The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  Meyer tortured him on a daily basis by insisting that he was telling minor lies. This treatment was, even by Meyer’s own account, extremely intrusive and hostile. For example, when Kaspar told his teacher that he had felt bad all night and had vomited, Meyer demanded to know where. When Kaspar told him that he had gone to the bathroom, Meyer told him that this could not be true; since he had such a highly developed sense of smell, he would never have gone there unless absolutely necessary, he would have used the sink in his room. “I told him: Either it is not true that you have a sensitive sense of smell, or it is not true that you vomited in the bathroom or anywhere else for that matter.” Meyer was determined that Kaspar become a devout Christian, and expended a great deal of energy in telling him about the dire fate that awaited him if he did not.

  “Do you pray?” asked Meyer.

  “Every night,” responded Kaspar.

  “Then tell me the prayers.”

  “I don’t know them by heart.”

  “You are lying.”33

  Kaspar was never allowed out of the house unaccompanied, and it was Meyer’s greatest complaint that he found every reason to flee on his own. The sadism clearly had an effect on Kaspar, and he began a gradual spiritual decline, ending in his taking religion seriously, something that had never occurred to him before.34 Before his religious instruction, before he was force-fed Latin and mathematics and all the other topics of which he previously knew nothing, he seemed completely devoid of any religious sense yet was noted for his extreme kindness toward all living creatures, even his own original jailer.35

  Stanhope left Ansbach on January 19, 1832, promising to adopt Kaspar Hauser and bring him to England. Kaspar was never to see him again. Stanhope went directly to the palace at Mannheim, where Grand Duchess of Baden Stéphanie de Beauharnais (married to Karl of Baden) was then residing. He gave the duchess a copy of Feuerbach’s book, which had just been published. She read the book, wept, and begged to meet Kaspar Hauser. Stanhope promised to arrange a meeting but did not. He had other plans for Kaspar Hauser.

  Meyer was a petty tyrant but a major sadist. Kaspar spoke of longing to return to his first prison, but a worse fate awaited him. On December 14, 1832, barely five years after he appeared, he was lured to the deserted Court Garden in the Orangerie in Ansbach by a man who said he had news of his mother. There he was stabbed in the chest. Meyer himself36 admits that he threatened the dying Kaspar:

  I explicitly advised him against making any more fuss, that in fact he deserved a good thrashing [italics in original]. Later I was inclined to blame myself for being so strict. But when I take into account that it could not hurt him if he was really in a delirium, and that if he was only faking, then he richly deserved it, I am able to comfort myself. Moreover, from the moment of my serious reprimand until the last evening of his life, his delirium did not recur. Then, too, his behavior on his sickbed greatly astonished me. Kaspar Hauser was normally such a sissy, I could not bear the fuss he made over the slightest hurt. He always noticed every little twitch, real or imagined. But this time he did not complain about his pain with a single word, unless asked, and even then he was monosyllabic. [Meyer is hinting that since Kaspar killed himself, he knew he could not blame anyone else].

  An extraordinary picture emerges from these words alone of the horror it must have been for Kaspar Hauser to live with this tyrant.37 Meyer also said: “I have to add that on the way back from the bridle path [where Kaspar was stabbed], I said to Hauser: ‘This time you have played the most stupid prank, this time it won’t go well for you’ [as opposed to the last time, in Nuremberg—Meyer is definitely telling him: That was as phony as this is]. When I said this he looked up at the sky and said: ‘In the name of God, God knows [that I am telling the truth.].’”38

  A letter from Privy Council Andreas Hofmann to Klüber,39 of February 3, 1834, refers to a meeting with Meyer that provides a sad and astonishing picture of these last days of Kaspar Hauser’s life:

  Meyer said in a tone of great outrage that Hauser was making a play for the compassion of the century; the whole event was nothing but a repetition of the earlier fabricated attempt on his life in Nuremberg. He would not lose any sleep over it today (December 14) the way Professor Daumer had then in Nuremberg. In fact he had told Hauser to his face as he was leaving him in order to tell me about the incident, that he deserved a good thrashing. [Here there is a footnote by Daumer which expresses what anybody would feel upon hearing these words: “One could cry bloody tears when one thinks about the fate of poor Kaspar, who had just received a mortal wound to his heart and then was threatened, in the meanest way, with a beating!”] Meyer even insisted that, since Hickel was gone, I should have him (Kaspar Hauser) removed from [Meyer’s] house, since he did not want to keep him any longer…. I told him that Dr. Albert, with whom I had spoken the previous evening, did not believe that Hauser was out of danger, and declared that moving him to another dwelling was not possible.

