The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  7 It was typical that the widely read paper in German-speaking countries, published in Vienna, the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung für Kunst, Literatur und gesellschaftliches Leben, in the following year had no less than twenty-five reports about Kaspar Hauser (Johannes Mayer, Philip Henry Lord Stanhope: Der Gegenspieler Kaspar Hausers [Caspar Hauser’s adversary] [Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1988], p. 271).

  8 He was the father of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (whose ideas provoked Marx to write his Theses Against Feuerbach), himself a friend of Daumer and Kaspar Hauser. The older Feuerbach wrote the Bavarian Criminal Code of 1813, which served as a model for the rest of Germany for the entire nineteenth century. “His personality was dramatic and passionate,” says the authoritative Neue Deutsche Biographie. There are several biographies, the best being the one by Gustav Radbruch: Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach: Ein Juristenleben(Vienna: Springer, 1934).

  9 This is from Feuerbach’s book on Kaspar Hauser.

  10 See my book A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).

  11 In 1834 an English translation of this book appeared: Caspar Hauser: An Account of an Individual Kept in a Dungeon, Separated from All Communication with the World, from Early Childhood to about the Age of Seventeen, Drawn up from Legal Documents by Anselm von Feuerbach, President of one of the Bavarian Courts of Appeal, etc. This work, published by Simpkin and Marshall in London, had a short introduction by Francis Lieber, dated Boston, November 1832, and was translated by one Henning Gottfried Linberg. However, either the translator or the “editor” decided that certain passages were best omitted from the work, for reasons not entirely clear (sometimes it seems to have been out of inadvertence; at others somebody thought the language was too “rough”), and so there has actually never existed a complete English translation. The Linberg translation is long out of print, and very hard to find even secondhand.

  12 The only “companions” that Kaspar Hauser had in his prison were two wooden horses and a wooden dog. He clearly thought they were alive, and missed them when he was separated from them. He did not understand that they were not real until many months after his appearance in Nuremberg. We read, in a passage in Daumer’s unpublished diary, the following:

  In September he said that there were three things that were the most joyous occasions in his life since arriving in Nuremberg. The first was when he was once again given toy horses. The second was the first loving treatment he experienced in the house of Mayor Binder. The third was when he by chance discovered the kind of bread he had enjoyed in his prison. He wept from joy at the first and third, (p. 79)

  13 Johannes Mayer and Peter Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser: Das Kind von Europa(Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1984), p. 57.

  14 His poems have been set to music by Brahms, and Thomas Mann said that one of them, at least, ranks as one of the great poems in the German language. He also translated a number of Persian and Arabic poems into German, and was something of a mystic, with odd religious views for his time.

  15 Daumer was among the first to visit Kaspar Hauser. Kaspar arrived on May 26. On July 18 he moved to Daumer’s house. Daumer writes, in his chronology of the story (Georg Friedrich Daumer, Kaspar Hauser: Sein Wesen, seine Unschuld, seine Erduldungen und sein Ursprung [Kaspar Hauser: his nature, his innocence, his suffering, and his origins] [Regensburg: A. Coppenrath, 1873], p. 74) that he met Kaspar Hauser “approximately three weeks before he moved to my house,” which would place his first meeting with Kaspar on June 26, one month after his arrival. It is not clear whether Daumer knew about the weeping from firsthand observation by his friend Freiherr von Tucher, who introduced him to Kaspar, or whether he heard it directly from Kaspar himself. The information was not reproduced anywhere else, nor was it known that Kaspar Hauser wept for eight days and eight nights. That is a long time, and provides a very different picture of Kaspar Hauser’s first week “out of captivity.”

  16 Pies writes in the margin of the last sentence: “Wichtig!”(important!).

  17 I have taken the text from Hermann Pies, Kaspar Hauser: Augenzeugenberichte und Selbstzeugnisse (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1925), pp. 419ff. All the fragments of Kaspar Hauser’s autobiography have been collected in this volume, and occupy some thirty pages. I have translated the full text of this first version in appendix 3.

  18 The question has often been asked whether any child could survive on a diet of bread and water without life-threatening problems. It should be noted that the bread was rye bread, probably made with molasses, and contained four herbs: cumin, anise, fennel and coriander, which no doubt provided some vitamins. I have asked several pediatricians whether survival would be possible, but have not had any definitive answer. The general medical view, however, seems to be that it would be unlikely.

