Spiegel:

From 74431.736@compuserve.comWed Jan 3 15:38:07 1996 Date: 03 Jan 96 11:46:39 EST
From: Leserdienst <74431.736@compuserve.com>
To: Emily Kelly <ekelly@acpub.duke.edu> Subject: Urban legends

Liebe Emily Kelly,

dem SPIEGEL ist nichts ueber ein Gunther Burpus bekannt - sorry!

Freundliche Gruesse
Catherine Stockinger / DER SPIEGEL / Ressort Information

So the news is that there is no news, and they've never heard of Gunther Burpus. Still no response from Die Welt; I'll post an update if I get anything. Anno Siegel points out that the Spiegel news archive is vast; if this story had been printed in Germany, it's hard to believe that they wouldn't have heard of it.

Emily "blue moon, you saw me standing alone..." Kelly