  Meyer was so proud of this threat to the dying boy that he repeated it.

  Meyer was the source of the rumors about Kaspar Hauser’s death being a suicide. Evidently he did not have a difficult time convincing the men of the town. There is a report, dated December 16, 1833—part of an official inquiry into Kaspar Hauser’s death—which reads: “On December 14, in the first moments that Kaspar Hauser’s accident became known, perhaps nine-tenths of the people living in Ansbach (I am referring here only to the male population) said to themselves: ‘This is the second edition of the Nuremberg attempt on his life.’”40 [that is, it is unreal]. One of the nastiest examples of this point of view was written by Karl Heinrich Ritter von Lang (1764-1835), and published in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung on January 4, 1834. Here is a partial translation of this mean-spirited, ugly text, since it was to prove so influential and because it was not atypical:

  On December 14, in the evening, the well-known Kaspar Hauser who was being taken care of by a schoolteacher here in Ansbach, returned home with a wound in his chest from which he died on December 17. His claims, that an unknown man invited him to go for a walk in the palace garden (in this horrible storm and nasty weather), that in front of the statue to the poet Uz he handed him a silk purse with a note in it and, as Hauser started to open it, stabbed him with a dagger in the chest—all of these statements were found, upon examination, to be false and invented…. What can we conclude from this? This Kaspar Hauser has shown himself to be a vicious, lying, and additionally a lazy and unteachable youth. There has been no lack of ridiculous attempts … to claim him as the child of the Grand Duchess Stefanie.41

  Lang concludes by saying that Kaspar Hauser had originally belonged to a tribe of beggars that went on a pilgrimage on which he “pretended to be a cripple or a ridiculous simpleton,” but left them to carry on his deceptions and lies on his own account in Nuremberg.

  The poets knew better. In 1834, two years after Kaspar Hauser’s death, there appeared an anonymous poem, “The Unsolved Riddle of Nuremberg,” which ends with these two stanzas:

  Has no prince shed a tear

  Which will perhaps make clear to humanity

  Why his blood had to flow

  And who the poor boy really was?

  Twenty-five silver coins

  Would I gladly pay to he who names the name

  But I know that others will pay gold

  So that nobody learns who Kaspar Hauser really was.42

  Meyer was slow to call a doctor. When it became apparent that the wound was serious, Meyer told people Kaspar Hauser had done it to himself, to revive flagging interest in him. This did not persuade everybody. Two doctors (Albert and Koppen) who attended Kaspar, told the police that “credible people claim to have heard out of his own mouth that he would like to become an officer, but only if there were no war; he had only begun to live five years ago, and wanted to live longer.”43 Kaspar was not spared a police inquiry—a skeptical one, as if influenced by Meyer or others—even as he lay dying. One of th
e official questions put to him over three days of questioning was the following:44 “Given that you had already had an accident in Nuremberg, how could you dare to accept an invitation to visit a deserted area with somebody completely unknown to you?”45 Kaspar Hauser had to undergo one final indignity, when he learned that Meyer was telling people he had inflicted the wound on his own body. Asked on his deathbed if he had anything to add to what he had told the police (who insisted on deposing him) he replied:46 “People are saying that nobody stabbed me. I already heard this from Mr. Meyer; they have spoken of it in hushed tones among themselves.” Kaspar also said: “Many cats are the death of the mouse,”47 and his last words were: “Tired, very tired, still have to take a long trip.”48 He then lay down on his right side and died.

  The perpetrator was never found, in spite of a large reward offered by the king of Bavaria.

