The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  From this and many other circumstances it was possible to infer—an inference soon proved completely correct—that the notion of living and dead, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, natural objects and artificial ones, were all strangely intertwined in his childlike soul.

  He differentiated animals from humans merely by their shape, men and women by their clothes. He preferred the varied, eye-catching colors of female clothing to those of the male, because of which he later on often expressed a desire to become a girl, in order to be able to wear women’s clothes.

  That little children might become adults never seemed plausible to him. When assured that he too had once been a child, after all, and that he himself would probably grow significantly taller than he already was, his denial was most emphatic. After many attempts he became convinced a few months later, only after observing his own rather quick growth by marking his height on the wall.

  Not the slightest spark of religion or the most minute notion of [church] dogma was to be found in his soul. In the very first weeks after his appearance in Nuremberg several clergymen tried preternaturally to find and encourage it in him. No animal could have understood and grasped less of their questions, speeches, and sermons than Kaspar did. What he brought with him of religion—if it would not blaspheme the word to say it—consisted only in [the religious pamphlets that] had been put into his pockets, with whatever malice disguised as piety tinged with stupidity, when he was abandoned in Nuremberg.

  Since the jailer Hiltel was able to closely observe him for several weeks, perhaps it would not be without interest to listen to the deposition of this simple but understanding man, concerning Kaspar Hauser’s behavior during his stay in the tower. Among other things, he made the following official declaration:

  Shortly after I was able to observe the so-called Kaspar Hauser quietly for some time, I reached the conclusion that he is not so much simple or deprived by nature, as, for unfathomable reasons, forcibly deprived of all education and opportunities for mental development. To relate all the proofs and experiences based on observations of Hauser that led me to this unquestionable position would take me too far afield. In the first days that he stayed with me, he behaved exactly like a small child, displaying a great natural innocence in everything he did. On the fourth or fifth day he was moved from his small cell on the upper floor of the tower prison down to the lower floor where I live with my family and put in a small room equipped so that I was able to observe him at all times without his noticing it. It was here that, under the mayor’s order, I observed him frequently and found that when he was alone, his behavior was unaltered. He took just as much pleasure in his toys when he was by himself as he had when he played with them in the same natural and unaffected way in my presence. In the first days, when he was avidly occupied with his toys, anything could take place around him and he would take no notice of it. Nevertheless I must point out that this pleasure in childish toys was of short duration. As soon as his attention was diverted to more serious and useful objects, and he was made receptive to them, he took no more pleasure in playing. His entire behavior was, one might say, a perfect mirror of childlike innocence. He had nothing false in him. Whatever he felt in his heart, he simply said it straight out, so far as his sparse vocabulary permitted. A sure proof of his innocence and ignorance was provided by the occasion when my wife and I took off his clothes for the first time and washed his body. His behavior on this occasion was that of a child, completely natural and without embarrassment.22 After he had received the toys and when other people were allowed to visit him, I sometimes let my eleven-year-old son Julius visit him too. He virtually taught him to speak, drew the letters of the alphabet for him, and attempted to communicate ideas to him insofar as he understood them himself. At the same time I sometimes permitted my three-year-old daughter Margareta to go into his room. In the beginning he played with her happily, and she taught him to string glass beads. As he began to tire of his inanimate toys, he no longer found this entertaining. Toward the end of his stay with me he took the greatest pleasure and diversion in drawing and etching, the results of which he hung on the walls of his little room.

  Chapter IV

  After his first few days in the tower, Kaspar was treated not as a prisoner but as an abandoned, neglected child in need of care and education. The jailer took him along to his own table, where he did not partake of the meals but learned to sit properly, to use his hands in a civilized way, and to imitate the good manners of educated people. He played happily with the jailer’s children, who also took pleasure in amusing themselves with the good-natured youth whose ignorance and naïveté they found entertaining. Kaspar was particularly fond of the oldest of the children, eleven-year-old Julius. It flattered Julius’s incipient vanity to be able to teach the rudiments of language to Kaspar—this young vigorous adolescent on whose chin a beard was already beginning to sprout.

  Soon curiosity led crowds of people to him on a daily, even an hourly, basis, only a few of whom were content just to stare at the tame wild man. Most of them attempted, each in his own way, to engage him in various ways. For some he was just an object of amusement or the subject of experiments that were anything but scientific. Still, there were also many who attempted to communicate sensibly with him, to awaken his mind, and encouraged him to communicate with them. One person would tell him words and figures of speech, which he would then have him repeat; another would attempt through signs and pantomime or whatever else worked to make Kaspar know what he did not know, understand what he did not understand. With each thing, with each toy with which, in human sympathy, the good citizens of Nuremberg approached the unfortunate young man, he gained new material for thought; he enriched his vocabulary and store of ideas. The most advantageous aspect of this lively human interchange was the fact that his mind, gradually awakening to a clearer consciousness, was stimulated in a variety of ways to observe, to reflect, and to think. Through his ever-increasing need to communicate, which grew in ability from day to day, the well-known language teacher creatively and instinctively at work in the spirit of man was kept constantly busy.