  19 Georg Friedrich Daumer (Mitteilungen über Kaspar Hauser[Information about Kaspar Hauser] [Nuremberg: Heinrich Haubenstricher, 1832], vol. 1, p. 8) introduces this version as follows: “The following is a part of a third attempt from February, 1829, in which can be seen a more educated but nonetheless still natural and naive writing style.” This would seem to indicate that Daumer had a more complete version, but it has never been recovered and must now be considered lost. The version I translated from is taken by Pies from Philip Henry Stanhope’s Materialien zur Geschichte Kaspar Hausers(Material on the case of Kaspar Hauser) (Heidelberg: J. Mohr, 1835), but he notes the variants between this version and the one published by Daumer. This means, as Pies notes, that there must have existed two very similar but nonetheless not identical versions (p. 508).

  20 Daumer notes in his manuscript: “It can be assumed that during his imprisonment he was rarely awake. He himself estimates that he was awake for only three or four hours” (p. 74). This information is not repeated anywhere else. It would seem that Daumer asked Kaspar Hauser a direct question, and this was his response. If he was in a kind of twilight state, and perhaps drugged with opium a good part of the time, it is not surprising that there would be an enormous change once he was outside the prison.

  21 Pp. 150-51. Since this is such an important passage, and never previously published, here is an alternative translation:

  In September and October he frequently stated that he could no longer imagine his erstwhile mental state. He would like to see himself as he had been when he whiled away his time playing. Frequently, while alone, he was trying to understand his condition at that time. It was beyond understanding, he said, that during his imprisonment he never thought about himself—had not reflected whether there were other beings beside him or whether anything else existed outside his cage, nor where the bread and water came from that he found daily and consumed. The entire period before he began to learn to read existed in his memory only in hazy and vague form.

  It seems clear to me that this narrative contains the actual words that Kaspar Hauser used to Daumer—when one thinks about it, an extraordinary event. It is fortunate that this document was somehow miraculously preserved. Daumer, in his first book, Mitteilungen, is clearly writing with this passage in mind when he begins his second volume (p. 113). He even quotes a part of the passage I have just translated from the manuscript.

  22 Actually our knowledge is now immensely greater, thanks to the diligent scholarship of Johannes Mayer in his seven-hundred-page Philip Henry Lord Stanhope, which contains many letters and previously unpublished documents that Mayer found in the Stanhope family archives in Chevening. Mayer is able to establish beyond doubt that Stanhope was intimately connected to the house of Baden and received money from the royal family. Right from the beginning, his interest in Kaspar Hauser was tied to the political fortunes of princely families in Austria and Germany. Whatever the reality was, these families perceived in Kaspar Hauser a potential ally or enemy, and Stanhope was ideally situated to exploit this perception, which he did with a guile, cunning, and ruthlessness that was to lead to the undoing of Kaspar Hauser—who neither knew nor suspected his own importa
nce to the ruling houses of Europe.

  23 On the very day that Kaspar Hauser was attacked, October 22, 1829, Stanhope wrote his banker (Merkel) in Nuremberg, asking him to send him a picture of Kaspar Hauser, and all information from the police and other authorities regarding the attempt on Kaspar’s life. His banker answered, saying that the “investigations into his [Kaspar Hauser’s] origins are being seriously pursued but kept secret by the court.” These important facts were only recently uncovered by Mayer in the Stanhope archives, and published in his book Stanhope, p. 282.

  24 It is found in the notes of Mayer’s Stanhope, p. 613. Mayer points out that Caroline, countess of Albersdorf, writes in her book about being an eyewitness to Stanhope’s visit to Nuremberg, and that he was staying at an inn with two suspicious-looking characters. The book is called Kaspar Hauser oder Andeutungen zur Enthüllung mancher Geheimnisse über Hausers Herkunft, die Ursache seiner Gefangenhaltung und Ermordung (Kaspar Hauser or allusions to the revelation of a number of secrets about Kaspar Hauser’s origins, the reason for his imprisonment and murder) (Regensburg, 1837). We know from elsewhere in Mayer’s book that Stanhope met with Hennenhofer, the presumed murderer of Kaspar Hauser.

