Among all his senses, his sense of smell proved the most painful and intrusive to him and more than anything else turned his life in this world into torture. What for us is odorless was not so for him. The most delicate, pleasant scent of flowers, for example a rose, was for him a stench, or painfully affected his nerves. What for the rest of us announces itself by smell only when it is close, if at all, he smelled from a vast distance. With the exception of the smells of bread, fennel, aniseed, and caraway seed, to which he assured us he had become already accustomed in his prison (since his bread was baked with these spices), every kind of smell was for him more or less repulsive. When he was once asked what scent he found most pleasant, he answered: “None at all.” He was put off his walks or horseback rides because they took him past flower gardens or tobacco fields or nut trees, and he had to pay for these relaxations in the fresh air with headaches, cold sweats, and attacks of fever. He could smell tobacco blooming in the fields from more than 50 yards away. The bundles of dry tobacco leaves commonly hung on houses in villages around Nuremberg he could smell at 100 yards.
From a great distance he was able to distinguish apple, pear, and plum trees by the mere smell of their leaves. The various coloring matter on the walls, tools, clothes, etc., the pigments with which he illuminated his paintings, the ink and pen with which he wrote—everything that surrounded him or came close to him wafted revolting or painful scents in his direction. If on the street a chimney sweep walked a few steps ahead of him, he turned his face away from the smell with a shudder. He felt unwell at the smell of old cheese and had to vomit. Once when he smelled vinegar, which was a good yard away from him, its sharpness affected his olfactory and optical nerves to such an extent that his eyes began to water. If decanted wine was placed on a table a short distance from him, he complained of a repulsive smell and a sensation of heat in his head. An open bottle of champagne was sure to drive him from the table or make him ill. What we term a bad smell seemed to affect him far less unpleasantly than did our good smells. He would say, for example, that he would far rather smell cat shit, since it hurt his head less than pomade, and by far any kind of excrement than eau de cologne or spicy chocolate. The smell of fresh meat was the worst of all. Even the stink of cat shit and the smell of dried cod were more bearable to him. When Professor Daumer (in autumn 1828) approached, with Kaspar, the cemetery of the Johannis Church in Nuremberg, the smell of the dead, which Professor Daumer himself did not sense in the least, affected him so strongly that he immediately began to freeze, shuddering violently. His freezing soon turned into the heat of a fever that finally broke into violent perspiration, drenching his shirt through and through. Such heat, he said later, he had never felt before. On the way back, near the city gate, he felt better again, yet he complained that it had become darker in front of his eyes. He had a similar experience (on September 18, 1828) when he happened alongside a tobacco field.
Professor Daumer first became aware of Kaspar’s special ability to feel, and his sensitivity, especially for the effects of metal, when Kaspar was still in the tower. There a stranger once gave him the present of a small toy horse and a small magnetic wand with which he could drag it around, swimming in the water, since it was mounted in metal. When Kaspar started to use the magnet according to instructions, he felt himself immediately affected by it in the most unpleasant way. He quickly locked it away in the little wooden box it came with, and never took it out of its box again to show his visitors, as he was accustomed to doing with his other toys. Later on, when asked the motive of his behavior, he explained that the little horse caused him a pain that he felt through his whole body and in every limb. When he had moved in with Professor Daumer, he kept the little box with the magnet in a suitcase. One day when he was tidying up his things, it accidentally reappeared. It occurred to Professor Daumer, who remembered the earlier phenomenon, to make an experiment involving Kaspar and the magnet of the little horse. Kaspar immediately felt the most amazing effects. If Professor Daumer pointed the positive side of the magnet toward him, Kaspar grabbed his chest and pulled his vest out, saying: “It is dragging me, there is a draft coming out of me.” The negative side of the magnet had a less powerful effect on him, and he said of the magnet that it was blowing on him. Because of this Professor Daumer and Professor Hermann52 conducted various similar experiments with him, which were also designed specifically to fool him. But each time, his feelings revealed to him correctly, even when the magnet was at a significant distance, whether the negative or the positive or neither was directed at him. Such experiments could not be continued for long because sweat soon broke out on his forehead and he felt ill.
