The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  Why was the educated public so interested in Kaspar Hauser? I think that for them Kaspar Hauser was Rousseau’s innocent child and an opportunity to see the role that education could play in the life of such a person. One is reminded of the “experiment” of Frederick II, 1194-1250, Holy Roman emperor, German king, king of Sicily, and king of Jerusalem, who called himself “lord of the world” and “one of the most arresting figures of the Middle Ages”:

  Himself the master of so many tongues, he was anxious to discover by research what the primeval human speech had been. He, therefore, had a number of infants reared by nurses who were most strictly forbidden to speak to them. ‘He wanted to discover whether the children could speak Hebrew, or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic as the original of all languages, or whether they would speak the speech of their parents who had borne them.’ The experiment failed, for the children died.111

  Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) had this to say on the topic:

  I believe that a child brought up in complete solitude … would have some kind of speech to express his ideas, for it is not likely that nature would deprive us of this resource when she has given it to many others … but it is yet to be found out what language the child would speak; and what has been conjectured about it has no great probability.112

  One should note that this experiment was perhaps a deliberate repetition of one reported at the beginning of book 2 of Herodotus’s History:

  He [Psammetichus] took two newborn children of just ordinary people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. The manner of their upbringing was to be this: the king charged that no one of those who came face to face with the children should utter a word and that the children should be kept in a lonely dwelling by themselves. At a suitable time the shepherd was to bring the goats to them, give them their fill of milk, and do all the necessary things. Psammetichus did this and gave these orders because he wished to hear from those children, as soon as they were done with meaningless noises, which language they would speak first. This, indeed, was what happened. For when two years had gone by, as the shepherd was performing his tasks, he opened the door and went in, and the children clasped his knees and reached out their hands, calling out “bekos.” At first, when the shepherd heard this, he remained silent about it. But as he came constantly and gave careful heed to the matter, this word was constantly with them. So he signified this to his master and at his command brought the children to his presence. When Psammetichus himself had heard, he inquired which of mankind called something “bekos.” On inquiry he found that the Phrygians called bread “bekos.” So the Egyptians conceded and, making this their measure, judged that the Phrygians were older than themselves. I heard this story from the priests of Hephaestus in Memphis. The Greeks tell, among many other foolish stories, one to the effect that Psammetichus had the tongues of certain women cut out and made the children live with these women.113

  But the interest in a natural state, a prelapsarian emotional and intellectual paradise, dies hard. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education was published in 1762, a few years after the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754).114 Rousseau’s thesis is, to put it in the famous words of the first sentence of that influential book, “Tout est bien, sortant des mains de l’auteur des choses: tout dégénére entre les mains de l’homme (All is well coming out of the hands of the author of all things; everything degenerates at the hands of man). Many of the ideas in that book (for example, Rousseau’s advocacy of vegetarianism) were on people’s minds, certainly on that of Kaspar Hauser’s teacher, who, we saw, berated himself severely for having weaned Kaspar Hauser from his vegetarianism. What was natural man like was for Rousseau a philosophical question that could be, and was, answered in great detail in Émile. But Kaspar Hauser represented an example from nature itself. He was what a natural man looked like. Was it good or bad? Rousseau’s advice was “do not expose his eyes at the outset to the pomp of courts, the splendor of palaces, or the appeal of the theater. Do not take him to the circles of the great, to brilliant assemblies” (Émile, p. 222). But this is precisely what Stanhope did for Kaspar Hauser, and what Daumer and Tucher objected to. If, as Rousseau believed, man was born essentially good and was only corrupted by socialization, Kaspar Hauser provided a good example. In fact, he never did learn cruelty. We can see how those who believed in nurture as opposed to nature found the rumors of Kaspar’s royal birth to be useful: After all, his relatives, the princes and princesses of the house of Baden, were killing one another with great frequency. If character was inherited, he too should have been cruel. Yet he was not: He had not “learned” how to be. People were struck, too, by the fact that Kaspar came out of his dungeon with no illnesses, outer or inner. Was language the demon? There are already hints of this early on. As long as Kaspar knew no language, he claimed that he felt no misery, or happiness. Language had not yet mediated his feelings. That is, he could not speak about what he felt, exposing his emotions to other people. (To do so always holds the danger of having one’s deepest feelings rejected, mocked, or in some other way not accepted). Even at a more benign level, other people are always reflectors of what is inwardly invisible. We may not be certain what we feel until we see a reflection in the response of another human being. Is it possible that the essence of happiness is only a state of tranquillity, a lack of awareness of an “other”? Perhaps to see oneself reflected in another (with all the possibility for rejection that entails) marks the beginning of misery or at least the potential for it. This certainly seems to have been the case for Kaspar Hauser. Cruelty after all, requires two people. In fact, he only became deeply unhappy when he was in the world, faced with insensitivities he encountered once he was released from his prison. At least, Kaspar says in the autobiographical account of his imprisonment, his situation in prison was predictable. He knew what to expect and when. In contrast, once he was in the world he never knew what people were going to do to him.

