Kaspar Hauser

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

Life

On May 26 1828 a teenage boy appeared in the streets of Nürnberg, 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 most of his life — maybe 10–12 years — he had lived in a dark 2×1×1.5 metre cell with only a straw bed for his company and a horse carved out of wood for a toy. He consumed only bread and water. Sometimes he was drugged so that somebody could change his clothes and cut his hair. The first human being he had seen was a man who had taught him the phrase, "I want to be a rider like my father", and to write Kaspar Hauser. Eventually the man, who had always taken great care that Kaspar could not see him, took him outside where he fainted. The next thing he remembered was the day he had walked in Nuremberg.

This strange boy inspired some interest across Europe and he received even more visitors. Some took him to be a con artist who just pretended to be dumb. Others began to connect him with the family of the Grand Duke of Baden, due to some facial resemblance. In this case, his parents would have been Karl Ludwig Friedrich, 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 an axe 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 by 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 hear something about his ancestry. Instead, a stranger stabbed him fatally to the chest, puncturing his lung. He struggled back home but died three days later. He never identified his attacker, for reasons unknown. When the police searched the park, they did not find the murder weapon but found a black purse with a note in it. The note read: "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 name is MLO." Later on, Stanhope and Meyer tried to claim that the cause of death was suicide. He was buried in a country graveyard where 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:

Honored 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 did not come from Kaspar Hauser but probably by the exhibition of the trousers claimed to be Kaspar Hauser's in Berlin police headquarters in 1905.

It has been claimed 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. In that castle, a tiny room was discovered in 1924 which contained, in addition to some half-decayed rags, a horse carved of wood like the one Hauser had said he'd had as his only toy. It has not been determined whether that horse was Kaspar Hauser's.

In 2002, the Institute for Forensic Medicine of the University of Münster analyzed hair and body cells that were also alleged to belong to Kaspar Hauser, and came to a more conclusive result. They took six samples from different sources: The boy's hat and trousers along with his hair curls, partially from the private collection of the Ansbacher chief presiding judge Feuerbach. The analysis took a long time as the results in the laboratory were examined several times over for the sake of accuracy. The genetic code was the same in all six samples, and was a 95% match to that 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, but amongst the people of Baden Wurtemburg the connection with the royal family is widely believed to be true.

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 and musicians like Suzanne Vega. 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 cited also in Billy Budd by Herman Melville and in City of Glass (among other similar cases) from the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.

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 school http://www.kasparhauserschule.de/ in Uberlingen, Germany (near Lake Constance - Bodensee (in German) takes its name and inspiration from Kaspar Hauser. It is a free Waldorf school, inspired by the work of Rudolph Steiner, and has an 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.

References

Kaspar Hauser: Europe's Child, Martin Kitchen, Palgrave MacMillan, 2001 0333962141
The Great Pretenders, Jan Bondeson, WW Norton, 2004 0393019691

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.
The Korean movie Oldboy is often said to tell a vaguely similar story, as the protagonist is held prisoner for unknown reasons for 15 years. But the similarities end there.
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 Dschingis Khan.
Suzanne Vega included a song called Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song) on her 1987 CD, Solitude Standing.

External links