Concerning his sensitivity to other metals and his ability to distinguish them by merely feeling them, Professor Daumer has gathered many facts of which I will emphasize only a few. In the autumn of 1828 he happened to come into a warehouse filled with metal, especially brass merchandise. Barely had he entered when he rushed back out into the street showing great revulsion and saying: “In there it pulls on my whole body from all sides.” Once a stranger pressed a small gold piece, about the size and thickness of a Kreuzer, into his hand, without Kaspar being able to see it. Nonetheless Kaspar said immediately that he felt gold in his hand.
Once Professor Daumer, in Kaspars absence, put a golden ring [and] a compass made of metal and brass alongside a silver drawing pen under a piece of paper so that it was impossible to see what was hidden underneath. Daumer instructed Kaspar to move his finger over the paper without touching it. He did so and was able to identify correctly both the material and the form of objects through the difference and strength with which the metals “pulled” on his fingertips.
Once when Doctor Osterhausen and the Royal Tax Collector Brunner from Munich were present, in order to test him, Daumer led Kaspar to a table covered with a wax tablecloth on which a sheet of paper lay. He demanded that he say whether any metal was under the paper. He moved his finger at some distance over it and said: “Here it’s pulling!” Daumer retorted: “Now this time you are really wrong. Just look, there is nothing under it,” and he lifted the sheet of paper. Hauser at first seemed shaken, but again moved his finger right at the place where he claimed to have felt the pull. He asserted again that he felt a pull right there. The wax tablecloth was raised, the table carefully examined, and a needle came into view.
He described the sensation that minerals aroused in him as a “pulling,” accompanied by chills that ran up his arm. How far up the arm these chills ran depended on what the object was. Apart from that there were other strange effects. The veins in the hand exposed to metal irritation would become visibly swollen. Toward the end of December 1828—when the pathological excitability of his nerves had almost completely subsided—his sensitivity to metal irritation gradually diminished as well and finally disappeared entirely.
The manifestations of animal magnetism were no less striking in him. This receptiveness he retained much longer than the one for metal irritation. Since this phenomenon in Kaspar corresponds with other similar well-known cases, it is superfluous to go into detail. It should perhaps only be noted that he called the sensation of magnetic fluids that poured into him as being “blowed at.” He felt these magnetic sensations not only when human beings touched him with their hands, or even stretched their fingertips in his direction from some distance away, etc., but also felt them from animals. Whenever he touched a horse, “coldness ran up his arm,” as he put it. If he sat on the horse, it felt as if a draft was going through his body. These sensations disappeared as soon as he had exercised his horse a few times on the riding trail. If he grabbed a cat by the tail, he would be overcome by chills and shivers, and felt as if someone had hit his hand.
In March 1829, he was taken for the first time to a circus tent in which foreign animals were displayed, and asked to be given a place in the third row. As soon as he entered he felt a feverish chill that grew much stronger as the aroused rattlesnake began to rattle its tail, and soon turned
into heat with a great deal of sweat. The snake’s gaze did not face the direction in which he was standing. He insisted that he was not conscious of terror or even fear at the time.
Now we leave the physical and physiological side of Kaspar to take a look at a deeper part of his being. Once the sharpness of his natural understanding is revealed, we are able to draw valid conclusions about his fate and about the total neglect to which human depravity had subjected him.