  About two weeks after Kaspar’s arrival in Nuremberg, good fortune brought him the worthy Professor Daumer, a young, bright scholar who found it in his kind heart to devote himself to the mental development, education, and instruction of this unfortunate person, to the extent that the boisterous crowds of the curious and other disturbing and inhibiting circumstances permitted. To everybody’s astonishment, Kaspar was found to have an active mind, extreme diligence in grasping everything new to him, and a lively, powerful, youthful memory for remembering once he had grasped something. In a short time he managed to learn as much as he needed to barely express his thoughts. It is true, however, that for the longest time his attempt at speech was nothing but a fragmentary, sorry, childishly awkward jumble of words, such that one was never sure what his bits of convoluted speech intended to express. It was always necessary for the listener to guess much and suppose the rest. At that point it was impossible to expect any fluency of speech or narration from him.

  The first mayor of the city, Mr. Binder, as chief of the municipal police, had to concern himself with Kaspar not only out of pure human interest but primarily for official reasons. He gave his particular attention and sympathy to this extremely rare subject of police inquiry. It was crystal clear that ordinary official procedures could not handle this case, which was anything but commonplace,23 and that to solve the mystery at least to some extent, he could not content himself with formal depositions, hearings, and other such official procedures, at least for the moment. For the time being, therefore, Mr. Binder was absolutely right to choose the path of a less constrained extrajudicial approach. He had Kaspar brought to his house on an almost daily basis, made him feel at home in his presence as well as that of his family, spoke to him and let him speak, no matter how well or badly this went, and took pains, through abundant questions repeated many times, to discover some information a
bout his life and arrival in Nuremberg. Mr. Binder did, in the end, after much effort, succeed, or at least think he succeeded, in distilling from Kaspar’s various answers and statements the material for an account that, on July 7 of the same year, 1828, was announced to the world in the form of a public declaration.24

  This official story, if one wants to call it that, contains some unbelievable and contradictory things. Many details were also given with such completeness and assurance that it is hard to ascertain what came from the questioner and what from Kaspar Hauser—how much really flows from his dim memories and how much he was unwittingly talked into, or how much was adapted from the many questions; what was added to or created through suppositions; what was grounded in simply misunderstood comments he made, since he was an animallike man barely capable of speech, still unacquainted with the most commonplace natural phenomena, and impoverished in everyday concepts. Nevertheless the story told in [Binder’s] declaration agrees by and large—that is, with respect to the essential major circumstances—with what Hauser himself, duly sworn, was to write later in an essay, incorporated into official court depositions that were taken in the year 1829, as well as with what he has told me and many other people on different occasions, all of them in essential agreement.25

  In brief, here is what Kaspar Hauser told Daumer (which Daumer recounted in the third person):

  He does not know who he is or where he comes from. He first “came into the world” in Nuremberg.26 It wasn’t until then that he learned for the first time that apart from himself and “the man with whom he had always been” there were other people and creatures in the world. As far back as he could remember, he had always lived only in a hole (a small, humble room he would sometimes call a cage), where, dressed only in a shirt and leather pants cut with a hole in the back, barefoot, he sat on the ground.27 In his room he never heard a sound, either from humans or animals, nor anything else. He never saw the sky nor was he aware of the brightness of sunlight as in Nuremberg. He never experienced any difference between day and night, even less did he have occasion to see the beautiful “lights in the heaven.” Next to him on the ground was a hole (probably with a bucket) in which he relieved himself. Whenever he woke up, there was bread and a pitcher of water next to him. From time to time the water had a very bad taste. At those times, shortly after drinking some of it, he was not able to keep his eyes open and had to fall asleep.28 When he was once more awake, he noticed that he was wearing a clean shirt and that his nails had been cut.29 He never saw the face of the man who brought him food and drink. In his hole, he had two horses made of wood, and several ribbons. It was with these horses that he played continuously when he was awake. His only activity was to push them by his side and to place or tie the ribbons he had—first one way and then another. One day passed him by like the next. He never missed anything, was not sick, and, except for a single exception, had never experienced physical pain. In fact, things were much better for him there than in the world where he had to suffer so much. Since he had no knowledge of time, he knows nothing of how long he lived in that world. He could not say when and how he had been brought there. Nor did he have any memory of ever being in any other circumstance or in any other place. The man with whom he had always been never hurt him. But one day, which must have been shortly before he was taken away, when he had dragged his horse on the floor too hard and made too much noise, the man came and hit him on his arm with a cane or a piece of wood. This was the wound he brought to Nuremberg.

