The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  Why the Fascination with Kaspar Hauser?

  Why were Kaspar Hauser’s contemporaries so fascinated by him? There had always been, in Europe, a fascination with the theme of the “wild child,” and Western philosophers have long been intrigued by the question: Would a child who had never been subject to parents or to society be different, in fundamental ways, from other children? Wild children, about whom Rousseau had already written in 1775,99 were ambivalently regarded: On the one hand they were “pure,” unsullied by the distorting influence of social prejudice, on the other there were many who claimed they were simply “retarded or idiot” children who had been abandoned by their parents. The Indian myths of children being raised by a wild animal were somehow reassuring: No matter how badly the parents behave, “nature” will not abandon a child, and friendly animals will come forward to act as surrogate, and kindlier, parents. This is, as Harlan Lane100 has pointed out, behind the tales of Romulus and Remus, and of the wild children in the Renaissance, about whom Shakespeare wrote in The Winter’s Tall:

  … a present death

  Had been more merciful. Come on, poor babe!

  Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens

  To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,

  Casting their savageness aside, have done

  Like offices of pity. (2.3.183-88)

  In 1970 François Truffaut’s haunting film The Wild Child had just appeared in cinemas. It was a moving account of the strange relationship between Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard and the so-called Wild Boy of Aveyron, who met on a summer day in 1800 in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The twenty-six-year-old Itard, recently appointed resident physician at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, had been a student of Philippe Pinel, who had recently unchained the city’s “lunatics” (but, like so many psychiatrists after him, insisted in maintaining his authority through violence, in this case, the use of straitjackets “when necessary”). Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien had ordered that the small twelve-or thirteen-year-old boy be brought to Paris from the forest region of Aveyron, in the south of France, so that scholars could see Rousseau’s “noble savage.” Itard was to educate the boy. Pinel observed him, and in a report to the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, on December 29, 1800, began by saying:

  For some time public attention has been fixed on a child that was found running wild in the woods of one of our departments in the Midi, and who was reduced to the most rustic state possible. The natural interest that children of this age always inspire, combined with the idea of complete abandonment and the extreme dangers that were the consequence, has renewed interest in the history of other children who, in various epochs, were reduced to the same degree of isolation. We congratulated ourselves on witnessing one of these phenomena which normally can be examined only at some distance and concerning which we still have only vague and inaccurate reports. Certain scholars, those who are concerned particularly with the history of human understanding, were delighted at the possibility of studying the rudimentary character of man and of finding out the nexus of ideas and moral sentiments which are independent of socialization. But soon this brilliant perspective disappeared, confronted with the highly circumscribed mental faculties of the child and with his complete inability to speak.

  Pinel decided, in the felicitous words of Harlan Lane, “that the boy was not an idiot because he was abandoned in the woods; he was abandoned in the woods because he was an idiot.”101 Pinel reached this conclusion by comparing his behavior with that of other “insane” children. As an example he told of a child incarcerated in La Salpêtrière (where Charcot was to hold court some years later):

  One of these girls, seven years old, gives a first impression of all the attributes of health and intelligence, ruddy complexion, black hair and eyebrows, an animated and a lively look; she looks at objects with an air of assurance and with a kind of attention … but … she never laughs and, if she is pinched or injured, she cries out and weeps, but without trying to remove the offending object.”102

  It would be obvious today, however, that this behavior is not a sign of insanity. There could be any number of reasons why a child in a mental hospital does not laugh, starting with the fact that she is imprisoned. It is of course merely speculation, but it is at least possible that these same so-called symptoms could derive from the fact that this girl was sexually abused, and learned early on that there was no point in resisting, that she could do nothing except signal her sorrow by crying. Would not those tears be eloquent language enough? Pinel concluded that Victor (the name Itard was to give him later) “ought to be categorized among the children suffering from idiocy and insanity, and that there is no hope whatever of obtaining some measure of success through systematic and continued instruction.” Itard, in any event, thought his teacher was wrong, and dedicated the next years to working with Victor. Victor never learned to speak, and his progress was described as at best limited. Abandoned by the intellectual elite of Paris (including Itard), who had earlier exhibited such interest in him, Victor went to live with his beloved Madame Guérin (Itard’s housekeeper), in whose home he died, in his forties, in 1828. The first account of the “wild boy” by Itard had already been published in 1801. It began a discussion that was to last the whole of the century.103