The childlike goodness and gentleness of his soul made him incapable of harming a worm or a fly, not to mention a human being. It proved spotless and pure as the reflection of eternity in the soul of an angel. As mentioned earlier, when he left his dungeon he took with him no idea, no notion of God, no shadow of belief in any higher invisible existence into the world of light. Fed like an animal, sleeping even when awake, unresponsive to anything in the desert of his narrow dungeon room except his animal needs, occupied with nothing but his feed and with the eternal monotony of his toy horses, his inner life could be compared to the life of an oyster, glued to its rock, feeling nothing beyond its food, not hearing anything beyond the eternal uniform crash of the waves, and there, in the narrow space of its shell, the most limited conception of a world outside of itself can find a place, not to mention any ability to fathom what is above the earth and then above all worlds [God in heaven].
And so Kaspar arrived in the higher world without preconceptions, but also without any sense whatever for the invisible, the incorporeal, the eternal. He was caught and tossed into the dizzying whirlpool of external objects. Visible realities occupied him too much for him to readily feel a need for invisible ones. At first nothing was real to him except what he could see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. His awakening and ruminating mind did not take in anything ungrounded in his sensual awareness, nothing beyond the realm of his senses, nothing that could not be brought into conformity with his obvious and simple mental categories. For a long time all efforts to awaken religious notions in him by the usual methods were in vain. He complained to Professor Daumer with complete naïveté that he just didn’t know what on earth these priests wanted with all these things he couldn’t grasp. To win him somewhat away from his shallow materialistic ideas, Professor Daumer attempted to make him receptive, at least in the meantime, to the conceivability and possibility of an invisible world, especially a godhead, in the following way. Daumer asked him whether he had thoughts, conceptions, and a will within himself. When he answered that he did, he was then asked whether he could see, hear, etc., them? When he answered no, his teacher made him aware of how, indeed, according to his own understanding, there were things that one could not see nor have access to from the outside. Kaspar admitted this was true and was very astonished to discover the spiritual nature of his inner being. Daumer continued: A being that can think and desire is called a spirit. Now God is such a spirit, and stands in relation to the world just as Kaspar’s own thinking and desiring stands to his body. Just as Kaspar can produce invisible changes in his mind through invisible thinking and desiring, for example, can move his hands and feet, so can God do the same in the world. He is the life in all things. He is the active spirit in the whole world.
Now Professor Daumer ordered him to move his arm and asked him whether he could at the same time also lift up and move his other arm. “Certainly.” “Well then,” Daumer continued, “from that you can see, then, that your invisible thinking and desiring, that is, your spirit, can be effective at the same time in two of your limbs, that is, in two different places at the same time. The same applies, then, equally to God, but in the large, and now you will be able to understand a bit what it means to say God is omnipresent.” Kaspar displayed great joy when this became clear to him, and said to his teacher that what he had just told him was something real, whereas what other people told him about it was never right. Teaching such as the above had, for a long time, no result except that Hauser no longer showed himself recalcitrant toward the idea of God, so the way was found to make his soul familiar with religious concepts.
Meanwhile, his inborn Pyrrho [a skeptical philosopher] appeared over and over again in different forms and from different directions. Once he asked whether he was permitted to ask God for something specific, and if he would be granted what he asked, for example, if he were to ask God to relieve him of his (recent) eye infection. “Of course,” was the answer, he could ask; only he had to leave it to the wisdom of God whether He thought it good to grant the wish. “But,” he retorted, “after all, I want my eyes back to learn and work, and that after all has to be good for me, so God can’t have anything against it.” It was explained to him that God sometimes has his own unfathomable reasons for refusing what seems good for us, in order to test us, for example, by making us suffer, to exercise our patience, etc. But this teaching always left him cold, and found no acceptance with him. His doubts, questions, and objections often put his teacher in embarrassing situations. For example, when the discussion was about God’s almightiness, he asked whether God the Almighty could turn back time—a question that had bitter and ironic connection to his earlier fate, concealing the question whether or not God could give him back the childhood and youth he lost while buried alive in a grave. From the little bit I have recounted here, one can deduce what it would be like to instruct him in positive religion, with Christian dogmatics, the secrets of the teaching of Christ’s expiatory death, and other such doctrines. I am happy to stay far away from his comments on these matters.
