Kaspar Hauser

Kaspar Hauser

Kaspar Hauser or Casparus Hauser (April 30, 1812–December 17, 1833) was a mysterious foundling in 19th century Germany with suspected and theorised ties to the royal house of Baden.

Life

On May 26 1828 a teenage boy appeared in the streets of Nuremberg, Germany. He was wearing peasant clothing and could barely talk. The only identifying material carried by the boy was a letter addressed to the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th cavalry regiment, in which the author asked the captain to take the boy in or hang him, and another piece of paper which appeared to be from his mother to his prior caretaker.

Shoemaker Weissman took the boy to the house of captain Wessenig where he could only repeat, "I want to be a knight, as my father was," and "Horse! Horse!" Further demands resulted only in tears, or the obstinate proclamation of "Weiß nicht." ("Don't know.") He was taken to a police station where he would only write a name: Kaspar Hauser. A letter with him claimed that he was born on April 30 1812.

He spent the following two months in Vestner Gate Tower in the care of a jailor, Andreas Hiltel. Various curious people visited him, to his apparent delight. He could only smile, walk in toddler's step and could barely use his fingers. He could only eat water and bread. He was approximately sixteen years old, but had the mental development of a 6-year-old. However, Mayor Binder claimed that he had an excellent memory, which, to him, suggested a noble birth.

He still suffered from periods of catalepsy and epilepsy. Eventually he was able to communicate enough so he could tell his story.

Hauser said that he had spent most of his life (presumably his first 10 to 12 years) in a darkened 2×1×1.5 metre cell (little more than the size of a one-person bed in area) with only a straw bed to sleep on and a horse carved out of wood for a toy. He was given nothing but bread and water. Periodically the water would taste bitter, and was apparently drugged: drinking this would cause him to sleep more heavily than usual, and when he awakened his straw had been changed, and his hair and nails had been cut. The first human being he ever had contact with was a mysterious man who visited him on occasion, always taking great care not to reveal his face to Kaspar, and from whom the boy acquired his limited spoken vocabulary and learned to write his name. The stranger eventually released Kaspar from his cell and deposited him outside, where he fainted. His next memory was of wandering the streets of Nuremberg.

The details of Hauser's early life aroused great curiosity and made him an object of international attention. Some claimed he was a con artist. Others suggested that he was related to the Grand Duke of Baden, to whom he bore a passing resemblance. In this case, his parents would have been Karl, Grand Duke of Baden and Stéphanie de Beauharnais, adopted daughter of Napoleon I of France. Because Karl Friedrich had no male progeny, his successor was his uncle Leopold I of Baden whose mother, the Countess von Hochberg, was the alleged culprit of the boy's captivity.

Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, president of the Bavarian court of appeals, began to investigate the case. Hauser was given to the care of a schoolteacher, Friedrich Daumer, who taught him to speak, read and write. He also subjected him to homeopathic treatments and encouraged him to write a diary. He appeared to flourish in this environment.

On October 17 1829, a hooded man tried to kill Hauser with a large knife but managed only to wound his forehead. Alarmed officials called for a police escort and transferred him to the care of Johann Biberbach and six months later to Baron von Tucher. Tucher found him employment as a copier in the local law office. The apparent assassination attempt also fueled rumors about his connection to the house of Baden.

A British nobleman, Lord Stanhope, took an interest in Hauser and apparently tried to win his trust with gifts. He also tried to gain custody of him. He transferred Hauser to Ansbach to the care of Johan Georg Meyer. He also hurriedly declared that Hauser was a Hungarian and not of noble blood. Various historians suspect him of ulterior motives and connections to the house of Baden.

