The Wild Child Read online

  Daumer had taught at the Saint Egidius Gymnasium in Nuremberg, but his poor eyesight forced him into retirement at the young age of twenty-eight. He was a strange man, progressive in many ways: the founder, in 1840, of the German Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, an early follower of homeopathy (more on this in the section about Daumer’s interests in Kaspar Hauser), and a poet.14

  Even though more is known about the daily events in the life of Kaspar Hauser than possibly any other child of the time, we are still able to piece together his life only with great difficulty. Thus any authentic new information is an important addition to our meager knowledge. For the year and a half, between 1828 and 1830, that Kaspar Hauser lived with him and his family, Daumer kept a diary in which he recorded Kaspar’s progress and quoted his words. This diary was long presumed lost. As mentioned earlier, I had the good fortune to find it in Germany. My edition of it (in collaboration with the Kaspar Hauser scholar, Johannes Mayer), has just been published in German. I describe the discovery in greater detail in appendix 2. Although the amount of previously unknown material it contains is limited, Daumer’s diary is an essential document. Perhaps one of the most important sentences in that diary helps considerably in understanding more about Kaspar Hauser’s first days in Nuremberg. On page 124 of the recently published German text, we read the following previously unpublished note by Daumer, dated 1828: “Initially he was treated harshly, because it was assumed he was dissimulating. At that time he cried incessantly for eight days and eight nights.” These two short sentences tell us a great deal that was previously unknown about Kaspar Mauser’s earliest moments in Nuremberg. The “legend” has it that he was an overnight sensation. But the first sentence hints at something much likelier and darker, namely that he was neither believed nor accepted.15

  At first Daumer seemed to have amazing success with Kaspar Hauser, whose vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds. He gave evidence of possessing strange faculties: He could read in pitch darkness, he could “feel” somebody pointing at him from behind, and his sensorium was inordinately sensitive. Loud noises could occasion convulsions in him, bright light caused him exquisite pain. He was often sick and subject to profound melancholy.

  Daumer taught Kaspar Hauser to speak, to draw, to play the piano, and to wonder about his own past. Everybody who met Kaspar was impressed with his gentle nature and his extraordinary ability to say profound things in simple words.

  Daumer made seemingly rapid progress with his pupil. We learn from the unpublished diary some important details about the chronology of Kaspar Hauser’s education. Kaspar first appeared in Nuremberg on May 26, 1828. In the diary Daumer tells us:

  At the end of August 1828 … he began to express himself fairly fluently and in a manner that could be understood. He distinguished without further confusion between living and lifeless things, organic and inorganic objects. He began to differentiate between jokes and serious topics and enjoyed jokes with other people. Humor became part of his statements and responses, and his activities were not merely comprehending and imitative but partially productive. He drafted letters and essays himself, even though they were filled with mistakes. At the beginning of September he began to write the story of his life, (page 149)16

  The Autobiography

  It is not entirely clear if the idea of writing down the story of his life was Daumer’s, Kaspar’s, or Mayor Binder’s. In fact Binder and other authorities wanted Kaspar to provide a coherent narrative account of his life, no doubt the better to be able to pursue their criminal investigations. This is not something that had ever occurred to Kaspar. To whom would he have told it? Evidently he never told it to himself, and he had nothing prepared, nothing ready. It obviously took some time for him to understand the concept, even, of the story of his life. But when he did, it is clear that he became obsessed with it. Yet the three different versions (at least—these are the only ones to have come down to us) give evidence that he found the task confusing. For whom was he writing?

  Kaspar did begin, however, and the result has fortunately been preserved. Since it has never, oddly enough, been translated into English, let me translate the beginning of the fragment:17

  It is dated, by Kaspar himself, the beginning of November 1828, five months after he first appeared:

  I will write the story of Kaspar Hauser myself! I will tell how I lived in the prison, and describe what it looked like, and everything that was there. The length of the prison was 6 to 7 feet, and 4 feet in width. There were two small windows which were 8 to 9 inches in height and were [the same] width; they were in the ceiling as in a cellar. But there was nothing in it but the straw where I lay and sat, and the two horses, a dog, and a woolen blanket. And in the ground next to me was a round hole where I could relieve myself, and a pitcher of water; other than that there was nothing, not even a stove. I will tell you what I always did, and what I always had to eat, and how I spent the long period, and what I did. I had two toy horses, and a [toy] dog, and such red ribbons with which I decorated the horses. And the clothes that I wore it was short pants, and black suspenders, and a shirt, but the pants and suspenders were on my bare body, and the shirt was worn on top, and the pants were torn open in back, so I could relieve myself. I could not take off the pants, because nobody showed me how. I will give a picture of how I spent the day, and how my day went.