  Stanhope, it turned out, had written a final letter to Kaspar Hauser.49 The letter was addressed as follows: Herrn Hauser, abzugeben bei Herrn Schullehrer Meyer in Ansbach. Franco. (To Mr. Hauser, to be delivered to Meyer, the schoolteacher, in Ansbach. Prepaid.) It was postmarked Munich, December 25, 1833. The letter, dated in Stanhope’s hand, “Vienna, December 16 and 17,” ends with these words: “A letter I have received from my wife makes it imperative to leave immediately for Munich. Therefore we will have the pleasure of seeing each other much earlier than would otherwise be the case, and hopefully before the end of next month. I think I will finish this letter when I am in Bavaria, so that you will have the pleasure of knowing that you are in the same country as your godfather, who loves you with all his heart, Earl Stanhope.”

  The perspicacious German writer Georg Friedrich Kolb (1808-84)50 commented early on: “Why the comedy of this touching letter after the death of Hauser?” He is right. Hauser’s death was in all the local newspapers on December 17, the very day he died. It was announced in all the Munich newspapers from December 20 on.51 We know Stanhope was in Munich on the twenty-fifth. Aware, as he had to be,52 that Kaspar Hauser was dead, why send him a letter? Undoubtedly to attempt to show, at some later date, that he was not in the least involved in the murder. But that is not all: The next day, December 26, Stanhope visited the prince of Öttingen-Wallerstein, Bavarian minister of the interior, in an attempt (vain, as it turned out) to persuade him that Kaspar Hauser was a fraud. If he really sent the letter on the twenty-fifth, as he claims, could he—a single day later—so have changed his mind that he was convinced he was dealing with a complete fraud, merely because Kaspar Hauser had died? And if the letter’s content was fraudulent, what does that say about Stanhope himself? Becoming feverish in his obsession, he goes so far as to conduct his own depositions in Nuremberg of all the people who witnessed Kaspar Hauser’s first days, in an attempt to get them to recant or alter their stories so as to show that Kaspar had invented everything. He was even willing to falsify his own written evidence—to lie, fabricate, and do anything at all to persuade people that Kaspar Hauser was a charlatan.

  In his quest to persuade the world that Kaspar Hauser was a fraud who had committed suicide, Lord Stanhope within days was visiting other dignitaries throughout Europe. In fact the most recent research, by Johannes Mayer, shows that it was Stanhope who was a fraud, at least complicit in the murder of Kaspar Hauser. In a fascinating passage published in 1859, Daumer himself prefigured Mayer:

  After Kaspar’s death Stanhope came to see me and tried to persuade me to bear witness against Hauser. As the educator and closest observer of the foundling I was a not insignificant expert. If my testimony could be used against him (Hauser) he would be completely discredited. The object was to see whether I could be drawn into this nefarious plot. To this end the count visited me several times, and gradually it became clearer what his intention was. Stanhope’s behavior amazed me greatly, and since, in my innocence, I trusted him implicitly, I did not know what to think. Women can usually see more clearly in these matters. Not I but my mother became deeply suspicious, and when I expressed my amazement over Stanhope’s behavior she used a word that I shall refrain from repeating. (“Can you not see that he is the _ _ _ _ _ _?” she exclaimed.) That was the end of my trusting relationship with this frightening man. The last time he came he could not fail to notice my deep ill-feeling. The conversation became uncomfortable for him, and all of a sudden he jumped up and ran down the stairs and out of the house as if pursued by the Furies and was not seen again.53

  The six blank spaces are clearly intended to represent the German word Mörder, “murderer.” Daumer was to soften this judgment in his later book,54 in which he recounts the same episode:

  My mother became aware of what [Stanhope] had in mind. She begged and beseeched him with deep emotion not to besmirch the memory of this unfortunate creature who had given him his childish trust as his fatherly friend and benefactor. She was absolutely certain that he, Kaspar, had not been an imposter or a villain. “He’s beyond any pain now,” replied Stanhope, turned red, broke off his visit, ran down the stairs and was never seen here again. I will not repeat what my mother had in mind and said at the time [Daumer gives here the following footnote: “The count was to hear a similar statement from the mouth of no less than a royal personage.”] Appearances can deceive, she may have made a mistake. I am only recounting facts that I personally witnessed and can swear to, facts that appear to me to be part of this obscure and ghastly episode without accusing the count of a crime or participation in a crime.

