The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  As president of the court of appeals of Bavaria, Feuerbach was given official charge of the investigation into the first attempt to murder Kaspar Hauser. He was of course privy to all the rumors, but initially he paid no attention to them.62 This is clear from a letter he wrote on April 8, 1830, to King Ludwig I of Bavaria:

  Among the many rumors and charges spread about Kaspar’s origins, some of them silly, some proven to be untrue, some beyond the bounds of any possible judicial investigation, there is one which goes as follows: our mysterious foundling is the Prince of the Grand Duke Carl of Baden and Stéphanie, who was exchanged, put in somebody else’s place and then caused to disappear. He is, therefore, no less a person than the actual genuine Grand Duke of Baden himself!63

  We know, though, that by the time he came to write his book, in 1832, he was himself the main researcher into the veracity of this very same rumor. In his book Feuerbach writes:

  If the reader’s curiosity, his desire for knowledge, wants more from me, should he ask me the results of the usual judicial inquiry, should he like to know in which direction those clues have led, in what places the divining rod really began to vibrate, and what happened next: I must answer that according to law and in the nature of the subject, I cannot, in my capacity as a writer, speak publicly of matters of which for the present I am allowed to know, or rather to suspect, only in my capacity as a state official. Moreover, may I assure the reader that the authorities in charge of this investigation, using all means at their disposal, even the most unusual ones, have made a tremendous effort to fulfill their duty without rest and without mercy—and, may I add, not entirely without success.

  However, not all far, deep, and high places are accessible to the reach of civil justice. With respect to certain places in which we have reason to search for the giant responsible for this crime, we would have to have the power of Joshua’s trumpets, or Oberon’s magic horn, in order to get to him, in order to do battle, tooth and nail, with the high and mighty Colossuses armed with ball and chain who stand guard in front of certain golden castle gates.

  This is beyond question a reference to Kaspar Hauser as the son of Karl von Baden and Stéphanie.64 The proof is found in the actual manuscript page of this passage, which contains a genealogical table in which Feuerbach explicitly connects Kaspar Hauser to the royal house of Baden.65

  Feuerbach put the results of his own research into Kaspar Hauser’s origins in a strictly secret letter to the queen mother of Bavaria66 (published after his death by his son, and subject to a restraining order from the Baden court67 ), hand-delivered to Karoline in Munich on February 19, 1832. We know that King Ludwig and the queen discussed the death of Kaspar Hauser on December 18. We have an important letter from the king in which he writes:

  Mother told me there in Biederstein (since we knew then that he had been wounded but not that he was dead) that Kaspar Hauser was considered to be the son of her brother, and that another child was substituted for him. The late President Feuerbach had written to her about this, and asked her to protect him [Kaspar Hauser], but she did not do so, in order not to expose him to danger.68

  This implies that the queen believed Feuerbach (as did the king69 ). We know too that the queen wrote two of her daughters, Sophie70 and Elise,71 about receiving the manuscript, and Elise wrote her sister, Amalie, in March after she read Feuerbach’s book that “the author believes, without saying so explicitly, that Kaspar Hauser is the son of our uncle Karl. I know that you already indicated this to me [Ich weiss, Du hast mir schon einmal in diesem Sinne gesprochen].”72 The daughter asked Karoline explicitly whom she took Kaspar Hauser to be. Her answer, written on March 12, 1832, was: “In the unanimous opinion of many people, Hauser was one of the sons of my poor brother.” Elise then asked her mother whether Stéphanie knew the rumors. She replied that “August Leuchtenberg [one of her courtiers], who had seen him [Kaspar Hauser] in Ansbach, told me she [Stéphanie] had asked many questions about the story.”73 The Mémoire was brought to the queen by Lieutenant Hickel,74 for whom an audience was arranged by Friedrich Ludwig von Schmidt (1764-1857), the priest and confidant of the queen, and somebody whom Feuerbach knew and trusted. He was also present at the birth of the prince (Kaspar Hauser) in 1812. Recently a letter was found from Feuerbach to Stanhope, dated May 12, 1832, which throws important light on how the Mémoire was received. After all, Feuerbach addressed it to Kaspar Hauser’s presumed aunt, now a queen, accusing her stepmother of a heinous crime. Prince Adalbert said she merely shook her head over the Mémoire, implying that she did not take it seriously.75 The letter, which proves this was not the case, is important enough to deserve a full translation:

  What follows is going to seem to you extremely strange. I heard it from Munich, out of the mouth of the queen mother, through H[ickel]. Before H[ickel] set out on his trip,76 which took him through Munich, I prepared a memorandum for the queen, in which I developed the facts and the reasons why I was able to deduce that K[aspar] can be none other than S[téphanie’s] oldest son, who had been declared dead. Through her priest77 I secured an audience with her royal highness. Over a period of two days H[ickel] had an audience lasting several hours with her, during which facts came to light that, when I think about them, cause shivers to run down my spine. They also explain the tears and sleepless nights of S[téphanie], about which you told me in your letter from Frankfurt.78 H[ickel], just before he left for Hungary, conveyed to me an eight-page-long report about that conversation. I expected, as I was writing the previous pages of this letter, to be able to make a copy of that report and include it in this letter. But when I took it out of my file on K[aspar] and read it over again in order to copy it down for you, I found that it would not be possible to entrust something like this to my letter without great danger. I am therefore forced to remain silent here about the most interesting thing to come out of the whole Hauser affair, and to keep it from you until I have the pleasure of seeing you again in person, or find a secure opportunity to send you the document in question. You will be amazed and you will shudder. Of all the horrors that I, as an experienced criminalist have witnessed, this one, which I heard about in this manner, is the most horrible. [italics in original]. K[lüber] in Frankfurt is, as I now also know, and as I could have known earlier were I not, since my illness, so forgetful, contrary to my expectations, a very weak source. K[lüber] has always acted in the interests of that family,79 which stood to benefit, and indeed has benefited, from the death or removal of Kaspar. He was and is still prejudiced on their behalf—but I fear that in saying even this little, I have already said too much.80

  That there was such a report at all is new information. The tragedy is that it has not come down to us, and there is no way of knowing what it contained. Clearly it was something sensational, and something having to do with proof of the identity of Kaspar Hauser, involving the royal house of Baden. Queen Karoline, as Stéphanies sister-in-law, was privy to much that is now lost or obscure. That the information was dangerous can only mean that the original perpetrators of the deed were still active and watchful. The puzzle, as Johannes Mayer points out, is that the document, which must have been among Feuerbach’s papers, was not found there after his death. He asks whether it was removed by some interested party, and wonders whether Feuerbach had it with him during his final conversation about Kaspar Hauser with Klüber in Frankfurt just before he died. The tragedy is that Feuerbach is unsuspectingly conveying his most secret information to the one person he should be wariest of—the man who may well have been responsible for the death of Kaspar Hauser and even, perhaps, that of Feuerbach himself just a few months later. It is not impossible that he was killed precisely in order to keep this report from seeing the light of day. Lieutenant Hickel may even have been part of the plot.81 Perhaps an even greater irony lay in the fact that the Grand Duchess Stéphanie never suspected Stanhope of playing any role in the death of her son. When she visited Queen Victoria in London in 1851, she went to Chevening, some thirty-five miles aw
ay, and spent two days with Stanhope. What must have been going through her mind, knowing, as she did, that Stanhope was the greatest enemy of Kaspar Hauser? She gave him a picture of herself (inscribed “Souvenir de Stéphanie”), which hangs in his castle, alongside two original watercolors by Kaspar Hauser.

  Before his book, Beispiel eines Verbrechen am Seelenleben des Menschen Feuerbach had clearly become convinced that Kaspar Hauser was the legitimate heir to the throne of Baden, the son of Stéphanie de Beauharnais and the Grand Duke Karl of Baden. The book caused a great stir, both for its beauty and for the story it had to tell. The hints it contained about Kaspar Hauser’s royal provenance were not lost on his audience. Newspapers throughout Europe carried accounts of Kaspar Hauser’s life and speculation on his origins. The subject became one of the most talked-about puzzles of the time.

