The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  The letter that was in Kaspar’s hand when he got to Nuremberg, addressed to the unnamed captain of the cavalry of the fourth squadron of the sixth regiment of light horses, read in form and content as follows:12

  From the boarder of Bavaria. The place is unnamed. 1828.

  To the High and Well Borne Captain of the Cavalry!

  I’m sanding yous a boy who would like to faithfully serve his king he beggs, this boy was laid on me on the 7th of Oktober, 1812, and I, myself a poor day laborer, I myself have ten children, I have enough to do to get by myself, and his mother laid the boy only for being raised, but I was not aeble to find his mother, and now I have also said nothing to the Provincial Court that this boy was given to me. I thught to myself that I must have him for my son, I raised him as a Christian, and I have sinc 1812 not allowed him to take a single stepp out of the house so that nobody knows the place where he was brought up, and he himself doesn’t know what my housse is called and the place he doesn’t know also, so you ken ask him as much as you like, but he can’t tell you, reeding and writing I have already taught him and he can write my handwriting like I write it and wen we ask him what he wans to become, he said he wants to be a Schwolische wich his father was, he also wants to be, if he hade parents whiche he had none he wuld have become a learned boy. You only haf to show him something once and he can do it,

  I only pointed him to Nuemark, and from there he had to walk to you on his own I told him that when he is a soldier, I would come right away and take him home, otherwise I would have been in trouble. [? meaning unclear]

  Best Captain: you shudn’t terture him with questions: he doesn’t know my plaace where I am, I tok him away in the middle of the night he doesn’t know any more how to go home. Truley yours, I don’t make my name nown because I coud be punished.

  And he doesn’t have a single cent on him because I myself have nothing, so if you can’t keepe him, you will have to butcher him [?] or hang him up in the chimney.13

  Enclosed was another note, this one handwritten in Latin letters, although probably by the same hand. It read:

  The child is already baptized she is called Kasper you’ll half to give him a last name yourself the child you will half to raize his father was a Schwolische wen he is seventeen years old send him to Nuremberg to the Sixth Schwolische Regiment that is where his father was too I ask you to raise him until his seventeenth year borne was he on the thirtieth of April, in the yeer 1812 I am a poor little girl I canot fead the boy his father is dead.

  At the time of his appearance in Nuremberg, Kaspar Hauser14 was four feet nine inches tall, and appeared to be around sixteen or seventeen years old. His chin and lips were covered with a very fine down, his wisdom teeth were still missing, and only broke through in 1831. His light brown, very fine hair, cut in peasant fashion, was frizzled in little curls. He was stocky with broad shoulders, and perfectly well proportioned with no visible physical defects. His skin was very fair and delicate; his complexion was not exactly glowing but not sickly either; his limbs were of delicate build; his small hands were beautifully formed. This is true of his feet, too, which showed no signs that any shoe had ever cramped or squeezed them. The soles of his feet were without calluses, as soft as the inside of a hand, though covered all over with fresh blisters, traces of which could be seen for months. He had a vaccination scar on both arms;15 on his right arm a wound with a fresh scab was clearly visible. Kaspar was later to say that this came from a blow with a cane (or a piece of wood) administered by the man “with whom he had always been” when he once made too much noise. His face was very ordinary at that time, and almost without expression when he was in repose; the lower part of his face protruded slightly, giving him an animallike appearance. The vacant stare from his bluish, otherwise clear and light-colored eyes, betrayed an expression of animallike apathy.16 His facial features changed completely in the next few months. His eyes took on expression and life, the protruding lower half of his face receded, and his earlier physiognomy could hardly be recognized. In the early period his weeping consisted of an ugly contortion of his mouth; but if something pleasant touched his spirit, a lovely friendly smile took over his features, a smile that could not but win over everyone’s heart. It was the irresistible charm of the joy of an innocent child. He could barely be said to know how to use his hands or fingers. With the exception of his index finger and thumb, he kept his fingers straight, stiff, and spread far apart. He generally kept the tips joined together in such a way that they made a circle. Where other people used only a few fingers, he would use his whole hand in the most clumsy and awkward way. When he moved it was like a child learning to take its first steps under constraint of a child’s leash. It was not so much a walk as a waddling, swaying, groping, an awkward compromise between falling down and standing up. When he tried to walk, instead of putting his heel down first, and raising his legs, he would put both his heel and the balls of his feet on the ground at the same time and then, his feet facing inward toward each other; his chest thrust out, his arms straight out, which he seemed to use as if they were balancing poles, he would stumble slowly and clumsily forward. If he encountered the slightest obstacle in his little room, he would often fall flat on the floor. Long after he arrived in Nuremberg, he still had to be taken up and down the stairs. Even now it is not possible for him to stand on one foot and lift, bend, or hold out the other one without falling.