  When I woke up I found water and bread18 next to me. The first thing I did, I drank the water, then ate a little bread until I was no longer hungry, then I gave bread and water to the horses, and the dog, then I drank it all up. Now I start to play, I remove the ribbons. It took me a long time until I had decorated a horse, and when one was decorated, then I again ate a little bread, and then there was still a little water left; this I finished, then I decorated the second one, which also took a long time, as did the first, then I felt hungry again, then I ate a little bread, and would have liked to drink water: but I no longer had any with which I could quench my thirst. So I picked up the pitcher probably ten times, wanting to drink, but never found any water in it because I assumed the water came by itself. Then I spent time decorating the dog. When the thirst was too terrible, I always went to sleep because I was too thirsty to play. I can imagine I must have slept a long time, because whenever I awakened, there was water, and bread. But I always ate the bread from one sleep to another. I always had enough bread but not enough water, because the pitcher was not large, it did not hold enough water, perhaps the man could not give me more water; because I [sic; mistake for “he”?] could not obtain a bigger pitcher. And how long I had been playing I cannot describe because I did not know what was an hour, or a day, or a week. I was always in a good mood and content, because nothing ever hurt me. And this is how I spent the entire period of my life until the man came and taught me to draw. But I did not know what I was writing.

  Here is the same description written by Kaspar Hauser in February 1829, some four months later:19

  The prison in which I was forced to live until my release was about six to seven feet long, four wide, and five high. The ground seemed to me made of hard earth, on one side were two small windows with wooden shutters, which looked black. Straw was put on the floor, upon which I sat and slept. My legs were covered from the knees up with a blanket. Next to my bed of straw, on the left side, was a hole in the earth, in which a bucket was placed; there was also a lid over it, which I had to move and then put back again. The clothes that I wore in the prison were a shirt, short pants, in which however the back part was missing, so that I could relieve myself, since I could not take off my pants. The suspenders were on my naked body. The shirt was over that. My nourishment consisted of nothing but water and bread; sometimes I did not have enough water; there was always enough bread, I ate little bread, since I could not move; I could not after all walk and did not know that I could stand up, since nobody had taught me to walk; the idea never occurred to me to want to stand up. I had two wooden horses and a dog with which I always entertained my
self; I had red and blue ribbons and with them I decorated the horses and the dog, but sometimes the ribbons fell off because I did not know how to tie them.

  As this passage demonstrates, Kaspar Hauser was learning the skills of writing and expression much more quickly than could possibly have been anticipated. It is as if he was recapturing skills he once possessed, rather than learning them afresh. The astonishing progress that Kaspar Hauser made in understanding the world around him—in remembering his own past, in being able to talk about it, describe it, and even to some extent be philosophical about it—was both a marvel to those of his friends and well-wishers who heard it, and also ammunition for his critics. How, they exclaimed, could Kaspar Hauser possibly have been as ignorant as he seemed to be, only to acquire the knowledge expected of an adult in a matter of mere months? Once again Daumer’s unpublished manuscript gives us more information than was previously available on Kaspar’s philosophical reflections: On one page of the manuscript we read:

  1828: In September and October he often said that he was completely unable to imagine himself in his former mental state. He would love to be able to see himself as he had been earlier when he spent all his time playing. When he was alone he was often preoccupied with attempting to understand the state he had been in. He said that it was completely incomprehensible to him that during his imprisonment he had no self-awareness at all and never wondered whether there were any other living beings beside himself, or whether anything existed outside his cage, nor did he ever wonder where the bread and water came from that he found and consumed daily. The entire time20 prior to the period when he began to learn to read was only vaguely and dimly remembered.21

  This passage invites speculation. Is the language actually that used by Kaspar Hauser, or is Daumer altering it in some way? The evidence seems to suggest that Daumer was taking notes on the same day Kaspar Hauser said something. My impression, then, is that this is actually what Kaspar said. But are these reflections spontaneous, or were they suggested or otherwise imposed by Daumer, Feuerbach, or other well-meaning adults?

  Kaspar Hauser Is Stabbed

  A year and a half after he came to Nuremberg, two things happened that were to have grave consequences for the later life of Kaspar Hauser. During the week of October 17, 1829, there rode into town in great splendor a rich English lord—Philip Henry, fourth earl of Stanhope, son of Charles (who invented the steam-driven battleship); nephew of William Pitt the Younger, and half-brother of Hester Stanhope, “queen of Thadmore.” Although we now22 know that Stanhope was indeed very interested in Kaspar Hauser at the time, and asked his banker to collect all information and publications about him, he said nothing at the time about Kaspar Hauser and in public displayed no interest or awareness. What, exactly, he was doing in Nuremberg that week was not clear.23

  A few days later Kaspar Hauser’s life took a dark and unexpected turn. Two strangers had an inordinate interest in Kaspar’s autobiography, as we learn from an important document, previously untranslated, written in Feuerbach’s house by Kaspar Hauser himself, on June 15, 1831, which reads:24

  About six weeks after the attempt on my life two unknown gentlemen came to visit me. One had a very evil-looking face, with a black half beard and a mustache and asked me what I was writing then. I answered: My story, how I was treated in the cage, and how this man brought me to Nuremberg. Then one of them took it and read about two pages while the other one with the black mustache asked me about all kinds of things, especially whether I frequently go for walks. No was my answer, since my feet start to hurt me right away. Do I go to classes and what do I learn … I told them everything. Afterward he took the story and read it from the first lines to the last. Then they left, and I accompanied them, which I do with other people as well, to the door. But when we went downstairs, they asked me what it was, and I said, it is an outhouse, and opened it for them to see. After I had shown them everything, I asked them where they came from. They answered me that they were from far away and I would not know the place, even if they were to tell me, and so they left.