For a very long time Kaspar could not overcome his loathing for two kinds of people: doctors and clergymen. The former because of the disgusting medicines they prescribed in order to make people sick, the latter because they frightened and confused him with incomprehensible blah, blah, blah, as he put it. If he saw a priest, he would become frightened, even terrified. When asked for the cause he answered
becuse these people have already tortured me so much. Once, four of them came to me when I was in the tower [after leaving the dungeon], and told me things I could not understand at all at that time. For example, that God created everything out of nothing. When I requested an explanation, they all began to shout at the same time, each saying something different. When I said to them that I don’t yet understand any of that, that I have to learn to read and write first, they replied that these other things have to be learned first. They did not go away until I let them know I wanted them to just leave me alone.
This is why Kaspar did not feel at all well in churches. The crucifixes there caused him a horrible fright, since for a long time after these representations took on spontaneous life. The singing of the congregation seemed to him a repulsive scream. He said one time after a visit to a church that first the people scream, and when they stop, the priest begins to scream.
Chapter VII
Under the careful nursing of the honorable Daumer family, through well-chosen exercises and suitable occupations, Kaspar’s health flourished considerably. He learned eagerly, acquired all kinds of knowledge, progressed in arithmetic and writing, and soon reached a point where he could undertake, as his teacher requested, to put the memories of his life into a written essay. This was at some point53 in the summer of 1829. This first attempt at representing his own thoughts for himself—even if, to be sure, it could only be taken as evidence of his long suppressed development and the poverty and clumsiness of his childlike mind—he looked upon with the eyes of a young writer who watches the first product of his quill pen coming off the press. In his excitement at being an author, he took to showing what he called his autobiography to local visitors as well as foreign ones. Soon it was announced in several newspapers that Kaspar Hauser was working on his autobiography. It is very probable that it was precisely this rumor that led to the catastrophe that soon after, in October of the same year (1829), was meant to bring his short life to a tragic end. Kaspar Hauser, if I am permitted to intersperse suppositions here, had finally become a dangerous burden to the one or ones who had concealed him. The chil
d who had long been fed grew into a boy and finally a young man. He became restless, his strength began to stir. He sometimes even made noise and had to be forced into silence by the considerable beating of which he still carried the fresh traces when he came to Nuremberg. Why was Kaspar not gotten rid of in some other way? Why was he not killed? Why was he not removed from the world as a child? Perhaps he was handed over to his jailer with the intent of having him murdered, but the jailer—out of compassion, waiting for more favorable times for the child who had been put aside, or from some other easily imaginable motive—kept the child and fed him in spite of the danger to himself. Each reader must judge these suppositions for himself. Meanwhile, the time had come, or rather had not come, when the secret of the child could no longer be kept hidden. They had to find a way, somehow, to get rid of him. So he was brought, dressed as a beggar, to Nuremberg. It was hoped that there he would be confined to a public institution as a vagabond or a lunatic or, should the recommendation he brought with him to become a cavalry soldier be taken into account, he could have disappeared as a soldier into some regiment. Against all expectations, not a single one of these calculations turned out as intended. The unknown foundling won for himself human sympathy, and became the subject of general public interest. The newspapers filled up with news and questions about the puzzling young man. At first the adoptive child only of Nuremberg, as the mayor of this town had made clear in his public announcement, he became finally the child of Europe. Everywhere people speak of Kaspar’s mental development. The public is told of miracles in his progress. And now this half-man is even writing his autobiography! Whoever writes down his life, must have something to say about it. Therefore those who had all the reason in the world to remain in the darkness they had created around themselves, and around the traces that could lead to them, must have felt their chests tighten somewhat at the news of Kaspar’s autobiography. The plan to bury poor Kaspar alive under the waves of a strange world had failed. Only now, as the clandestine criminals might have supposed, did the killing of Kaspar become a sort of self-defense.
The Wild Child Page 14