  A. F. Bance shrewdly points out that “absurdly inflated expectations were followed by an exaggerated hypocritical rejection, the pattern, mutatis mutandis, running remarkably close to the Europeans’ experience with the “noble savage” of the South Seas in the 1780s:

  One only had to shift the evidence a little and one saw in place of idyllic love and natural goodness a world of thieves, voluptuaries, cannibals and idolaters—anarchy instead of Arcady, Sodom and Gomorrah rather than New Cythera. Civilization, it seems, had a clear duty to save these unfortunate people from themselves. (Alan Moorhead, The Fatal Impact, “Arcady Reformed,” p. 79).”116

  Like the educated public in general, Daumer was also greatly interested in the nature/nurture controversy. There had always been an interest in feral children, and clearly Kaspar Hauser was one version of a wild child. Dr. Preu, the first person to examine Kaspar Hauser, said that he was a “half-wild boy who had been raised in the woods,” a judgment he was to rescind quickly, but obviously not before those very words got out and set up reverberations in the mind of the public.117 Certain cases were well known in Germany: The wolf-child of Hesse who was found in 1544 running wild in the woods: “According to the story, a hole had been dug for him by wolves. They had carpeted it with leaves and at night would encircle him with their bodies in order to protect him from the cold.”118 Peter, the savage from Halin in Hannover (1724), had been abandoned by his father in the forest. He lived on plants and tree bark. When captured he would eat only the green bark from twigs and suck the sap from raw wood. He was sensitive to music, but never, in the sixty-eight years he was in captivity, learned to speak.

  The underlying metaphor of the wild-children legend suggests a longing to be part of another world. This took a specific form in the case of Kaspar Hauser: the curiosity about his possible royal parentage. As we have just seen, for everybody, educated and uneducated, as well as for both Daumer and Feuerbach, one reason for the interest in Kaspar Hauser was the mystery of his origins: Who, really, was he? Connected to this issue was the s
udden appearance on the scene of the earl of Stanhope. Why, the public wanted to know, was Stanhope, with his close ties to the houses of both Baden and Bavaria, so interested in this boy? Of course the attempt on Kaspar’s life, and finally his murder, certainly increased the interest. That the king of Bavaria offered an immense sum of money for information leading to the arrest of the criminal proved that Kaspar Hausers identity was hardly a matter of indifference to the princely houses.

  At the same time, and also right from the beginning, voices were raised in opposition to Kaspar Hauser. As early as 1830, Johann Friedrich Karl Merker (1775-1842) wrote his notorious ninety-three-page treatise Caspar Hauser, Most Likely a Fraud119 without ever having met Kaspar Hauser. The flavor of the debate is captured in a statement, typical of the anti-Hauser sentiment, by the Danish writer Dr. Daniel Friedrich Eschricht in his book Unverstand und schlechte Erziehung:120 “When Hauser was given over to Professor Daumer, he was still a poor, very limited, but innocent child. Under Daumer’s guidance he gradually turned into a vain fool, a charlatan, a liar. When he left Daumer’s house he was a complete fraud, as only a simpleminded idiot knows how to be.” Daumer responded: “I must have been able to take somebody who was, due to a brain defect at birth, a dull simpleton beyond any recovery, cure him completely, and magically turn him into a dangerous cunning devil who was, for mysterious reasons, able to dupe the entire world. I challenge anyone to do that!” For Eschricht, of course, Kaspar Hauser killed himself: “Hauser died as a liar and a fraud, and by his own hand as well.”121

  The story itself was utterly absorbing, and would prove fascinating to generations of writers, poets and playwrights. Golo Mann called the “case” of Kaspar Hauser “the finest detective story of all time.”122 Students of French will remember Paul Verlaine’s haunting poem “Gaspard Hauser chante.” Verlaine wrote his melancholy poem about a boy with no mother and no friends in 1873, while he was in prison for assault on his former companion, the poet Rimbaud. He wrote it, he said, because he was feeling as lonely and abandoned as Kaspar Hauser. The famous last stanza reads:

  Suis-je né trop tôt ou trop tard?