  On October 17, 1829, when Kaspar was alone in Daumer’s household, a man dressed in black approached a small outhouse where Kaspar was sitting, and with what looked like a butcher’s knife (Kaspar was able to draw it later), tried to cut his throat. Kaspar was wounded but did not die. In a delirium he addressed broken sentences to his unknown assailant: “Why you kill me? I never did you anything. Not kill me! I beg not be locked up. Never let me out of my prison—not kill me. You kill me before I understand what life is. You must tell me why you locked me up!”25 Feuerbach described his visit to Kaspar Hauser in a hand-written report found among his papers after his death. In that report Feuerbach quotes Kaspar as telling him:

  If I survive this time, I will still be murdered by the man—my intuition always told me so; he himself told me as well, that he would kill me eventually. After all, he has to do it—he surely learned that I have described my captivity, that I was able to give an exact description of the route by which he brought me to Nuremberg. He will think that I have already said things of which he must be afraid. He must murder me, because he must fear that I will eventually remember what happened to me, and where I was kept prisoner, and why he did that to me, that man, who took everything, everything, from me.26

  Once again this sounds like an authentic quotation, something that Feuerbach wrote down as he heard it directly from Kaspar Hauser. (It is also an extremely intelligent analysis of his situation; one wonders whether anyone else at the time shared this view.) The language is not dissimilar from that of those passages reported by Daumer. Kaspar clearly feared that he would die: The man had told him so, in so many words. Kaspar was deposed by the police eleven days after the stabbing2727 and said that the man told him: “You must die before you leave the city of Nuremberg.”

  Kaspar was deeply upset by the fact that he was called a Hasenfuss (sissy) by the townspeople. People made much of his “cowardice,” for example of the fact that he was terrified to cross a gangplank. However, Gottlieb Freiherr von Tucher (1798-1877), his guardian, told the police when he was deposed:28 “Who could hold this fear of death against him, he who had just recently begun to live, and saw his precious life already threatened in so terrifying a way?” Who wanted Kaspar Hauser dead, and why? What interests was he threatening? This was a question on many people’s minds, especially Feuerbach’s.

  The mayor appointed two policemen to accompany Kaspar Hauser wherever he went. For safety reasons, and because Daumer became ill, which made it harder for him to continue to work with Kaspar Hauser, he was moved to the house of a wealthy businessman, Johann Christian Biberbach, in January 1830. This was not a happy period for him, and he did not thrive. Six months later he was moved again, this time to the house of his legal guardian, Freiherr von Tucher, the brother-in-law of the philosopher Hegel, where he stayed from May 1830 until November 1831. Tucher had first met Kaspar Hauser during the initial weeks of his stay in the tower. He met with him almost daily when he was living with Daumer.

  A year later the earl of Stanhope rode back into Nuremberg. This time he was interested in only one thing, and very publicly so: Kaspar Hauser, by now christened the child of Europe. He befriended the boy in an ostentatious way, dividing him from Tucher and other well-wishers. Kaspar Hauser responded, especially to Stanhope’s encouragement of his belief in his “noble” status. For example, in January 1831, Stanhope ends a letter to Kaspar: “The most pleasant trip I could take would be one with you to your own country estate of which you were so unjustly and cruelly robbed.”29

  Kaspar began to speak of how he would treat his “underlings” when his wealth was returned to him. Daumer was suspicious of Stanhope, as were von Tucher30 and other people who had Kaspar’s best interests at heart (though evidently not Feuerbach since he dedicated his book to him). Daumer even noticed an underlying homosexual current, though he attributes the observation to somebody else: “I knew somebody who observed with astonishment
the caresses the earl gave Kaspar Hauser, even in public.”31 Stanhope publicly announced that he wished nothing less than to adopt Kaspar Hauser and take him (as his heir?) to Chevening Castle, in Kent. He provided money (five hundred Gulden) to the city for the boy’s upkeep, and demanded (and received) legal guardianship over him. Surprisingly, though, in his large correspondence with his wife, children, and other relatives in 1831 and 1832, he never once mentions Kaspar Hauser, let alone bringing him to live in Chevening.32

  The Murder of Kaspar Hauser

  While waiting to take Kaspar Hauser to England, Lord Stanhope claimed that he wished to safeguard his life by sending him to the small town of Ansbach, some fifty miles from Nuremberg. There he would live with a schoolteacher and organist especially selected by Stanhope, by the name of Johann Georg Meyer (1800-68), who though only thirty-two at the time, seemed and behaved like an old man. For a bit less than two years, while he was living with Daumer, Kaspar had been happy. But almost deliberately, it would seem, Stanhope moved him, on December 10, 1831, into the dark, somber house of this typical, narrow-minded German schoolteacher—into what Feuerbach called “a second prison.”