Lock, No Key

The 18-year-old, who smashed a car window after a night of May Day reveling and was held in a police-station cell overnight, probably did not work as hard to get out of jail, as, say, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers. Their 1960 escape from the Alcatraz prison involved seven months of planning, including the fashioning of decoy heads from plaster and human hair.

While he no doubt needed to suck it up and put on a brave face when officers tried to open his cell only to find that the lock was jammed, it's fairly certain that the 79 Allied soldiers who broke out of Nazi POW camp Stalag Luft III, despite the overwhelming likelihood they would be hunted down and killed by the Gestapo, were even braver.

What makes the case of the German teen unique is the police methods involved. After a while officers gave up trying to pop the lock, and did what we all have done when faced with an open-and-shut case that simply will not open: they called a locksmith.

'We'll prise apart the bars for you'

In fact, they even went to exceptional lengths to assure that their prisoner could go home where he belonged.

"We told him we'd get him out of there," said a spokesman for local police in Zwiesel, near the Czech border. "We said the locksmith was coming and that if that didn't work we'd pry the iron bars apart for him."

This is in stark contrast to the case of famed charmer Casanova, who masterminded a crafty plan to disappear from Venice's "inescapable" Doge Palace in 1756 after he was convicted to a five-year sentence for witchcraft.

Ticket to high society?

In 1979 Frank Morris's devilishly clever breakout plot was captured in the film "Escape from Alcatraz," starring Clint Eastwood. The 1963 Steve McQueen vehicle "The Great Escape" told the story of those brave POWs -- 50 of whom were, in fact, caught and killed by the Gestapo.

As for Casanova, he dined out on tales of his dashing escape for years, becoming the toast of Parisian high society as a result.

So what fate lies in store for Germany's current high-profile prisoner? A film deal? A radio talk show? A reality series?

Nobody knows. But chances are it has more to do with a serious parental talk about responsibility or a chat with the car owner about property damage than a film script of an invite to a Parisian ball.