The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  65 Mayer and Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, p. 409.

  66 Karoline, queen mother of Bavaria (1776-1841), princess of Baden, the sister of Karl von Baden, hence Kaspar Hauser’s aunt. She was the stepmother of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Her husband Maximilian I, king of Bavaria, had died in 1825.

  67 The document was published by Ludwig Feuerbach in a two-volume work entitled Anselm Ritter von Feuerbachs Leben und Werken, aus seinen ungedruckten Briefen und Tagebüchern, Vorträgen und Druckschriften(Leipzig: Verlag von Otto Wigand, 1852). It was published under a pseudonym in 1859, 1889, and 1892 (see Mayer and Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, p. 180). Often called the secret “Mémoire” (Memorandum), it begins with the words “Wer möchte wohl Kaspar Hauser sein?”(Who might Kaspar Hauser be?), sometimes given as its title. It has been reprinted in Pies, Dokumentation, pp. 327ff. Pies discusses the reaction in his Kaspar Hauser: Die Wahrheit über sein Auftauchen und erste Nürnberger Zeit (Kaspar Hauser: The truth about his appearance in Nuremberg and his early time there) (Saarbrücken, 1956). (See reprint in bibliography.) New and important documents pertaining to the Mémoire can be found in Mayer, Stanhope, pp. 412ff.

  68 Quoted in Mayer and Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, p. 179.

  69 When the king heard about Kaspar Hauser’s death, he wrote in his diary: “Very sorry over the death of the rightful Grand Duke of Baden, if he was Kaspar Hauser, which is probable.” Quoted by Prinz Adalbert von Bayern in Der Zwiebelturm 5 (1951), p. 125, and also in Mayer and Tradowsky, ibid., p. 214.

  70 Sophie (1805-72), archduchess of Austria, mother of Kaiser Franz Joseph I. Austrian politics was intimately involved in the affairs of Baden and Bavaria, as Mayer details in his book on Stanhope.

  71 Elisabeth (1801-73), queen of Prussia.

  72 Letter quoted in Mayer, Stanhope, p. 415.

  73 Ibid., p. 415.

  74 Joseph Hickel was thirty-eight years old in 1833. He was a police officer (Gendarmerieoberleutnant) assigned early on to the Kaspar Hauser case, presumably by Feuerbach, who trusted him. He accompanied Kaspar Hauser on several trips, as far away as Hungary, in search of clues for his identity. He became friendly with Stanhope, and after Feuerbach s death seems to have allowed himself to be manipulated by Stanhope against the interests of Kaspar Hauser. The two books by Julius Meyer, the son of Kaspar Hausers teacher in Ansbach (the first and most influential, Authentische Mittheilungen über Kaspar Hauser [Authentic observations on Kaspar Hauser], a cynical misnomer if ever there was one, was published in Ansbach in 1872), contain letters from Hickel that Pies was able to demonstrate are forgeries. Stanhope probably wrote them. But whether Stanhope or Hickel was the author of these letters, they contradict the actual evidence of other documents that are indisputably by Hickel. For more information on this topic, see Pies, Fälschungen.

  75 See his 1951 article, “ Königin Caroline von Bayern und Kaspar Hauser.”

  76 To Hungary.

  77 Schmidt.

  78 This is a reference to a letter that Stanhope wrote Feuerbach on January 23, 1832, in which he writes: “I was told that the grand duchess when she read your book wept bitter tears and had red eyes for a long time afterwards” (Mayer, Stanhope, p. 403).

  79 A reference to Luise von Hochberg, her son Leopold (1790-1852), who became grand duke of Baden in 1830, and his wife, Sophie of Baden (1801-65).

  80 The text is given by Mayer, Stanhope, pp. 416-17. He found the letter in the Stanhope family archive, Chevening, Kent.

  81 Pies (Fälschungen) vouches for Hickel and was able to show that the letters by Hickel published in 1872 and 1881 by Julius Meyer, the son of Kaspar Hauser s Ansbach teacher, were fabrications. (Hickel died in 1862.) On the other hand, Hickel seems to have gone along with the plan, first formulated by Stanhope and Meyer as early as 1834, of fabricating the letters. This information is new, and was found by Mayer (see Stanhope, pp. 503ff).