  Feuerbach died suddenly at the age of fifty-eight. Before dying, he suspected, and his son Ludwig was certain, that he had been poisoned at the orders of members of the royal house of Baden who did not like his discoveries about Kaspar Hauser’s origins. He is reported to have written a note that contained the words: “Man hat mir etwas gegeben” (I have been given something [that is, poison]). The note was lost, but his grandson, the physician Johann Anselm von Feuerbach (1842-1916), son of Eduard August von Feuerbach, a professor of law in Erlangen, claims to have read it.82 We know that he died on his way to Frankfurt, where he went to meet Klüuber (coincidentally the lover of Countess Hochberg, a fact of which Feuerbach, of course, was unaware)83 in order to discuss with him his discoveries about Kaspar Hauser’s royal parentage.84 He died on May 29, 1832.85 Strangely enough, Stanhope was in Andernach that day, not far away. As Johannes Mayer perceptively notes, “Whenever something tragic happened with reference to Kaspar Hauser, Stanhope was to be found close to the event.”86 In an important letter Johannes Mayer found in England from Feuerbach to Stanhope dated February 4, 1832, less than five months before he died, Feuerbach makes it clear how close he was to solving the mystery of Kaspar Hauser’s birth: “Seltsam!—im Oktober 1812 starb (angeblich) der bewusste schwächliche Erstgeborene und, laut des von Kaspar mitgebrachten Briefes, wurde Kaspar ebenfalls im Oktober 1812 dem Manne, bei dem er immer gewesen, gelegt!” (Strange! In October 1812, the weakling firstborn son [allegedly] died, and, according to the letter Kaspar brought with him, Kaspar was handed over, also in October 1812, to the man with whom he had always been!)87 The letter goes on to say: “My friend Kaspar is now my guest every Sunday and is the source of great pleasure to me and my family. After dinner he accompanies me into my office, where I take pains to influence his education and studies through conversations. He is somebody in whom my interest will never turn cold and from whom I will one day part only with the deepest sorrow. Only a monster could not love this pure innocent soul,” thereby giving the he to Stanhope’s oft-repeated claim that Feuerbach told him he had changed his opinion about Kaspar Hauser and now considered him a charlatan. Feuerbach even says explicitly, in this same letter, that one reason he wrote his book was to protect Kaspar Hauser “qegen den Verdacht der Betrügerei für immer gerechtfertig” (against the suspicion of being a fraud once and for all).

  Another close relative of Kaspar Hauser seems to have believed that he was the legitimate heir to the throne. His sister Marie von Hamilton88 who lived in Baden-Baden, was in touch with Tucher in 1874, long after the death of Kaspar Hauser. According to a recently published account, she

  told [Tucher] further that the oldest son of Grand Duke Leopold and Duchess Sophie, the successor to Grand Duke Ludwig, became mentally ill … and that she visited him. When she entered his room he fell onto his knees in front of her, put his arms around her, and in a state of tremendous emotional agitation asked that the story of Kaspar Hauser be taken out of his head, then he would be cured. She further told [Tucher] that his father, Grand Duke Leopold, was also much preoccupied with Kaspar Hauser and that upon his deathbed (he died in 1852) he did not want to let go of Kaspar Hauser’s portrait.

  If this account is accurate (we have only Tucher’s word for it, no other document) it indicates that at least Kaspar Hauser’s sister believed in his identity as her brother the prince, and that those who later occupied the throne (both father and son, from the other side of the family) as a result of Kaspar’s death could not rid themselves of a guilty conscience, even though the son, at least, had had nothing to do with the crime. This is such perfect poetic justice that one cannot help but question the veracity of the account. I would like to believe it is true.

  Kaspar Hauser’s life before he was put in the dungeon, probably at three or four years old,90 has been the subject of much research. We now know at least one of the places in which he was held, and also the identity of the castle in whose dungeon he lived for twelve years. On April 22, 1829, Kaspar Hauser made a watercolor drawing of a plant. In 1924 the German novelist Klara Hofer bought a large house, Schloss Pilsach (near Nuremberg), and, as she was having some renovations done, found a secret dungeon. It corresponds in almost every detail to the description given by Kaspar Hauser of the dungeon in which he had been kept. In the dungeon was a large iron window frame shaped like a plant, almost identical to the one that Kaspar Hauser drew. On March 13, 1982, while the new owners of the house were doing further renovations, they found a small white wooden horse, exactly the size, shape, and color of the one Kaspar Hauser described having had in his dungeon.91 It seems likely, therefore, that this is the place where Kaspar Hauser was kept.

  In 1829 Kaspar Hauser drew for his teacher Daumer a crest he had seen in a dream. This crest—almost exactly like those on the doors of the castle Beuggen bei Laufenburg, on the banks of the Rhine (a few miles east of Basel)—allowed researchers to establish that Beuggen was probably one of the three castles in which Kaspar Hauser lived for his first three to four years.

