122 “Der schönste Krimi aller Zeiten,” in his Afterword to Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser oder die Trägheit des Herzens, 10th ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbach Verlag, 1992, first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 9, 1980).
123 Stefan Georges (1868-1933) beautiful German translation of this stanza reads:
Kam ich zu. spät, zu frühe?
Ich weiss nicht wie mirs ergeht.
O ihr all! schwer ist meine Mühe—
Sprecht für mich ein Gebet!
Very different is the version by the contemporary German songwriter Wolf Biermann:
Zu früh kam ich zu spät auf diese Erde.
Auf diesem Kahlkopf steh ich als ein Haar.
Mein Elend schreit, doch du, ich bitt’ dich: Bete
Für mich, den armen Hauser, den Kaspar.
(Too early I came too late into this world. / On this bald head I stand like a single hair. / My suffering screams, but you—I beg you: Pray / For me, poor Hauser, Kaspar.)
124 Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Harold Beaver (New York: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 331. In his notes, the editor says that “in 1833 Hauser was stabbed and died of the knife wounds—probably self-inflicted in a psychopathic fit. For Melville, however, this youth reared in apparent isolation had long been a romantic hero, the symbolic outsider unspoiled by civilization.” Melville was still revising the unfinished Billy Budd when he died in 1891.
125 See Ursula Sampath, Kaspar Hauler: A Modern Metaphor, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture, vol. 67 (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1991). See also Ulrich Struve, Der Findling: Kaspar Hauser in der Literatur (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992). This theme had already been tackled in 1935 in Otto Jungmann, Kaspar Hauser: Stoff und Problem in ihrer literarischen Gestaltung (Würzburg).
126 See note 125.
127 A somewhat more balanced view, with many historical examples, especially from nineteenth-century French psychologists (and a valuable bibliography) can be found in Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
128 See, in particular, Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994); Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Michael D. Yapko, Suggestions of Abuse: True and False Memories of Childhood Sexual Traumas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Richard Wexler, Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995). There is, unfortunately, no comparable list of books maintaining the integrity of the reality of memories of sexual abuse in childhood. The politics of memory has yet to be written. For some of the background, see Louise Armstrong: Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
129 Mark Pendergrast: Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives (Hinesburg Vt.: Upper Access, Inc., 1995), p. 48: “Masson’s work provided an important scholarly cornerstone for the nascent Incest Survivor Movement and its renewed search for repressed memories. Soon modern therapists would once again encourage ‘abreactions.’”
130 See, in particular, my The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), which gives most of the new documents. For a more narrative account see my Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990). For the background on which Freud, too, depended, see my A Dark Science.
131 The Complete Letters from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, edited and translated by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [The Belknap Press], 1995).
132 I call this a loss of moral courage, because nobody at the time was willing to vindicate the “stories” Freud heard from his women patients, or show solidarity with these women who were clearly telling Freud the truth. Freud’s 1896 paper, “The Etiology of Hysteria,” was universally rejected when it was published. In rejecting my views, scholars have claimed that it took even more courage for Freud to attribute these “stories” to a young girl’s imagination, and that Freud’s shift to the reality of childhood sexuality, in his book Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, was more profoundly upsetting to Victorian society than was the thought of men abusing children. But this is simply not true, as I discovered when I looked at the reviews of this book in the 1905 German medical periodicals. Some did indeed reject Freud’s views, but many of the reviews were positive. Evidently men did not find the idea that children imagine rather than experience sexual abuse at their hands all that threatening.
133 Not a trivial matter when we consider that women were simply not permitted until very recently to write firsthand accounts of sexual violence at the hands of men. I know of no autobiographical published account in the nineteenth century of childhood sexual abuse, though undoubtedly they happened and were written about.
134 See W. G. Niederland, “Schreber’s Father,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 8 (1960), pp. 492-99; Morton Schatzman, Soul-Murder: Persecution in the Family (New York: Random House, 1973).
135 As just one example, the father invented a device to force children to sit straight, an iron crossbar fastened to the table at which the child sat to read or write. The bar pressed against the collarbones and the front of the shoulders to prevent forward movements. The child could not lean for long against the bar “because of the pressure of the hard object against the bones and the consequent discomfort…. I had one manufactured which proved its worth time and again with my own children.” In Schreber’s Memoirs he reports on a “delusion”: “One of the most horrifying miracles was the so-called compression-of-the-chest-miracle … it consisted in the whole chest wall being compressed, so that the state of oppression caused by the lack of breath was transmitted to my whole body.”
136 See M. D. Everson and B. W. Boat, “False Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Children and Adolescents,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (1989), 28, pp. 230-35. According to this article, the fabrication rate is 4 percent to 8 percent.
137 It has become fashionable in the last few years to claim that Freud actually suggested memories of abuse to his patients, rather than their remembering them. See Russell A. Powell and Douglas P. Boer, “Did Freud Mislead Patients to Confabulate Memories of Abuse?” Psychological Reports 74 (1994), pp. 1283-98. See also Frederick Crews, “The Revenge of the Repressed,”New York Review of Books, Dec. 1, 1994, pp. 49-58. In fact we have almost no knowledge of what Freud actually did with his patients. The only real source is the Freud/Fliess letters that I edited for Harvard University Press (The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904), which provide very little material on which to base any conclusion.