  82 In his unpublished manuscript on the Kaspar Hauser question, written in 1908, pp. 73-74. (Anselm von Feuerbach thought his grandfather was systematically poisoned by arsenic starting in 1829.) Daumer wrote that Eduard von Feuerbach “died, it I remember correctly, suddenly and unexpectedly with symptoms of having been poisoned” (Sein Wesen, p. 82). Eduard Feuerbach (1803-43), did die, suddenly, on April 25, 1843. His uncle, Joseph Anselm von Feuerbach (1798-1851), professor of archeology in Freiburg, one of the great judge’s sons, husband of Henriette von Feuerbach (herself a noted cultural figure whose brother, the physician Wilhelm Heydenreich, 1798-1857, first recognized that Kaspar Hausers wound was fatal), and father of the painter Anselm von Feuerbach, was apparently also poisoned. On the words Feuerbach supposedly wrote on the piece of paper, see also Pies, In Memoriam Adolf Bartning (Ansbach: C. Brügel and Sohn, 1930), p. 167. See too Mayer, Kaspar Hauser, pp. 206-8. The great grandson of Feuerbach told Bartning that “My father held the piece of paper in his own hands on the occasion of a visit to his aunts in Nuremberg and copied down the exact quotation. It contained the words: Somebody gave me something.” Mayer, Kaspar Hauser, p. 206.

  83 I could be wrong about this. In a letter that Johannes Mayer found in the Kent Archive from Feuerbach to Stanhope, dated May 12, 1832 (op.cit., p. 416), Feuerbach writes: “K[lüber] was stets im Interesse jenigen Familie, welche durch Tötung oder sonstige Entfernung Kaspars gewinnen konnte und wirklich gewonnen hat. Er war und ist immer noch für dieselbe eingenommen: doch ich fürchte, ,schon durch dieses wenige zu viel gesagt zu haben.” (Klüber was always [operating] in the interest of that family [namely Hochberg] who stood to gain from Kaspar’s death or removal by other means, and did in fact gain. He was and is still prejudiced on their behalf. But I fear that even by saying this little, I have said too much.)

  84 Mayer, Stanhope, p. 409.

  85 There is a letter from Klüber dated May 30, 1833, reporting the death of Feuerbach after a two-hour visit with him the day before. He reports in it that an autopsy was performed and nothing was found, so the “illness was declared to be nervous” (die Krankheit wurde für nervö erklärt). Daumer, Sein Wesen, p. 461. Also in Mayer and Tradowsky, p. 204.

  86 Mayer, Stanhope, p. 451.

  87 Mayer, Stanhope, p. 406.

  88 Marie Amalie Elisabeth Caroline Markgräfin von Baden was born on October 11, 1817. She married William Alexander Anton Archibald, duke of Hamilton, marquis of Douglas and Clychester, in 1843.

  89 Mayer and Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser, p. 281.

  90 Nothing certain is known. But the fact that Kaspar Hauser was able to learn to speak fluently in so short a time suggests that he had already acquired the basics of language. This was the view of Daumer (Sein Wesen, p. 422) and others.

  91 Mayer, Kaspar Hauser, p. 780.

  92 According to Daumer (Sein Wesen, p. 133), it was widely suspected that Karl was poisoned at the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1815. He died in 1818, only thirty-two years old. He is said to have spoken these words on his deathbed: “My two sons and I have all been poisoned.”

  93 “Man hat mich umgebracht und) meine Söhne” he said to several of his courtiers. See Mayer, Stanhope, p. 209. Varnhagen gives a blistering account of Karl’s last days: “Die Umgebung war trostlos … dem Kranken durfte man nicht sagen, wie schlecht es um ihn stand; aber dasser nicht lange Leben könne, dass er Gift bekommen habe, wiederholte er selbst öfters unter jammervollen Ausrufen…. Er sass tagelang niedergeschlagen und gelangweilt da.” (The surroundings were bleak … one could not tell the sick man how things stood with him; but that he could not live long, that he had been given poison, he himself repeated many times with miserable cries…. He sat there the whole day depressed and bored.) (Quoted in Mayer, Stanhope, p. 205, from the twelve volumes of memoirs of K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, published in Leipzig in 1871, Denkwürdigkeiten des eigenen Lebens.) Writing in a lively and direct style, Varnhagen was a particularly valuable eyewitness to these events. The relevant passages can be found in Pies, Dokumentation, pp. 246ff. His death of course widowed Stéphanie and allowed the son of Countess Hochber
g to ascend the throne.