  During a forensic examination of Kaspar Hauser’s physique that was carried out in the year 1830, the following highly unusual peculiarities, among others, were noted, which shed some clarifying light on his life and fate. According to the expert opinion of Dr. Osterhausen,17 “his knees show a peculiar deformity. Generally when the lower leg is extended the kneecap becomes visible. But in Hauser’s case the kneecap remains considerably depressed. Ordinarily the four extensor muscles of the lower leg, the vastus externus, the vastus internus, the rectus femoris, and the cruralis, are attached to the protuberances of the shinbone by a common tendon after they have been interwoven with the kneecap. But in Hauser’s case the tendon is severed, and the tendon of the large external and internal thigh extensor (m. vastus externus et internus) proceed downward at the external and internal side of the protuberance of the knee and are inserted into the shinbone underneath. Between them lies the kneecap. By this means—and because these tendons are very strongly affected—the depression I spoke of ensues. When he is sitting on the floor, with his femur and shank stretched out in a horizontal position, his back forms a right angle with the flexion of the femur, and his knee joint extended straight in front of him is so close to the floor that there is no elevation to be seen between the floor and his knee. Even a playing card could hardly fit into the hollow of the knee.”

  Chapter III

  The strangeness surrounding Kaspar Hauser in his first appearance in Nuremberg transformed itself, during the next few days and weeks, into a dark and terrifying mystery whose solution one tried in vain to find with one guess after another. He was far from being an idiot or insane. In addition he was so gentle, obedient, and good-natured that nobody could even be tempted to believe that this young stranger was a savage, or a boy who had been raised by animals in the forest. And yet, except for those expressions I have already referred to, which he used over and over, he was so completely devoid of words and concepts (comparable only to the state of an Indian from Tierra del Fuego [Pescheräh]); he had such a total lack of acquaintance with the most common objects and the most everyday occurrences of nature, he had such an indifference, contempt even, for all habits, comforts, and necessities of life; and at the same time gave evidence of so many peculiar traits in his entire mental, moral, and physical being, that observers could actually believe themselves in a position to choose whether he should be taken as an inhabitant of another planet miraculously transported to earth, or as one of those men about whom Plato had written that they are born and grow up under the earth and only when mature emerge into our world and see the light
of day.

  Kaspar consistently displayed extreme aversion toward all food and drink except dry bread and water. Not just the taste, even the mere smell of our common foods nauseated him or worse; a small drop of wine or coffee, secretly mixed in with his water, caused him to break out in a cold sweat or be seized with vomiting and violent headaches.18 At some point somebody to get him to drink some brandy under the pretext that it was water. When the glass was brought to his mouth, he turned pale and fainted. He would have fallen backward into a glass door if someone had not caught him. Another time he was forced by the jailer to drink some coffee. He had barely swallowed a few drops when he was seized by diarrhea. From a few drops of beer that had been strongly diluted with water he developed terrible stomach cramps, his whole body felt feverish, he began sweating profusely, followed by chills with headaches and burping. Even milk, boiled or unboiled, did not please him and caused him unpleasant burpings. Once somebody concealed some meat in his bread; he smelled it immediately and expressed his strong aversion to it. When he was nevertheless forced to eat it, it made him very sick.

  At night, which generally began for him when the sun set and ended when it rose, he lay on his straw sack; during the day he sat on the floor, his legs stretched out straight in front of him.

  In the first few days, when he saw a burning candle in front of him for the first time, the bright flame delighted him and he innocently reached out to it, burning his hand and finger, which he withdrew too late amid screams and crying. When, to test him, somebody ran at him with a naked saber and pretended to stab him and beat him, he remained completely motionless, did not even blink his eyes, and seemed completely unaware of the fact that this object could cause him harm.19 When a mirror was held in front of him, he reached for his own reflexion and then made for the back of it to find the person [he thought was] hiding there. Whenever he saw a shining object, he reached for it like a small child. When he couldn’t grab it or was denied it, he wept.

  A few days after his arrival in Nuremberg, Kaspar was being led around the city by two policemen in the hope he might recognize the gate through which he had been led. As one might well have anticipated, he was unable to distinguish one gate from another; in fact he seemed to take no notice of anything that passed before his eyes. He stared dully at any object that was brought close to him, betraying only once in a while a puzzled curiosity. He had only two words with which from time to time he would designate whatever living creature he became aware of. The human figure, regardless of gender and age, he would call “Bua” [boy]; any animal he happened to see, four-footed or two-legged, dog, cat, goose or chicken, he would call “Ross” [horse]. If the horses were white, he displayed pleasure; dark animals aroused in him repugnance or fear. A black hen that ran up to him terrified him; he screamed and made the greatest efforts to run away on those legs of his, which refused to serve him.

  His soul seemed at first completely rigid, and so also some of his senses, only very gradually awakening and opening to the conditions around him. After a few days he became conscious of the striking of the clock tower and the ringing of the bells. This put him in a state of awe reflected in an expression of intense listening and amazement, but soon his eyes returned to a dull stare that had something wistful about it. A few weeks later he heard the music from a peasants’ wedding procession as it passed under the window of his little room in the tower. He stood there suddenly listening, like a statue, his face transfixed, his eyes radiating delight. His ears and eyes were continuously fixed on the gradually fading music; even when the last notes were completely inaudible he stood there motionless trying to catch them. It was as if he hoped to incorporate these last sounds—like heavenly vibrations to him—into himself. Or as if his soul had abandoned his body to a state of numbness in order to draw nearer to these sounds. It was certainly not to test Kaspar’s musical sense that somebody, knowing full well his extraordinary sensitivity to nervous arousal, had positioned him right next to the big regimental drum during a military parade. The first beat on the drum upset him so much that he fell into convulsions and had to be taken away immediately.