138 Judith Herman and Emily Schatzow found that fifteen of fifty-three women, or 28 percent, had delayed memories of sexual abuse. See their article “Recovery and Verification of Memories of Childhood Sexual Trauma,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 4 (1987), pp. 1-14. John Briere and Jon Conte found that when asked if they had ever forgotten an experience of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen, fifty-nine percent of 450 people said yes. For other, similar studies, see Charles L. Whitfield, Memory and Abuse: Remembering and Healing the Effects of Trauma (Deerfield Beach, Fla.: Health Communications, 1995).
139 Children who have been abused are often targeted later in life by older men who recognize the symptoms and take advantage of the vulnerability that is the legacy of sexual abuse. Stanhope’s questionable wish to kiss Kaspar Hauser could be interpreted in this light. See the passages I quote on p. 17.
&nbs
p; 140 Linda Meyer Williams, “Recall of Childhood Trauma: A Prospective Study of Women’s Memories of Child Sexual Abuse,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 62, no. 6 (1994), pp. 1167-76. The passages I quote are from p. 1170.
141 See her book The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
142 It does seem astonishing and inexplicable that in May 1828 Kaspar Hauser could say but a few stereotypical phrases, for example heimweissa (“show me the way home?”), without knowing what they meant, and a few months later could provide a coherent if sketchy narrative account of his life. It is as if he were remembering speech, not learning it, somewhat like a person who forgets a foreign language and then, on returning to the country, begins quickly to regain it.
143 See Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abtue and Deprivation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). On the literature preceding Feuerbach, and on his influence on the later literature from a juridical perspective, see Wilfried Küpers thorough book Das Verbrechen am Seelenleben: Feuerbach und der Fall Kaspar Hauser in strafrechtsgeschichtlicher Betrachtung (Heidelberg: Manutius Verlag, 1991).
144 It seems that we go through cycles of recognition and denial when it comes to child abuse, whether physical or sexual. There was a period in France in the 1880s when both were acknowledged and written about, but the books that were published then are sadly long out of print and even completely forgotten. See my Assault on Truth for details of this French literature.
145 See the article, first published in 1888, “Sudden Death of a Girl about Thirteen Years Old as a Result of Intense Emotion,” which I translated from the German and published in A Dark Science.
146 See D. James Henderson, “Incest,” in Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, edited by A. M. Freedman, H. I. Kaplan, and B. J. Sadock, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1975), p. 1536. For a critique, see two excellent books: Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), and Russell, The Secret Trauma.
147 Meyer complained that he could not convince Kaspar Hauser of the truth of the saying “All good is rewarded, and all evil punished.” This passage and the one quoted in the text are found in Notizen über Kaspar Hauser by J. G. Meyer, reprinted in Pies, Augenzeugenberichte, p. 305.
148 Tucher was asked in a deposition on January 31, 1834, whether Kaspar Hauser knew the existence and contents of the several works that appeared during his lifetime which accused him of being a charlatan. Tucher responded that he definitely knew about Merker’s booklet and had probably read it (Pies, Dokumentation, p. 120). He had purchased (!) a copy of Feuerbach’s book, which he wanted to give as a gift to Mayor Binder’s sister. The second book by Merker, also directed against Kaspar Hauser, “lay open in the living room of the Meyer household.” It is interesting (and in character) that Meyer would have left this piece of hate literature against his houseguest lying open to be seen.
149 The play is about the tyranny of language—about how Kaspar Hauser’s socialization into language was a form of torture and personal destruction. If Feuerbach felt that Kaspars soul was murdered as a result of his imprisonment, when he was removed from society, Handke believed that his soul was murdered when he was accepted into society. Werner Herzog, in his wonderful film Jeder für jich und Gott gegen Alle (Every man for himself and God against all), which came out in 1974, conveyed something of the same tragedy. Both Handke’s play and Herzog’s film, as he himself told me, were based on Feuerbach’s book. Mechthild Blanke compares Handke’s play with Feuerbach’s book in “Zu Handke’s Kaspar,” in Über Peter Handke, edited by Michael Scharang (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 27ff.
