The Flying Wallendas
acrobatic performers
The Flying Wallendas is a circus act and group of daredevil stunt performers who perform highwire acts without a safety net. They were first known as The Great Wallendas, but the current name was coined by the press in the 1940s and has stayed since.
History
Karl Wallenda was born in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1905 to an old circus family, and began performing at the age of six. While still in his teens he answered an ad for a "hand balancer with courage." His employer, Louis Weitzman, taught him the trade. In 1922, Karl put together his own act with his brother Herman, Joseph Geiger, and a teenage girl, Helen Kreis, who eventually became his wife.
The act toured Europe for several years, and when John Ringling saw them perform in Cuba, he quickly hired them to perform at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. In 1928, they debuted at Madison Square Garden. The act performed without a net (it had been lost in transit) and the crowd gave them a standing ovation.
In 1944, while the Wallendas were performing in Hartford, Connecticut, a circus fire broke out, killing over 168 people. None of the Wallendas were hurt.
The public source identifies “The Flying Wallendas” as acrobatic performers. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Flying, Wallendas and acrobatic.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “The Flying Wallendas”, the useful work is to connect “acrobatic performers” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7734631. VIAF identifies the subject as 156151938. The Library of Congress control number is n2006009786. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1905, 1922, 1928 and 1944.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “The Flying Wallendas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.