  Among the many unusual reactions of Kaspar Hauser in the first days and weeks, it was noticed that the idea of horses, particularly wooden horses, held a special significance for him. The word “horse” seemed to take up the greatest space in his dictionary of barely a half dozen words. It was uttered most frequently, on the most varied occasions, and for the most varied objects. He often spoke in a pleading, melancholy tone, with tears in his eyes, as if he were expressing a longing for a horse. When somebody gave him a present of some small trivial item, say a shining coin, a ribbon, a little picture, and so on, he would say: “Horse! Horse!” He made clear by expression and gesture that he wanted to put these pretty things around the neck of a horse. Kaspar was taken every day to the police station, which was not exactly to the advantage of his mental development or in the service of accurate observation, although the singularity of his person would surely demand it. There, amid the din and the hustle and bustle, he would generally pass a good part of the day. In fact he felt at home there, and soon won the affection and love of the denizens of the police station. Here, too, he would often repeat his “Horse! Horse!” This gave one policeman,20 who had the most to do with the strange half-youth half-child, the idea of bringing a white toy wooden horse to the police station. Kaspar, who until then had almost always shown himself to be unresponsive, indifferent, detached, or even depressed, was as though transfigured as soon as he saw this wooden horse and behaved as if he had found in this little horse an old friend he had long been yearning to see. Controlling his joy but weeping with a smiling face, he immediately sat down on the ground next to the horse, stroked it, petted it, kept his eyes glued to it, and attempted to hang on its neck all the colorful, shiny, tinkling little objects he had been given by well-wishers. Only now that he could decorate the little horse with them did these objects seem to reach their true value for him. When the time came for him to leave the police station, he tried to pick up the horse in order to take it home with him. When he realized that his arms and legs were too weak to carry away his beloved horse over the threshold of the door, he wept bitterly.21 After that, whenever he visited the police station, he would immediately sit down on the ground next to his beloved horse paying not the slightest attention to the people present. Later one of the policemen was to say, in an official deposition, first before the police and then before the court, that “Kaspar would sit for hours beside the oven playing with his horse, without paying the slightest attention to what was going on around him or near him.”

  In the tower, too, in his small bed-and living room, he was soon provided with not one but several different kinds of horses. These horses were, from then on, as long as he was home, constant companions and playmates that he never let out of his sight or presence. Whenever he was observed, through a hidden hole in the door, he was continually occupied with them. One day, one hour, was like any other. Kaspar would sit on the ground next to his horses, legs stretched out straight in front of him, constantly adorning them this way or that with ribbons, strings, colorful bits of paper, or hanging coins, small bells, or gold sequins around their necks. Sometimes he seemed lost in the deepest thought about how best to improve their finery by putting something here or rather placing it there. He would also often push them back and forth by his side, without moving from his place or changing positions, but very carefully and quietly—as he later explained, so that the rolling of their wheels did not give rise to any noise for which he might be beaten. He would never eat his bread without first holding up each and every bite to the mouth of the little horses; never did he drink his water without first dipping their mouths into it, which he carefully wiped each and every time. As one of these little horses was made of plaster, its mouth soon became soft from dipping into the water. He did not know what caused this, since he remarked that the mouths of the other horses got wet without affecting the form of their m
ouths. Weeping, he showed this misfortune with the little plaster horse to his jailer, who, in order to calm him down, helped him understand that this little horse did not like water. After this he ceased dipping its mouth in water, since he believed that the horse was showing him by this visible deformity in its mouth that it did not want to drink. The jailer, who often saw how hard Kaspar sought to feed his horses bread, tried to help him understand that these horses could not eat. But Kaspar attempted to refute him by pointing to the bread crumbs on the muzzle of his horse. One of his horses had a bridle in its wide-open mouth; Kaspar constructed a bridle out of gold spangles and tried in every possible way to get his other horse to open its mouth so that he could put the bridle inside—an attempt he tirelessly took great pains with for two days running. Once when he dozed off on a rocking horse and fell down and hurt his finger, he complained that the horse had bitten him. One day he was pushing one of his other horses across the floor when its back legs got caught in a crack in the floor and its front legs reared up. This caused Kaspar such enormous delight that he constantly repeated this marvelous spectacle for the entertainment of all his visitors. Since the jailer showed displeasure over Kaspar’s always displaying the same thing over and over to everybody, Kaspar stopped, but cried over the fact that he could no longer show how his horse reared. Once when it was rearing the horse fell. Kaspar ran to help, showing great tenderness and expressing his sorrow that the horse had hurt itself. He became completely inconsolable when once he saw the jailer hammer a nail into one of the horses.