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February 2004

Wonder Boy

What do we really know about the mysterious Kaspar Hauser?

From Moses to Mowgli, from Oedipus to Anna Anderson (a.k.a. Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia), history and myth speak to us of an abiding fascination with identities mislaid or mistaken—of changelings and foundlings and human destinies that seem to epitomize both high intrigue and low cunning. Of all these cases—too numerous to list—that of Kaspar Hauser connotes more than any other the search for a lost identity. Seminars bearing his name are devoted to the themes of alienation and disorientation.

In his theories on the familial integration of children Freud refers to him. More recently, the term “Kaspar Hauser Syndrome” has been coined to describe a particular form of child abuse. Poets and dramatists, writers and filmmakers of major and minor repute have been fascinated by the thin and precarious line between fact and fiction that Hauser’s life transcribed in its search for definition. His name has long since become synonymous with many of the social ills prevalent today—the twin evils of rootlessness and loneliness and the challenges faced by the individual in changing and changeable times.

The bare bones of Kaspar Hauser’s story are as follows: on Whit Monday, May 26, 1828, a young man aged approximately 16 years appeared at one of the city gates of Nuremberg. He wore a crudely tailored jacket, riding breeches, a waistcoat with red spots, boots and a hat. His hair was fine and curly, his eyes blue and apparently blank. A cobbler out on a walk noticed the figure, in particular because he appeared to have great difficulty in walking properly, almost as if he were drunk. Speech was also a problem—the stranger was capable of only a couple of words spoken in the most primitive of Bavarian dialects. The cobbler took his new acquaintance to the police station, where he produced a letter specifying that he, the bearer, was baptized and that his name was Kaspar. His father, apparently, had been a soldier, his mother an impoverished servant, both unable to care for their child. He had therefore been entrusted to a laborer, with instructions to help him enlist in his father’s regiment once he had reached the age of 17. According to Kaspar’s own garbled testimony, the laborer had kept his charge confined for the entire time in a kind of low-ceilinged cellar, properly fed and clothed but without the possibility of exercise or human exchange and with only a couple of toy horses to play with. The time having come for his “release,” he was taught how to walk and write his name and pushed out into the world, abandoned.

The circumstances of Kaspar’s life‚ his “discovery” and his subsequent behavior in civilized society turned him, almost overnight, into a cause célèbre. Nuremberg basked in the glory of its newly adopted son, welcoming a string of celebrities who showered Hauser with presents in order to elicit and witness his capacity for childish delight. He was examined by doctors and scholars keen to find evidence of any number of crackpot theories on human development. He received tuition and learned, fairly quickly but under obvious strain, to read and write. He showed an aptitude for horse-riding and painting with watercolors. His story was publicized all over Europe, his person patronized by various local dignitaries, including the local mayor, an eminent lawyer and a specialist in the science of animal magnetism and early advocate of homeopathy. Theories concerning his provenance were propounded, rejected, revised and revisited time and again in every forum imaginable—from the carpeted antechambers of royal palaces to the sawdust-strewn floors of village taverns. All the while, Kaspar was pushed, sickly and often nervous, literally from pillar to post: in spite of all the fuss around his person, nobody was keen to foot the bill for longer than a few months at a time. While still in Nuremberg he survived one accident with a loosely slung gun and one apparent attempt on his life. In 1832, he was moved for his own safety to the town of Ansbach and made ward of a quixotic Germanophile and English nobleman. Lord Stanhope evidently believed one of several theories that were currently circulating on Hauser’s noble ancestry and hoped to prove that he was the firstborn son of Stephanie de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s niece, and Karl, Prince of Baden, removed at birth by scheming courtiers in order to eliminate the principal line of male succession in favor of sons from morganatic alliance. Clearly, Stanhope wished, through Hauser, to become a vicarious player in the political landscape of German duchies and principalities. When Hauser no longer excited the kind of prurient and potentially lucrative interest that had initially attracted him, Stanhope’s attention turned from something bordering on homoerotic affection to derision and accusations of fraud. From being the object of intense interest Hauser found himself, perhaps once again, a mere mortal forced to deal with life’s adversities and to earn a living. He started work as a bookbinder’s apprentice and seems to have been making adequate progress but was living in somewhat straitened circumstances when he suffered a mysterious attack administered with a sharp knife in the palace gardens of Ansbach that ultimately led to his death, some four days later, on December 17, 1833. He died as he lived, a source of confusion and contention. Some maintained that his death was suicide, the last act of a desperate imposter. For the conspiracy theorists, of course, the circumstances of his demise were fresh evidence of dirty deeds in high places, the murder most foul of a hereditary Prince of Baden.