  94 One of the most important articles (because the author had family access to previously unpublished letters and other documents) about this case is “Königin Caroline von Bayern und Kaspar Hauser,” by Prince Adalbert von Bayern (1886-1970). From one of these letters (quoted on page 107) we learn that “King Ludwig I of Bavaria remarked on December 23, 1833, that his external minister, Freiherr von Gise, ’told him in confidence what my deceased brother-in-law, Count Eugen von Leuchtenberg, told him, but that he did not want to reveal: namely that his cousin, the widowed grand duchess of Baden [Stéphanie, Kaspar Hauser’s mother] was of the opinion that her eldest son, whose corpse she never saw, had not died but was kidnapped!” Caroline of Bavaria wrote to her daughter on Monday, March 12, 1832 (thus while Kaspar Hauser was still alive), in response to the question of who Kaspar Hauser was: The general consensus is that Hauser is one of the sons of my poor brother. Although I am convinced that at least one [of his sons] did not die a natural death, I have, unfortunately, no doubt that the crime has been successfully committed.” (The German original says precisely this: Obschon ich überzeugt bin, dass wenigstens der Eine keines natürlichen Todes gestorben ist, so habe ich unglücklicher Weise trotzdem keinerlei Zweifel, dass das Verbrechen voll ausgeführt worden ist” [p. 123].) What this article proves conclusively is that both royal houses were hardly indifferent to the question of who Kaspar Hauser really was, both during and after his lifetime. For some members of the royal households it was, and remained, an obsession. Kaspar’s aunt, Marie von Hamilton, who was born in 1812, was visited in 1875 by Bogdan Graf von Hutten-Czapski (1851-1936), who reported that she showed him a picture of Kaspar Hauser and then said: “This is Kaspar Hauser, my unfortunate brother. My mother and I were always convinced that he was my brother.” In 1875 Louise Baronin Belli di Pino, a lady-in-waiting to her mother, visited the countess of Hamilton and “told the noble lady that I was convinced that Kaspar Hauser was the son of her mother. She answered me: Maman est morte avec cette conviction! Et je crois qu’il était mon frère” (Mother died believing this, and I believe that he was my brother). Both quotations are in Mayer, Stanhope, p. 319. He took the former from Sechzig Jahre Politik und Gesellschaft, vol. 1 (Berlin, Bogdan, Graf von Hutten-Czapski, 1936), and the second from the Tucher archives.

  95 See his Neue Beiträge zur Kaspar-Hauser-Forschung (Nuremberg: J. L. Schrag Verlag, 1929).

  96 According to Pies, Dokumentation, p. 294, it was the belief of both doctors, Preu and Osterhausen, Kaspar Hauser’s first two physicians, that he lived in freedom for the first three or four years of his life. This agrees with Klee s research as well.

  97 Feuerbach, The Kaspar Hauser Question, p. 88. This manuscript, which has been edited by Johannes Mayer, was just published in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s series Die andere Bibliothek, along with our edition of Daumer’s manuscript. I was able to see it and cite it through the kindness of Mr. Mayer. The full title of the new book is: Anselm von Feuerbach, Georg Friedrich Daumer, Eduard Feuerbach: Kaspar Hauser, Ediert und mit Hintergrundberichten versehen von Johannes Mayer und Jeffrey M. Masson. (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 1995).

  98 Cases like that of Kaspar Hauser are not entirely unknown even in modern times. One, cited by Lane (p. 179; see note 100 for full reference), which he took from Lucien Malson’s book about the Wild Child of Aveyron, bears a striking resemblance to that of Kaspar Hauser. It reports: “Yves Chenau was discovered in 1963 at Saint-Brévin, in Loire-Atlantique, by his uncle and some gendarmes; he had been living in a cellar for eighteen months, imprisoned there by his wicked stepmother. ‘When he came out,’ his uncle recounts, ‘he took a long time to get accustomed to the light. He was shown a cat and a cow and asked what they were. He no longer knew.’ Didier Leroux—sent to cover the story by a major Paris newspaper—and who saw the child at the Nantes hospital, states ‘His gaze wanders apathetically over things and people. He does not speak; he no longer knows how to speak.’”

  99 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Paris, 1754; reprint, Paris: Garnier, 1962), pp. 94-96: “These children walk on all fours and require careful instruction before they can walk upright…. [The child from Hesse] had been taken care of by wolves…. He walked so like an animal that pieces of wood had to be tied to his legs for him to hold himself erect … on his two feet…. The same was true of the child discovered in the forests of Lithuania who had lived among bears. According to Abbé Condillac he did not reveal the slightest sign of reason. He walked on all fours, lacked the power of speech and uttered sounds quite unlike anything human. The young savage from Hanover who was taken to the English court some years ago had the greatest difficulty in learning to walk on two feet…. Two other savages were discovered in the Pyrenees running up and down the mountainside like quadrupeds.” Lucien Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature: The Wild Boy of Aveyron by Jean Itard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; originally published as Les enfanta sauvages [Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1964]), p. 38.