  New research has also thrown some light on the people from the court of Baden involved in Kaspar Hauser’s imprisonment and their motivation. Grand Duke Karl of Baden was married to Napoleon’s adopted daughter, Stéphanie de Beauharnais.92 In 1812 she gave birth to a prince, presumably Kaspar Hauser, who would have inherited the throne had he not “died.” Another son, born in 1816, also “died,” whereas three daughters lived. The person who benefited from these sudden deaths was none other than the second wife of Karl’s father, Luise von Hochberg. Only Karl himself remained between Luises son and the throne. When he lay dying, banished to Bad Griesbach, a small, depressing mountain village he hated, he maintained that his two sons had been poisoned, and now he was poisoned as well.93 He died under mysterious circumstances in 1818, at the age of thirty-three. When the entire line on the side of her husband’s first wife died out, Luise’s son became grand duke.94

  What Fritz Klee95 and other researchers think happened to Kaspar originally was that he was taken out of his crib, and the dying child of Johann Ernst Jakob Blochmann, a gardener (suddenly promoted in 1812), who worked for Countess Luise von Hochberg and had ten children of his own, was substituted for him. It appears from the doctors’ reports that Kaspar Hauser was not incarcerated until he was three or four.96 Little is known about his life until he reached the dungeon, but there is some evidence of a reason for a sudden change of plans. It is a complicated story that need not be gone into here; what seems to have happened is that a bottle was found in the Rhine in November 1816 (when Kaspar Hauser was four), which contained this note in Latin: “To whoever finds this note: I am being kept in a prison, near Laufenburg, on the Rhine. My prison is underground and even the person who seized my throne does not know where it is. I cannot write any more, because I am carefully and cruelly guarded. Signed: S. Hanés Sprancio.” Published in 1816 in the Parisian Le Moniteur Universel, it did not create a stir. The theory is that somebody wrote this to frighten the countess, and the chief of the secret police, Maj. Johann von Hennenhofer (1793-1850), was deputed to take Kaspar Hauser to a safer place. The article was reprinted in 1834 in the Hamburgische Abendzeitung, and
a connection with Kaspar Hauser was considered possible. It was suggested that the signature was an anagram of “his son Kaspar.”

  It is odd that so many people involved in Kaspar Hauser’s story died early and suddenly. An unpublished manuscript by Anselm von Feuerbach (a medical doctor, son of Eduard Feuerbach, hence the grandson of the judge), entitled The Kaspar Hauser Question, notes that Binder, Biberbach, Dr. Preu, Dr. Osterhausen, and Dr. Albert (who performed the autopsy), all of whom were intimately involved in Kaspar Hauser’s life, died between 1833 and 1835.97 He believed that their deaths were not entirely accidental, and that at least three members of the Feuerbach family were believed to have been poisoned because of their connections to Kaspar Hauser.

  Among the reasons that the Kaspar Hauser story has elicited such passionate responses over the last 165 years has been the failure of the powerful myth of the crazed, single perpetrator—that is, that our lives are safe and only threatened by some failure of social order. Why is it that many Americans of singular intelligence refuse to believe that John F. Kennedy was killed by a single person, acting on his own “delusions?” The existence of a conspiracy seems to be an emotional necessity. How could we continue to exist if we believed that completely fortuitous circumstances could end our lives, with no larger meaning to be extracted from such a tragic event? I think the reason we balk at this is that at some deep, unconscious level, we know that the single perpetrator is a myth—it is false—and that in fact our greatest danger comes not from a single wild individual but from the powers that be when they feel threatened in any way. While this may not be literally true in Kennedy’s case, it probably is very true in the case of Kaspar Hauser.98 When Kaspar Hauser rose to become a celebrity in Germany, he grew nostalgic for his old life. He complained bitterly that he had been happier when he was alone in his cell than when he was the object of everybody’s unbridled curiosity. What, exactly, he got in exchange is something he wondered about, and the same question inevitably tugs at the modern reader. It is a paradox that he was safer in his dungeon than he was in the external world. A murderous attempt was made on his life, and finally he was killed by an unknown assailant. No doubt the people who were responsible for his imprisonment in the first place also saw to it that he was murdered, and probably for the same reason—namely that he represented a threat to their political legitimacy. But it is odd that with all of Germany aroused by his fate, not a single clue (during his lifetime at least) could be found with respect to his jailer, his parents, or anything at all about his past, even after King Ludwig I of Bavaria offered a ten-thousand-gulden reward (a fortune at the time).