Even such a brief “factual” resumé of Hauser’s life illustrates the basic problem that posterity faces in reviewing his hapless existence. These facts, such as they are, have all been supplied, reworked and rewritten by third parties. Unusually, for a person of such renown, no documents remain that can be linked, without any doubt, to the person of Kaspar Hauser himself and could provide first-person insights into his personality: no diary, no letters, no accurately recorded interviews or police interrogation transcripts—just a couple of lithographs and sundry memorabilia. And all of those concerned with Hauser had their own particular ideological or financial ax to grind. Since their interest was never disinterested, our picture of Hauser is necessarily colored by the agendas and opinions of early 19th-century Europe, when the forces shaping individual development were observed through the conflicting prisms of enlightened theory and romantic longing. His first teacher, Georg Daumer, carried out early homeopathic experiments on him and attempted to involve him in the occult, playing havoc with an already delicate mental and physical constitution. Although he was genuinely attached to Hauser, Anselm Feuerbach, one of the foremost legal minds of his generation, was interested above all in using his observations of the boy and his incarceration to build a case around the notion of “crimes against the soul.” Hauser was viewed by these and many other men essentially as a tabula rasa, a clean slate on which to draw whatever designs were currently in fashion—a particularly popular pastime since Jean Jacques Rousseau had postulated his theory of man’s innately noble character and its (in)compatibility with the constraints imposed by society. In the context of such considerations, academics and scientists saw in the unfortunate Hauser the seemingly prototypical feral child whose character and development promised insights into hitherto inaccessible regions of human nature.

Thus poor Kaspar became a plaything of intellectuals and socialites, courted or condemned as they saw fit. In a sense, he has remained so to this day. In 1996, the German news magazine Der Spiegel published findings of a DNA examination of blood taken from Hauser’s underwear. The results ruled out any connection between the wearer and the House of Baden. Yet six years and several advances in DNA technology later, locks of his hair and traces of sweat taken from his hatband were examined and found to match those of a descendent of Stephanie de Beauharnais. Recent research has suggested that Hauser might have been the illegitimate child of Napoleon himself, conceived with his charming and adoring niece-by-marriage just prior to the Russian campaign. Or are we to believe the theory that the poor lad simply had the bad luck to suffer from epilepsy? The fits and general ill health recorded by his doctors correspond to descriptions of the condition. In those days, epilepsy was still regarded in some places as a form of insanity. Bavaria was apparently particularly backward when it came to catering for the mentally ill—leaving the job to families, which were, in turn, often happy to leave it to someone else. Private incarceration was a common solution.

Whatever theory we accept, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser will lead us inexorably down the same paths trodden by all those who have concerned themselves with his fate: the wish to provide him with something that individuals can only ever develop for themselves in the context of a stable and supportive environment—a sense of self. There was a vacuum where his sense of identity should have been. Vacuums demand to be filled and everybody who has ever read or heard or watched the story of Kaspar Hauser will want literally to “get a life” for the unhappy young man. If you dare to tread where angels fear, a visit to the Kaspar Hauser Museum in Ansbach or to his well-tended grave or maybe to the small monument marking the spot where he received his mortal wound in the palace gardens is as good as place as any to start.

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