  Nevertheless it is clear that Daumer thought—correctly, it turns out—that Stanhope was implicated in the murder of his ward. A few years after Kaspar Hauser was killed, a book was published by a woman who knew both him and Stanhope—Caroline, countess of Albersdorf (born Caroline Graham)—which hints that Stanhope was up to no good, and points out, too, that he was using letters of credit issued by the Baden court.55

  To a considerable extent, national pride played a role in the more popular accounts known to the general public. Many people in Germany had suspected that Lord Stanhope played some role in the murder of Kaspar Hauser before the recent work of Johannes Mayer provided the missing documents that clinch the case. But the English were always defensive of Stanhope and derisive of Kaspar Hauser. Thus the famous 1911 version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica concludes the entry on Kaspar Hauser by saying that

  he affirmed that the wound was inflicted by a stranger, but many56 believed it to be the work of his own hand, and that he did not intend it to be fatal, but only so severe as to give a sufficient coloring of truth to his story. The affair created a great sensation and produced a long literary agitation. But the whole story remains somewhat mysterious. Lord Stanhope eventually became decidedly skeptical as to Kaspar’s stories, and ended by being accused of contriving his death!57 The evidence has been subtly analyzed by Andrew Lang in his Historical Mysteries (1904) with results unfavorable to the “romantic” version of the story. Lang’s view is that possibly Kaspar was a sort of “ambulatory automatist,” an instance of a phenomenon known by other cases to students of psychical abnormalities, of which the characteristics are a mania for straying away and the persistence of delusions as to identity; but he inclines to regard Kaspar as simply a “humbug.” The “authentic records” purporting to confirm the kidnapping story Lang stigmatizes as “worthless and impudent rubbish.”

  There is, in fact, nothing subtle about Lang’s58 analysis. It is biased, and even for the time it was written, based on questionable sources. For Lang, Kaspar was “a useless, false, convulsionary, and hysterical patient” whom “no one was likely to want to keep” (p. 125). He was one of the few converts to Stanhope’s desperate attempt to convince the populace that Kaspar Hauser had killed himself in a vain attempt to gain attention: “Lord Stanhope suggested that Kaspar himself had inflicted the wound by pressure, and that, after he had squeezed the point of the knife through his wadded coat, it had penetrated much deeper than he had intended, a very probable hypothesis” (p. 138).

  The Prince
Theory

  Sigmund Freud, at the beginning of his career, when he still believed that abuse lay at the core of human unhappiness, thought that repetitive dreams pointed to an actual historical event that could not be consciously remembered and could only be worked through in the privacy and safety of a disguised dream. I believe there is some real truth to this theory, and that dreams often do serve to recover latent memories. Whoever imprisoned Kaspar Hauser did not count on his beginning to dream precisely those parts of his early life that were supposed to have been long lost to memory. In appendix 4, I give all the passages in the literature connected with Kaspar Hauser’s dreams that have a bearing on memories of his early childhood. It is a fascinating but somewhat complex topic that might disrupt the flow of this introduction, but I urge readers to look at this appendix once they have finished reading the introduction.

  It is not clear whether anybody except Daumer ever saw the autobiographical writings at the time Kaspar Hauser was producing them. There had been rumors from the beginning, of course,59 about Kaspar Hauser’s provenance, according to which he was no less than the prince of Baden—the son of Stéphanie de Beauharnais (1789-1860), Napoleon’s adopted daughter, and Karl, grand duke of Baden (1786-1818)—who had been born healthy in 1812 and died under mysterious circumstances a few weeks later. We know from the notebooks of K. A. Varnhagen von Ense (the Prussian commercial attaché in Karlsruhe) that there were rumors of poison.60 Had the prince lived, he would have been just about Kaspar’s age. The rumors spoke of a sick, dying child who had been substituted for Kaspar Hauser by the countess of Hochberg (Luise Geyer von Geyersberg, 1768-1820), the second wife of the founder of the dynasty, Karl Friedrich von Baden (1728-1811), who wanted her own eldest son, Leopold (1790-1852), to inherit the throne (which he did in 1830). Kaspar, they said, had been kept hidden in a dungeon, probably for twelve years, and now he was here in Nuremberg. Even Ludwig I, king of Bavaria (1786-1868), wrote a letter to Stanhope on December 8, 1831, in which he spoke of Kaspar Hauser, who, he said, “gewiss nicht in jener Finsternis geboren wurde, in der er durch seine Feinde gehalten wurde” (was certainly not born in that darkness in which he was held prisoner by his enemies).61