  100 The material that follows comes from the excellent book by Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

  101 Lane, The Wild Boy, p. 56. Claude Lévi-Strauss also believes this, and claims that “most of these [abandoned] children were congenitally abnormal and it is imbecility, which they nearly all seem to have suffered, that is the original cause of their abandonment and not, as some contend, its result.” Cited in Lane, The Wild Boy, p. 172. The reference to Lévi-Strauss is to his book, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), pp. 3-4. Lane says that Maria Montessori shares this view.

  102 Lane, The Wild Boy, pp. 62-63.

  103 Octave Mannoni, in “Itard et son sauvage,” Les Temps Modernes 233 (October 1965), pp. 647-63, regrets that hard was no Freud. The literature on the Wild Boy of Aveyron is nearly as extensive as that about Kaspar Hauser (see the bibliography in Lane). I recommend Lane, The Wild Boy, and Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature, mentioned in notes 99 and 100.

  104 It is clear from the Daumer manuscript, which Feuerbach had in front of him when writing his own account, that both men were fascinated by Kaspar Hauser’s unusual sensory apparatus, the fact that he was so sensitive to taste, smells, sounds, and sights. In this he resembled an infant. For Feuerbach and Daumer, it was as if Kaspar Hauser’s development had completely frozen at this early stage, and part of their task was to set his natural growth back into motion. At the same time they worried about “spoiling” the natural purity of the infant in him.

  105 Daumer, Mitteilungen. See the reprint by Peter Tradowsky (Dornach: Rudolf Geering Verlag, 1983), p. 119.

  106 This important letter was published by Pies, Die Wahrheit, pp. 69-73.

  107 Perhaps Feuerbach meant by this word that he was a genius.

  108 On Hahnemann, see Richard Haehl: Samuel Hahnemann, His Life and Work (London: Homeopathic Publishing Co., 1922). See also Harris L. Coulter, Divided Legacy: A History of the Schisms in Medical Thought, vol. 2 (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1988). Chapter 6 is devoted to Hahnemann. Hahnemann wrote that he, like Kaspar Hauser, knew no childhood.

  109 Sein Wesen, p. 175.

  110 Sein Wesen, p.276.

  111 From Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second 1194-1250, translated into English by E. O. Lorimer (London: Constable & Co., 1931). See also Thomas Curtis van Cleve, The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: Immutator Mundi (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 31-32:

  It is related also that, in an effort to discover what language men would naturally speak if reared in complete seclusion and denied the hearing of all spoken words, he caused new-born infants to be reared by foster-mothers who were “to suckle and bathe them but in no wise to speak to them.” For as Salimbene relates, “he desired to know whether or not they would speak Hebrew, which is the original language, or Greek, Latin, or Arabic, or the
language of the parents from whom they were born…. But the infants died.”

  The author writes that “one can only conclude that, if excessive cruelty accompanied Frederick’s efforts in experimentation, it was because he lived in an age when cruelty was not uncommon, appearing at times as an attribute of piety. The significant feature of all this is that Frederick II had the will to seek for truth by means of experimentation in those realms of thought where passive acceptance was the established order of the day” (p. 318).

  112 Quoted from John Edwards, Multilingualism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 16.

  113 Herodotus, The History, translated by David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 131-32.

  114 In this book Rousseau cites examples of feral children, or homo ferus.

  115 An idea echoed, no doubt deliberately and consciously, by Daumer in the foreword to his 1873 book about Kaspar Hauser (Sein Wesen): “Hauser bewies in jener Periode, dass der Mensch edel geschaffen ist und dass die Bestialität nicht die Grundlage seiner Natur bildet” (Hauser demonstrated, during that period, that man is created noble and that bestiality does not constitute the essence of his nature), p. 17.

  116 A. F. Bance, “The Kaspar Hauser Legend and Its Literary Survival,” German Life and Letters 28 (1975), pp. 199-210.

  117 Perhaps it was with this remark in mind that Daumer notes in the manuscript that “lost children living in the wilderness present a very different picture from that of Kaspar Hauser” (p. 120).

  118 Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature, p. 39.

  119 Caspar Hauser, nicht unwahrscheinlich ein Betrüger (Berlin: August Rücker).

  120 Vier populäre Vorlesungen über Kaspar Hauser (Berlin: Verlag der königlichen geheimen Oberhofbuchdruckerei, 1857).

  121 Ibid., p. 170; cited by Daumer, Enthüllungen, p. 35. One cannot say that this tendency has entirely disappeared. Dieter Zimmer’s “Tarzans arme Vettern: Über Wilde Kinder und Wolfskinder,” in his book Experimente des Lebens: was uns die Wissenschaft über wilde Kinder, Zwillinge und unser eigenes Verhalten lehrt (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1993), is a contemporary example.