  Qu’est-ce que je fais en ce monde?

  O vous tous, ma peine est profonde:

  Priez pour le pauvre Gaspard!

  (Was I born too early or too late? / What am I doing in this world? / Oh, all of you: my sorrow is deep: / Pray for poor Kaspar!)123

  The story had always intrigued writers. Herman Melville (1819-91) had already compared Billy Budd to Kaspar Hauser, when he declared that the “character marked by such qualities has to an uninitiated taste an untampered-with flavor like that of berries, while the man thoroughly civilized, even in a fair specimen of the breed, has to the same moral palate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine. To any stray inheritor of these primitive qualities, found like Caspar Hauser, wandering dazed in any Christian capital of our time …”124 Kaspar was the ultimate “outsider.” He was, to the admiration of many writers, unwilling or unable to be integrated into ordinary society, and his attempt to do so was seen as tragic. For many twentieth-century European writers, Kaspar Hauser was a kind of “secret stowaway,” who, once they learned of his enigmatic appearance and inexplicable death, worked inexorably on their imagination. German writers, such as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (“Der Knabe”), the novelist Jakob Wassermann, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Sigismund in his political drama Der Turm [The Tower] is clearly an echo of Kaspar Hauser); the poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914); the novelist Klaus Mann (1906-49), the son of Thomas Mann; and the journalist Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935), were among those fascinated by the figure of Kaspar Hauser.125

  There were also many elements from fairy tales: a secret dungeon; a simpleton with extraordinary abilities; a social outcast who was possibly of noble birth and would triumph in the end (he did not). Even his love of animals suggested the theme of the animal helper (hence the insistence, against the evidence, that he was an extraordinary horseman). The issues it raised for memory, for debates about nature versus nurture, and for the relevance of abuse in childhood seemed decisive. But there was a paradox: Kaspar Hauser was kept locked in a dungeon for at least twelve years of his childhood and perhaps more. Released at sixteen, he seemed not entirely human. Yet within a few months he developed into an engaging adolescent. He did not seem unduly damaged or unhappy—that is, he was not by ordinary standards “neurotic.”

  Our Interest in Kaspar Hauser

  At least three threads are interwoven in the modern interest in Kaspar Hauser. First, the preceding interest is a historical phenomenon in itself. Then there is the influence of the Kaspar Hauser legend or story or case history on literature. A number of books have been written on this topic, most recently by Ulrich Struve in Der Findling Kaspar Hauser in der Literatur.126 And, not least, is the fact that the interest in his real identity has by no means died down. We see it even in the latest film, the prizewinning 1994 Kaspar Hauler, by Peter Sehr. Based on a careful reading of many historical documents (the Kaspar Hauser scholar Johannes Mayer was the technical adviser), the film portrays Kaspar Hauser as without any doubt the prince of Baden. This is also the opinion of the most serious researchers in the field—Hermann Pies, Fritz Klee, and Adolf Bartning. I share this belief, though I am not persuaded that the matter has been “proved” in the strictest juridical sense of the term. But this is not really the source of my interest in the Kaspar Hauser mystery, nor will it be, I suspect, for many others who will nonetheless find the story intriguing. Regardless of who he really was, here is somebody who was abused.