On December 14, 1833, Hauser was lured to Ansbacher Hofgarten with the promise that he would learn something about his ancestry. Instead, he was attacked by a stranger, who stabbed him in the chest. He managed to find his way back to his home but died three days later without ever identifying his attacker. When the police searched the park where the incident took place, they found a small black purse with a note in it which read (in German): "Hauser will be able to tell you how I look, where I came from and who I am. To spare him from this task I will tell you myself. I am from . . . on the Bavarian border . . . My initials are MLÖ." (A photograph of this letter is in the book This Baffling World, by Australian journalist John Godwin). Hauser was buried in a country graveyard; his headstone reads, "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious." A monument to him was later erected in Ansbach which reads, Hic occultus occulto occisus est: "Here an unknown was killed by an unknown."

Documentation

Kaspar was found with two identifying slips of paper: the first was not dated, and read as thus:

Honoured Captain,

I send you a lad who wishes to serve his king in the Army. He was brought to me on October 7th, 1812. I am but a poor laborer with children of my own to rear. His mother asked me to bring up the boy, and so I thought I would rear him as my own son. Since then, I have never let him go one step outside the house, so no one knows where he was reared. He, himself, does not know the name of the place or where it is.

You may question him, Honoured Captain, but he will not be able to tell you where I live. I brought him out at night. He cannot find his way back. He has not a penny, for I have nothing myself. If you do not keep him, you must strike him dead or hang him.

The second letter, presumably from the boy's mother mentioned in the first letter, is dated simply "October 1812" and reads as follows:

This child has been baptized. His name is Kaspar; you must give him his second name yourself. I ask you to take care of him. His father was a cavalry soldier. When he is seventeen, take him to Nuremberg, to the Sixth Cavalry Regiment: his father belonged to it. I beg you to keep him until he is seventeen. He was born on April 30th, 1812. I am a poor girl; I can't take care of him. His father is dead.

Legacy

Legend and analyses of the Kaspar Hauser case continue to this day. In addition to theories of royal blood and outright imposture, medical analyses include amnesia caused by hypnosis or that Kaspar Hauser had been suffering from a kind of epilepsy, autism or psychogenic dwarfism (see Feral children). Conspiracy theories concentrate on the House of Baden and Lord Stanhope.

In November 1996 the German magazine Der Spiegel reported an attempt to genetically match a blood sample from pants assumed to have been Kaspar Hauser's. This analysis was made in laboratories of Forensic Science Service in Birmingham and in the LMU Institute of Legal Medicine in University of Munich. Comparisons with the members of the royal family were inconclusive. It later became clear that the examined pants were probably not Kaspar's.

In 2002, the Institute for Forensic Medicine of the University of Münster analyzed hair and body cells from locks of hair and items of clothing that were also alleged to belong to Kaspar Hauser, and came to a more conclusive result. The analysts took from the items used in the test six different DNA samples, all of which were determined to belong to the same person, and which were 95% identical to the DNA of Astrid von Medinger, a descendant of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, who would have been Kaspar Hauser's mother if indeed he had been the hereditary prince of Baden. The DNA evidence would seem to argue that Kaspar Hauser was indeed related to the House of Baden. The House of Baden continues to be silent on the matter of Kaspar Hauser and does not allow any medical examination of the remains of the allegedly stillborn son of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, who lies in the family vault at Pforzheim, but amongst the people of Baden-Württemberg the connection with the royal family is widely believed to be true.

It has been claimed (in The Great Pretenders, by Jan Bondeson) that Kaspar Hauser spent at least part of his imprisonment in a cell at Pilsach Castle near Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany, about 34 km (21 miles) from Nuremberg. A tiny room was discovered in the castle in 1924 which contained, in addition to some half-decayed rags, a carved wooden horse of the sort Hauser had said he had possessed. It has not been determined whether the horse actually belonged to him.

Films, books and art

In 1974 the German filmmaker Werner Herzog made Hauser's story into a film, Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Every Man for Himself and God Against All). In English the film was either known by that translation, or by the title, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

The case of Kaspar Hauser has also inspired other artists like playwrights Paul Verlaine and Peter Handke, theatre composers like Elizabeth Swados, and musicial artists like Suzanne Vega and Moth!Fight!. Robert A. Heinlein refers to 'Kaspar Hausers' as an analogue to persons popping in and out of metaphysical planes in his novel Glory Road. He is also cited in Billy Budd by Herman Melville, "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides and in City of Glass (among other similar cases) from the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. Fredric Brown offers a theory about "Casper Hauser" in his science-fiction story "Come and Go Mad". Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's book on Kaspar Hauser is Lost Prince : The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser.