  About the same time, the man showed up in his dungeon one day, placed a little table over his feet, spread out something white in front of him, which he now recognizes to be paper, and standing behind him so that he could not be seen by him, held his hand, and with a thing that he put between his fingers (a pencil), moved it back and forth on the paper. He (Hauser) did not know what it was, but was immensely pleased when he saw the black figures suddenly appear on the white paper. When he felt his hand free once again, and the man let go of him, in joy over his new discovery, he never tired of drawing these figures over and over again. So engrossed was he in this new task that he almost neglected his horses, even though he did not know what those lines meant. On several occasions, the man repeated his visits in the same way.30

  After this the man came another time, lifted him off his pallet, set him on his feet, and attempted to teach him to stand up, which he repeated on several occasions. He accomplished this by way of holding him firmly around the chest, placing his legs behind Kaspar’s, and raising them so that they could move forward.

  Finally the man appeared for the last time, put Kaspar s arms around his shoulders, tied them together, and with him on his back in this manner, dragged him out of the hole. He carried him up or down a hill.31 He does not know what was happening to him. It went completely dark, and he was placed on the ground. As became clear from several occasions in Nuremberg, in Kaspar’s vocabulary “going dark” meant “losing consciousness” as well.

  The account of his further voyage is confined essentially to the fact that on more than one occasion he put his face on the ground and lay down when it grew dark, that he ate bread and drank water a number of times, that the man “with whom he had always been” often took pains to teach him to walk, which always hurt him very much, and so on.

  This man did not say anything to him beyond constantly prompting him to repeat the words: Reutä wähn, etc. etc. On this voyage he (Kaspar) saw this man’s face as little as he did earlier in prison. Every time he led him, the man sternly ordered him to look in front of him at the ground and his feet. He strictly obeyed, partly out of fear, partly because he had more than enough to do with himself and his feet. Before he was found in Nuremberg, the man put the clothes on him in which he appeared in Nuremberg. Having his boots put on hurt him very much. The man had put him down on the ground, seized him from behind, pulled his feet up with great force and pushed his feet into the boots. Then they set forth again, only this time it hurt more than before. Now he took in as little of anything around him as he had before. He observed nothing and saw nothing, so that he was unable to say from which area, from which direction, from which road he had come into Nuremberg. The only thing he was conscious of was the fact that the man who led him finally pushed the letter into his hand and disappeared, whereupon a citizen of the town saw him (Kaspar) and brought him to the police station in the New Gate.

  This story of the mysterious captivity and abandonment of a young man is indeed not just gruesome, but also a strange and dark puzzle. It gives rise to an extraordinary number of questions and conjectures, but nothing that can be answered with any certainty. And naturally, as long as there is no solution, it has, in common with other puzzles, the quality of being puzzling. The soul-condition of Kaspar during his life in the dungeon was one of a human being who as a child sank into a profound slumber, a dreamless sleep or at least one during which he had no succession of dreams. He just slept on in a stupor, until the day he suddenly awoke in terror and pain, to the wild clamor of a colorful world. Now in a daze, he does not know what happened to him. Anybody who would expect such a person, waking to full consciousness, to thereupon provide a complete, detailed, utterly convincing historical account of his sleep and his dreams would be demanding nothing less than that a sleeping person be awake while asleep and a waking person be asleep while awake.

  In certain parts of Germany, which a second Dupin32 in his map of the Enlightenment could shade in dark gray, such accounts as the one Hauser told about himself are anything but unheard of. For example, Dr. Horn,33 just a few years ago, saw in the Salzburg Infirmary a not unattractive twenty-two-year-old-girl who was raised in a pigsty among pigs and forced to sit there with her legs crossed until she was sixteen years old. One of her legs was completely crooked, she grunted like a pig, and behaved without manners when appearing as a person. Compared to such cruel acts, the crimes committed against Kaspar can be counted among the more caring acts of humanity.

  It really is
no wonder that Kaspar is unable to say anything at all about the way and manner he reached Nuremberg, that he can furnish so little about his adventures on the trip, about the places through which he came, and about all other matters we are generally able to observe on our trips by coach or on foot. The real wonder would be if he were able to do so. Had Kaspar already been awakened to a completely clear, reasonable state of self-awareness in his dungeon, had he, in his tomb, like Sigismund in his tower,34 been able to grow into the mental maturity of an adolescent through good upbringing and education, he would, as a result of sudden emergence from his narrow, dank dungeon into the open air, still immediately have fallen into unconsciousness, or at least into a state resembling complete inebriety. The unaccustomed exposure to external air must have stunned him, and the bright sunlight must have blinded his eyes. But even if his eyes had not been blinded, had they seen, he still would not have seen or at least would not have noticed or taken in anything. At that time nature and all its phenomena could only have appeared to him as a colorfully spotted confused mass, from which he would not have been able to distinguish any particular thing that flitted momentarily in front of his face. This, as we shall presently demonstrate on the basis of incontrovertible experiences, can be proved to have been the case even when he reached Nuremberg.