Dead Drops and Dial Tones

Cold War stories from the people who lived them

Lukas Brandt2 episodes3 min of audio28 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Jul 4, 20261:2516 plays Preview

Thirteen Days on a Cuban Radio

In October 1962, nineteen-year-old Orlando sat at a military radio outside Havana as the world came closest to nuclear war. Lukas speaks to him, now eighty-two, about what he heard and what he feared.

S1 · E1Mar 5, 20261:2712 plays Members

Reading My Parents' Stasi File

Lukas opens the series with the file that started it: 212 pages on his mother and father, compiled by a neighbour they trusted. He reads from it, and then calls the neighbour's daughter.

About the show

Lukas Brandt was born in East Berlin in 1983 and has a Stasi file on his parents that he has read more times than he would like. Dead Drops and Dial Tones is his weekly interview series on the Cold War as ordinary people experienced it, forty to fifty minutes an episode, and it ranges far beyond Berlin. A Cuban radio operator during the missile crisis, an Angolan conscript in a proxy war, a Korean family split by the 38th parallel, an Indian diplomat in the non-aligned movement, a Soviet cosmonaut's widow, a Chilean exile in Stockholm, a Pakistani engineer at a listening post. Lukas interviews the witnesses themselves where they are still alive and their children where they are not, and he fills in the geopolitics only as much as the story needs. He is calm, precise and allergic to spy-thriller nostalgia. For listeners who grew up after 1989 and want to understand the world their parents were shaped by.

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