  Kaspar Hauser and Child Abuse

  The Kaspar Hauser story is of considerable contemporary interest for another reason: because of the light it can potentially shed on an explosive current debate about what can and cannot be forgotten. At the moment in the United States and Germany, a great deal is being made of the so-called False Memory Syndrome (no doubt the name itself is meant to confer some semblance of medical dignity on what is after all only an idea), and proponents of this “theory” would almost certainly claim that Kaspar Hauser s memories were little more than fantasies put into his mind by well-meaning educators.127 In Germany this same theory goes by the name of Missbrauch des Missbrauches (abuse of abuse). The question, put starkly, is this: Can a person undergo horrendous abuse in childhood over a prolonged period and simply forget it? Very little empirical research has been done on this topic. It has just been assumed that children do not forget traumas (or do not repress them—the distinction being that something can be forgotten for no particular reason, whereas if it is repressed, it is because it was unpleasant to remember, so that a psychological defense mechanism is in operation; Freud in fact considered repression the main defense mechanism). Recently in the United States there has been a spate of books maintaining that repression of sexual abuse is rare, or even nonexistent, and that anyone who claims to have recovered a memory of sexual abuse is either lying or has been manipulated by a therapist or other interested party.128 This position is the backlash against the belief (prevalent in the 1980s) in the reality and pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse. I, among others, am one of those blamed for creating the intellectual climate in which this “hysteria” could flourish.129

  A history of my own interest in this topic may be pertinent here. In Toronto in the 1970s I was a candidate in training to become a psychoanalyst at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute. My training in philology and history and my interest in the etiology of misery led me early on to become intrigued by an unsolved puzzle: Why did Freud initially believe that all of the eighteen people (twelve women and six men) he had in analysis in 1896 were sexually abused, and then, some years later, maintain that he had been mistaken and that these people had only imagined the abuse? The actual process by which he changed his mind on this matter presented seemingly insoluble puzzles: These people were no longer in analysis with Freud. Did he suddenly, years later, have an “aha!” experience that allowed him to know in hindsigh
t that what was reported as a memory of an event was in reality the memory of a fantasy, or a wish? Did he think that subsequent clinical experience applied by analogy to his earlier cases? Did he receive new information on all those eighteen cases? Was his retraction based on newly available data, or did theoretical considerations drive his decision? After all, one did not normally tell a person who summoned the courage to remember an occasion of being abused as a child that her (or his) memory was mistaken and that she (or he) was indulging in a wishful fantasy. Abuse quickly shifted from a universal phenomenon to a women’s issue. What evidence was there that Freud was right?

  Psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts knew that the number of women who reported sexual abuse in childhood was high. As part of our clinical training, we were taught, however, that the actual incidence of such abuse was rare. One therefore had to conclude that these women (men had early on dropped out of the picture) were not remembering actual abuse. Fantasies, desires, wishes, impulses—in other words, internal events, not external ones—were at work here. Freud’s experience in 1896 served as a cautionary tale of how easy it was to be misled by direct testimony.

  But what, really, was Freud’ experience in 1896 and the subsequent years? This question had not been answered by any historical or scholarly work, and I was left with a compelling desire to see if there was any way to come up with new documents that would point to where an answer might be found.

  Fortunately Freud’s daughter, Anna, granted me access to her father’s private papers and letters, and there I was able to come up with new documents that shed some light on these questions. I have written on them in a series of books, and this is not the place to go into detail.130 Suffice it to say that I developed the following hypothesis: As long as Freud maintained that the women (and some men) who told him about sexual abuse in childhood were telling him the truth—that they remembered events that actually happened—he was going up against received wisdom that such events did not happen, or happened so rarely that they were of negligible importance for psychology. When Freud, for a brief time, persisted in believing his patients, and telling colleagues about his views, he began to perceive himself as being shunned by his medical peers. This was no misperception on his part: He was considered at best naive, and at worst paranoid, to believe his “hysterical” women patients. In a letter Freud wrote to Fliess on May A, 1896, two weeks after he gave a courageous paper about the reality of child sexual abuse, he said, “I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me” (a passage omitted from the first edition of the letters, and which I restored in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess). When I asked Freud’s daughter, Anna, why she omitted this letter from the collection she published, she told me that “it made him sound so paranoid.” But of course Freud was perceptive, not paranoid. Since we now know that about 38 percent of women have been sexually abused by the time they reach the age of eighteen, and there is no reason to suppose that things were very different in Freud’s time, we can assume that some of the men in Freud’s audience (there were no women present to support Freud from their own direct experience, nor were women ever permitted to publish personal accounts of sexual abuse until very recently) were themselves guilty of sexual abuse. Not surprisingly they were not receptive to Freud’s theories.