  The year 1828 was the very one in which Kaspar Hauser appeared for the first time in Nuremberg. As soon as it was learned that he had been kept for all or most of his life in a dungeon, the general public took notice. Why? Why are we so fascinated by those who have been imprisoned for long periods? It seems we yearn to know the answers to certain questions: Are there “natural” thoughts and “natural” emotions? In Kaspar Hauser’s case, all who came into contact with him were struck by his unusual gentleness and compassion. Perhaps, some people—notably his teacher Georg Daumer—thought, this is the natural state of man. At least part of the charm of observing Kaspar Hauser was the recognition that he was seeing the world for the first time. Everything was unfamiliar to him.104 Especially noticeable was his attitude toward other living creatures. He could not believe that they were not like him—that is, able to understand simple sentences spoken slowly. He was admonished early on about speaking to them by everybody, including his enlightened teacher. Shamed, he stopped. But the new manuscript provides some evidence that Kaspar Hauser did not cease altogether. Daumer writes:

  1828. Even early in October, after he had stopped wanting to treat animals as though they were people, he told the cat that he had seen another one, much resembling her: “Today I have seen a cousin of yours.” He thought the cat should understand him and be pleased, (p. 130)

  This is no doubt from direct observation. The last sentence, however, is an interpretation made by Daumer, and we cannot be certain on what it is based. Clearly Daumer did not think that Kaspar Hauser was simply joking or engaging in cute animal talk. He meant what he said, namely that since he had seen one cat who resembled (in color) the one he knew from Daumer’s house, he assumed they were related. Similarly, on the preceding page of the manuscript, Daumer writes:

  After watching a very obedient dog, upon his return to the house, he decided to tell the cat what an obedient dog he had seen and admonish her to act in the same way. That is what he did. (p. 130)

  The first time he saw the night sky filled with stars, he fell into a kind of rapture. His gentleness puzzled and delighted people. He would not return insults or even blows. He showed great solicitude for even the smallest insect. Daumer, in an unpublished diary entry, notes that

  When he saw a bird or some other animal caged, he became sad, and said that this animal would gladly be free, why was it locked up? … when somebody started to kill an insect, he stopped him and said: this animal would also prefer to live … I once had to allow him to free a bird that was supposed to be roasted, to avoid his becoming enraged at me. (pp. 171-72)

  A similar passage is:

  1828. Once he related, with an indescribably sorrowful expressio
n, [how] so and so had today hunted and shot a hare and two birds, and he saw them still bleeding. He could not understand that the man showed no compassion for these animals, who after all had never harmed anyone. When he was told, among other things, that these animals were killed in order to be eaten, he said that people could eat something else, bread, for example, the way he does. (p. 172)

  In Daumer’s first book, published in 1832, we read: “When he saw somebody, as he did a few times when he was in the tower, punish a child, he began to cry and was in a terrible state.”105 His compassion went so far as to encompass his own jailer. Daumer’s unpublished diary gives the following passage as an example:

  1828. A lovely remark he made at the end of October is the following: He said that one reason for not wanting to think back to the time he was a prisoner was that he could imagine the anxiety that his unknown jailer, who kept him prisoner, must have experienced. The jailer probably always hoped he would die. Since he did not, he believed that the unknown jailer must have been tortured by constant anxiety until he actually got rid of him. This thought hurt him, when he imagined it. (p. 173)

  Why was Feuerbach so intrigued—indeed, obsessed—with Kaspar Hauser? We know from an important letter he wrote to Elise von der Recke, a distinguished older friend, on September 20, 1828, how involved he had become in the case, “officially and unofficially.”106 Of course he was the highest authority in the land for criminal activity, and therefore he first of all wanted to know what had happened. There was a crime to be solved, and an injustice to be righted. But so far he had gotten nowhere, despite all the efforts of the police and court officials. Kaspar Hauser was a puzzle and might perhaps “remain one forever.” He writes:

  the deed is done, and in Kaspar Hauser we see a seventeen-to eighteen-year-old marvel [Wundermensch107 ] such as the world has never seen, a person who from earliest childhood was buried, who about six [actually four] months ago saw the sun for the first time and discovered that apart from himself and the monster who fed him bread and water there were other people on this earth.

  For Feuerbach there was also a human consideration. He met Kaspar Hauser on July 11, 1828, barely more than a month after he appeared in Nuremberg. He was struck by the innocence, the childlike quality, the purity of the boy. “He is a living refutation of the doctrine of original sin,” wrote Feuerbach, “with his pure innocence and the goodness of his heart.” He could not believe that Kaspar Hauser learned “in days what others took months or even years to learn.” Nor did he ever tire of asking questions, of catching up on everything he had never learned about or known in his prison. “His sole passion,” wrote Feuerbach in the letter, “is the process of learning itself.” Clearly Feuerbach felt that Kaspar was hungry to learn about all he had missed during his years of imprisonment. And indeed, perhaps initially he was. Feuerbach was intrigued by the gentle demeanor of this boy who had been so terribly abused. Daumer had seen evidence of his kindness to his own jailer, and so did Feuerbach. Early on he was aware of this gentleness, for he wrote in the letter that

  when among other things I told him of my indignation toward the villain who had kept him prisoner for so long, he admonished me: “He with whom he had always been” was not bad, but his father, that is what he called that man, then, when I visited him, to whose care he had been handed over. It is only in the last two months, more or less, that it appears to have become clear to him that he was the object of an evil deed, and since then he expresses the greatest fear at the very thought of the possibility of falling into the hands of his jailer again.