Anthroposophists have written several books on Kaspar Hauser. One in particular, a detailed work by Peter Tradowsky, addresses the mysteries surrounding Kaspar Hauser's life from the anthroposophical point of view. His analysis delves into the occult significance of the individuality he sees as incarnated in Kaspar Hauser.

The Kaspar Hauser Schule [1] in Überlingen, Germany (near Lake Constance) takes its name and inspiration from Kaspar Hauser. It is a free Waldorf school, inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner, and has an innovative program for dealing with children considered ineducable. In 2006 it was nominated in a national competition for the best school in Germany and is one of the finalists selected so far.

Greg Tricker is an artist whose works often combine the innocence of children with the sacred and the mystical. His series of paintings and stonework on the life of Kasper Hauser was first exhibited in 2006 at PianoNobile [2].

In 2007, artist Diane Obomsawin publish Kaspar, a graphic novel in which she tells the story of Kaspar Hauser. This book has been published by L'Oie de Cravan, in Montréal, Québec.

See also

• Feral child
• Victor of Aveyron

References

• Kaspar Hauser: Europe's Child, Martin Kitchen, Palgrave MacMillan, 2001 [ISBN 0-333-96214-1]
• The Great Pretenders, Jan Bondeson, WW Norton, 2004 [ISBN 0-393-01969-1]
• Kaspar Hauser: Where Did He Come From?, Terry Boardman, Wynstones Press, 2006 [ISBN 0-946206-60-0]

Biography

• Feuerbach, Paul Johann Anselm, Ritter von: The Wild Child The unsolved mystery of Kaspar Hauser. Translated from the German with an Introduction by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson/ NY Free Press 1997 1st ppb ptg ISBN 0 684 83096 5

Fiction

• Jakob Wassermann – Caspar Hauser or the Inertia of the Heart
• The movie The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle), by Werner Herzog, tells the story.
• Another movie was made in 1993 : Kaspar Hauser was a German-Austrian production directed by Peter Sehr.
• Marianne Hauser's novel Prince Ishmael is a fictional account of the life of Kaspar Hauser.
• Katharine Neville's novel The Magic Circle mentions the life of Kaspar Hauser.
• There is a song called Kaspar Hauser , by the German band Dschinghis Khan.
• There is also a song called Kaspar by the singer Reinhard Mey
• Suzanne Vega included a song called Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song) on her 1987 CD, Solitude Standing.
• As mentioned in the article, the French poet Verlaine wrote a poem about Kaspar under the French translation of his name "Gaspard," which was later made into a song with the same name by the French singer/songwriter Georges Moustaki.
• In the Japanese horror movie Marebito, Masuoka, the main character, believes the girl he found chained up underground is a feral child (from her lack of speech and social skills), and refers to her as his "little Kaspar Hauser".
• Harlan Ellison, in his story "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," from the Dangerous Visions anthology, suggested that Hauser had been plucked out of time and later murdered by a female sadist named Juliette.
• Eric Frank Russell, in his story Sinister Barrier, mentioned Kaspar Hauser as a person who originated from a non-human laboratory.
• A short story by Steven Millhauser called "Kaspar Hauser Speaks" in the book The Knife Thrower and Other Stories.
• In the movie Fahrenheit 451 (1966 film), Guy Montag discreetely puts a copy of a book entitled "Gaspard Hauser" into his bag before the rest of the books in that residence are torched.

External links

• An illustrated article
• A pedigree of the Baden family, including Kaspar as an alleged member
• Kaspar Hauser and other feral children at FeralChildren.com
• Page about Kaspar Hauser, in German