Appendix 2. A New Kaspar Hauser Manuscript
1 Feuerbach’s papers were hardly well preserved after his death. But it is interesting to learn that Daumer was friendly enough with the family (he remained a good friend of the son Ludwig Feuerbach) to be able to see them and quote from them as in this passage. We learn more about the fate of the Feuerbach literary estate from page 461 of Daumer’s Sein Wesen book. In this passage he tells of an unnamed friend who visited (date unspecified) one of the daughters of Feuerbach (the letter the friend sent Daumer was dated February 23, 1872). She told the friend that
Eduard [a son of Feuerbach, who, according to Daumer, was poisoned!] took possession of these documents and other writings that were part of the estate. After his death they presumably came into Ludwig s possession. He was still living, though damaged by a stroke. He lives in this area on the Rechenberg. I went there. But what a shock was produced by the sight of that man! I found him in a state of complete dementia, incapable of stringing two words together. His memory was almost totally gone. I tried to explain the reason for my visit in the simplest words, spoken clearly and succinctly. I soon became aware that he had not understood me. His wife, sitting next to him, confirmed this. Finally, my efforts and hers succeeded in getting him to understand that the matter in question was the papers concerning Kaspar Hauser in his father’s estate. There seemed to be a flicker of understanding on his part. With great difficulty he let us know that he had collected all of those papers after his father’s death. However, he could not recollect what had happened to them. He only said: “It’s all here.” He was not aware that his brother Eduard presumably had taken charge of them. Thereupon he went to another room and after a while returned with a three-inch-thick bundle of papers. The bundle consisted only of papers in great disarray, dealing with literary and legislative matters. I then asked permission to search myself with the help of his wife and in the presence of the incapacitated man. Permission was granted immediately. I found huge stacks of old Feuerbach’s writings, twenty times as many papers as Ludwig had collected. They testified to the vast erudition of the president in fields other than law; but everything was in total disorder without any trace of papers having to do with Hauser. Nothing of the documents I sought, nor any correspondence dealing with Hauser. The room where this took place was a vast rock-lined hall. There was a large desk in the center, and bookshelves and cupboards lining the walls…. The documents were passed on after the president’s death to his two sons; then they were lost in the night. There is but a faint gleam left by them, which perhaps is but a will o’ the wisp. At least it is certain that the attack of the “negative Kritik” [presumably Hauser’s enemies] on the man they hated so deeply and who was supposed to have destroyed the papers, failed.
2 Actually this is one of the few places where Daumer seems to be mistaken. Mayer is in possession of a letter from Stanhope to Daumer written on December 9, 1831, attempting to discourage him from publishing his book on Kaspar Hauser.
3 Daumer, Sein Wesen, p. 490.
4 Von der Linde, Kaspar Hauser: Eine neugeschichtliche Legende, vol. 2, p. 21, has a footnote in which he calls these notes a “fraudulent reconstruction” (Rekonstruktionsschwindel) on the part of Daumer, since he let forty years pass before he referred to it in 1873 (die er 40 Jahre hingehen liess). However, Feuerbach makes no attempt to hide the fact that he had received many communications from Daumer, although he never states explicitly how much of these communications he had used for his own work.
5 Kaspar Hauser: Sein Wesen, pp. 257-8.
6 A letter from Tucher to Feuerbach of July 20, 1830 (in the private possession of Mayer), announces that he is including Daumer’s notes with his letter (lege ich hiermit die abgeschriebenen Notizen über Kaspar Hauser vor). Hence we now know the exact time they were sent to Feuerbach.
7 Because of the importance of this passage, here is the original German:
Ich schickte meine Bemerkungen über Hauser an Feuerbach mittelst einer con fremder Hand gefertigten Abschrift, welche ich, meiner leidenden Augen wegen, nicht selbst durchsehen und von Fehlern reinigen konnte; der Abschreiber machte solche, die nicht geändert wurden, unglücklicher Weise, gerade bei den in Rede stehenden Notizen und so kamen sie auch in Feuerbachs Buch. Ich hatte von einem tückischen P
ferde gesprochen, daraus wurde ein türkisches, worüber sich nun der Stallmeister, als er es las, freilich gar sehr verwundern musste. Ich hatte geschrieben: “H. verspürte nie etwas an dem Gesässe, sondern nur etwas Weniges an den Schenkeln.” Aus “sondern” wurden in der Abschrift wahrscheinlich “oder,” und so steht bei F.: “Er ritt stunden-lang ahne sich wund zu reiten, oder nur in den Schenkeln oder im Gesässe Schmerzen zu empfinden.
8 Pies had bound in with the Daumer notes a manuscript by Feuerbach’s grandchild, an unpublished book about Kaspar Hauser. This explains the “von Feuerbach” on the spine.
9 Gustav Radbruch (1878-1949) was the minister of justice in 1922-23 in Germany, during which time he fought for the right of women to be made judges. He was the first professor to lose his chair in Nazi Germany in 1933. His book on Feuerbach, Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach: Ein Juristenleben, a small masterpiece, appeared in 1934.
10 On July 11, 1828.
11 The letter was written by Feuerbach to Elise von der Recke on September 20, 1828, and was published by Pies in his book Augenzeugenberichte, pp. 98-105. I translate extracts from the letter in the Introduction on p. 43.
12 This is a reference to an argument between the different seats of government with respect to who had jurisdiction over the Kaspar Hauser affair. The documents have all been collected in Pies, Die Wahrheit über sein Auftauchen, pp. 85ff. I discuss this in the Introduction on p. 6.
13 This is a reference to Binder’s Bekanntmachung, the proclamation, which was published on July 14, 1828, and is the “germ cell” of all later accounts concerning Kaspar Hauser. I have translated the entire document in appendix 1.
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