  He felt a deep sorrow about the fate of this boy, whose “key emotional state is a quiet melancholy” (der Grundton seiner Gemütsstimmung ist eine stille Schwermut). He told Elise von der Recke that nothing could be done any longer to discover the criminal responsible, because “I have reasons to believe that the barbarian in whose power Kaspar had been, taught him certain points, by means of terrifying threats that had as their goal the covering up of all clues to the discovery of the place or the person responsible for the deed.”

  Moreover, he realized that the attention Kaspar Hauser received—being stared at in his small room like an animal in a cage, being made the object of foolish experiments, was literally making him sick—in body and in soul. Kaspar would not survive unless he was removed. Feuerbach notified the Regierungspräsident (head of state) of Bavaria, Herr von Mieg, who traveled to Nuremberg and saw for himself what was happening. It was at their suggestion that Kaspar Hauser moved into Daumer’s house on July 18, just a week later.

  Daumer’s interests were similar to Feuerbach’s, but even more directly connected to education. He no doubt genuinely liked Kaspar Hauser and continued to support him throughout his short life. But Daumer also had a number of theoretical interests, and Kaspar Hauser proved a subject for experiments—benign ones to be sure, unlike those described by Feuerbach in the letter to Elise von der Recke, but experiments nonetheless. Daumer believed that some people are inordinately affected by certain substances, especially metals. Kaspar Hauser provided him with many examples, and he gave them at tedious length in his three books about Kaspar Hauser. He was an early disciple of Christian Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), the founder of homeopathy, who was himself fascinated by Kaspar Hauser’s strange abilities.108 He also believed that Kaspar Hauser’s purity came, in part, from his vegetarian diet. And so he hypothesized that Kaspar Hauser began to lose this purity, including his sensitivity to other creatures, when he began to eat meat. Daumer even blames himself for this in one of the few directly personal passages in his 1875 book:

  It is true, I cannot deny it, and I must take this opportunity to confess: In my treatment of Hauser I was guilty of one major error. Nobody has held it against me, and so I don’t really need to mention it, but I cannot forgive myself, even though I acted with good intentions. Hauser’s exaggerated irritability and sensitivity toward impressions from the external world were for him a source of unending pain and suffering: his relations with other people were especially made difficult in that he was so terribly sensitive to the effect animals had on him, which is nonexistent for ordinary people. I thought that this would be changed as soon as he became accustomed to eating flesh…. The aim I had of freeing him from those torturous sensitivities was in fact achieved; the physiological miracles disappeared, and they were really not necessary, and so it could have been a good thing. But at the same time his ability to understand and think suffered a regrettable reduction, and [there was] an extremely deplorable deadening of his moral sensitivities, both of which qualities he had formerly possessed in the highest degree. This was for me a significant experience with respect to the question of whether animal flesh is natural, useful to people, and to their advantage, especially with respect to higher considerations [höherer Rücksicht—that is, spiritual matters?]. I deeply regret that I accustomed the foundling Kaspar Hauser to meat.109

  In contrast to Feuerbach, who at times seemed to believe that life was not unpleasant in Kaspar’s prison, something that Kaspar Hauser himself seemed to have thought as well (at others, however, Feuerbach was well aware, as the title of his book indicates, what had been done to Kaspar), Daumer was exquisitely aware of how deeply Kaspar Hauser had been hurt, and seemed to think that this somehow gave him access to special powers. It is a not uncommon theme in mythology: The hurt person develops strange faculties. In Kaspar Hauser’s case these faculties were primarily physical: keen hearing, keen sight, keen smell. Daumer did not believe these were miraculous powers, rather they were the direct result of his confinement, developed in compensation for his lack of normal abilities. Daumer himself believed in miracles, but he was always careful not to impose these beliefs on Kaspar:

  My friends and I have duly observed, valued and noted what was extraordinary in Hauser’s being and appearance, but we never told him any stories of the supernatural [telepathic dreams, and the like] nor did we attempt to instill a belief in miracles in him. For Hauser, daily, ordinary oc
currences were miraculous and amazing enough. It was important first to make him familiar with this ordinary reality.110