  25 Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser, page 182 of the edition included in the useful collection edited by Jochen Hörisch, Ich möchte ein solcher werden wie … Materialien zur Sprachlosigkeit des Kaspar Hauser (I would like to be like … Material about the lack of speech of Kaspar Hauser) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979).

  26 Pies, Dokumentation, p. 67.

  27 Ibid., p. 69.

  28 Ibid., p. 97.

  29 Text of the letter in Mayer and Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, p. 545.

  30 Tucher said that Stanhope had told the boy that “he was a Hungarian magnate … and it was expected that he treat his subjects (Untertanen) with care and love.” See Mayer, Stanhope, p. 384.

  31 Sein Wesen, p. 288. Daumer refers to a similar passage on page 233 of his Enthüllungen über Kaspar Hauser(Revelations about Kaspar Hauser) (Frankfurt am Main: Weidinger Sohn, 1859): “I can, should it be requested, name a witness who observed the public embraces of the lord with great astonishment.” This is the only reference that I have been able to find to a possible homoerotic attachment on the part of Stanhope for Kaspar Hauser. In Peter Sehr’s fine film, this theme is made explicit. Daumer also refers to a letter from Meyer’s wife, in which she speaks of how Stanhope allowed (encouraged?) Kaspar to kiss and stroke him (p. 288).

  32 Mayer, Stanhope, p. 401.

  33 Examples of Meyer’s endless picking on Kaspar can be found in Pies, Dokumentation, p. 126ff.

  34 He had the great good fortune, however, to be taught by Johann Heinrich Fuhrmann, thirty-six years old in 1833, a gentle, kindly priest, who delivered the burial address and also wrote a charming essay on Kaspar Hauser, published a year later, in 1834, and reproduced in Pies, Augenzeugenberichte und Selbstzeugnisse. Both were also reprinted in Tradowsky, Johann Simon Heinrich Fuhrmann: Kaspar Hauser (Dornach: Rudolf Geering Verlag, 1983).

  35 He had said many times that the man had done nothing bad to him and he did not want him punished if he should ever be caught. It was only when for the first time in his life he looked at the star-studded night sky that he said he realized what he had been robbed of by his incarceration in the dungeon, and asked if his jailer realized what he was depriving him of. It was an actual question, not a criticism. For examples, see pp. 42ff.

  36 Pies, Dokumentation, p. 132.

  37 Kaspar Hauser managed, from time to time, to escape his teacher. On January 22, 1833, for example, he was taken to meet the twenty-year-old Richard Wagner in Bamberg. No text has come down to us of what the two young men said to each other.

  38 Pies, Dokumentation, p. 207.

  39 Daumer, Sein Wesen, p. 501. Johann Ludwig von Klüber (1762-1837) is one of the most mysterious players in the Kaspar Hauser drama. He is reputed to have been the lover of Countess Hochberg, who arranged for the murder of Kaspar Hauser. His son Friedrich Adolf (1791-1858) was the personal secretary of Leopold, the son of the countess, who came to the throne instead of Hauser. Feuerbach died under mysterious circumstances on a visit to Klüber to discuss Kaspar Hauser. (There has never been any suggestion that Klüber was involved in what looks like a case of poisoning, but one can’t help wondering.) Meyer informs us that after Feuerbach’s death, Klüber became Kaspar Hauser’s guardian (he had taken over from Tucher), a strange and rather remarkable circumstance that seems not to have been noted earlier (Stanhope, p. 214). Letters from and to Klüber can be found in von der Linde’s two-volume Kaspar Hauser: Eine neugeschichtliche Legende (A contemporary legend) (Wiesbaden: Verlag von C. Limbarth, 1887) and in Mayer’s volume on Stanhope.

  40 Reproduced in Pies, Kaspar Hauser: Fälschungen, Falschmeldungen und Tendenzberichte (Forgeries, perjuries and biased reports) (Ansbach: Ansbacher Museums Verlag, 1973), p. 103.

  41 Ibid., p. 104.

  42 Reprinted in Hörisch, Ich möchte ein solcher werden wie, p. 256.

  43 Pies, Dokumentation, p. 225. Hermann Pies published the full medical reports, Die amtlichen Aktentstücke über Kaspar Hausers Verwundung und Tod(Official documents relating to Kaspar Hauser’s mortal wound and death) (Bonn: Kulturhistorischer Verlag, 1928). They have been reprinted by Peter Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser: Arztberichte (Kaspar Hauser: doctors’ reports) (Dornach: Rudolf Geering Verlag, 1985.) Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Heidenreich, thirty-four years old at the time, who actually performed the autopsy, published his report in 1834. In it, reprinted by Pies, Augenzeugenberichte, p. 399, he notes that “in the first days after he was wounded, the mood of the public was very much against Kaspar Hauser.” He goes on to say that “once the corpse was autopsied, the size of the wound showed that he could hardly have brought it about himself, and the majority of people were once again inclined to believe in an assassination.” (See, too, his deposition, quoted by Pies, Dokumentation, p. 158.)

  44 Ibid., p. 205.

  45 Pathetically Kaspar answered that he did not think his life was in danger since he now had a fosterfather (Pflegevater) who would take care of him. This was a reference to Stanhope, the very man who was probably directly or indirectly collaborating with Kaspar Hauser’s murderer.

  46 Pies, Dokumentation, p. 204.

  47 Ibid., p. 154.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Reproduced in Pies, Kaspar Hauser, pp. 62ff.

  50 He wrote two excellent books about Kaspar Hauser that are still worth reading today (see the bibliography).

  51 Pies, Augenzeugenberichte, vol. 2, p. 315.

  52 Pies is certain he learned about it on the trip from Vienna to Munich (Kaspar Hauser, p. 63).

  53 Daumer, Enthüllungen, p. 170.

  54 Daumer, Sein Wesen, p. 293.

  55 She published two books, Kaspar Hauser oder Andeutung zur Enthüllung mancher Geheimnisse über Hausers Herkunft, die Ursache seiner Gefangenhaltung und Ermordung(Regensburg, 1837), and the two-volume Kaspar Hauser oder die richtige Enthüllung der bisher unbekannten Geheimnisse(Kaspar Hauser or the correct revelation of previously unknown secrets) (Munich, 1839). See Mayer, Stanhope, p. 352.

  56 Actually, it was not “many” at all, but primarily Meyer and Stanhope, both of whom had good reasons to make this claim.

  57 One can fairly feel the indignation of the anonymous writer at the suggestion that an English lord could even be imagined guilty of such a heinous deed.

  58 Andrew Lang: Historical Mysteries (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1904), chap. 6, “The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser: The Child of Europe,” pp. 118-42. Lang’s Blue Fairy Book is still a much-loved children’s classic.

  59 As early as July 1828, mayor Binder had received a letter asking: “Is not Kaspar Hauser the son of the Grand Duchess Stéphanie?” And Feuerbach had a letter with the same content in 1829. See Mayer, Stanhope, p. 271.

  60 “Rumors of poisoning [in this case of the crown prince, Alexander, who was born in 1816 and died a year later], which were already quietly whi
spered about in the earlier case [Kaspar Hauser], came up again and became louder and bolder.” Cited by Pies, Dokumentation, p. 252. These notebooks and diaries are a valuable source, see Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Denkwürdigkeiten und Vermischte Schriften, 9 vols. (Leipzig, 1843-46 and 1859), as well as Tagebücher (diaries), 14 vols. (Hamburg and Zurich, 1861-70). Pies gives all the important passages.

  61 From a letter found in the Stanhope family archives, Kent, Chevening, by Mayer (Stanhope, p. 395).

  62 In the Mémoire (memorandum), of which more follows, Feuerbach says that “it is not insignificant that not long after Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nuremberg, a rumor was circulated, and one that came from Baden: Kaspar is the prince of the house of Baden, who was claimed to be dead, the son of the Grand Duchess Stéphanie. This rumor would from time to time surface, and has done so especially in recent times” (Pies, Dokumentation, p. 242).

  63 Pies, Dokumentation, p. 78.

  64 That it was so understood by many readers is clear from the response of Karoline, queen of Bavaria, to whom Feuerbach had sent a copy of the book. She asked him, then, about his proof of a Majestätsverbrechen(a crime against royalty), and it was this question that impelled Feuerbach to write his famous Mémoire to the queen, attempting to prove his hint (see Kaspar Hauser, by Mayer and Tradowsky, p. 552). As early as February 6, 1832, the Augsburger Tageblatt spoke of Kaspar Hauser as the “mutmassliche[r] Prätendent […] von Baden” that is, the heir apparent (ibid., p. 550).