Riddle of His Time the Mysterious Life and Tragic Death of Kaspar Hauser: Royal Heir or Suicidal Teenager?

On May 26, 1828 a teenaged boy with a limping gait, wild eyes, torn clothes and long unkempt hair mysteriously appears wandering the streets of Nuremberg Germany.

No one in the city has any idea who the boy is.  It is as if he has appeared by magic, fallen from the sky, and landed right in the middle of Bavaria’s second largest city.

On being questioned the boy is only able to repeat, “Horse, horse,” over and over again.

After searching the pockets of his clothes it is discovered that the boy is carrying two letters.  The first letter is addressed to a Bavarian cavalry officer named Captain von Wessering and is simply headed, “From the Bavarian border: 1828”.

The letter is not signed.  It says only that the boy had been given over to the author’s custody in October of 1812 while still an infant.  The author claims that he has done his best to instruct him in reading, writing and the Christian religion but that he/she has never allowed the boy, “to take a single step outside of the house”.

The boy’s adopted caretaker states in the letter that, “the boy is now fit to be a cavalryman as his father was,” and that Captain von Wessering may either, “take the boy in or hang him dead as he sees fit.”

Another, shorter and older letter, is also found in the boy’s possession.  Supposedly, this older letter is from the boy’s biological mother and was addressed to the teenager’s adopted guardian.  In this letter the boy’s mother asserts that he was born on April 30, 1812 and that his father, a Bavarian cavalryman (who served in the same regiment as Captain von Wessering incidentally) had just been killed in action during the Napoleonic Wars.

Despite the varying age of the two letters, and the claim that each one was penned by a different author, the handwriting in both appears to be identical and to have been written by the same person.

The boy is taken to the house of Captain von Wessering, a respectable citizen of Nuremberg, but Captain von Wessering has neither seen nor heard of the boy in all his life.

Local citizens begin to question the boy at Captain von Wessering’s home but he is only able to repeat the words, “Horse! Horse!” and answer, “I don’t know!  I don’t know!” to all further questions surrounding his identity before bursting into tears.

He is brought into police custody.  After waiting several hours the boy finally calms down and is able to tell police that his name is, “Kaspar Hauser,” he thinks, though he is not quite certain even of that.

While in police custody, the teenager now called Kaspar, demonstrates that he can read a little, write his alphabet, recognize money and say many common Catholic prayers such as the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary”.  Other than that, the boy’s vocabulary appears very limited, more like the vocabulary of a five or six year old, than that of a teenager.  And although Kaspar speaks coherently, he speaks in an older, more formal dialect of German that has long been out of popular use.

Though small and slight of stature Kaspar Hauser appears, to the authorities anyway at first, to be about sixteen years of age.  He is thin but not in any way malnourished despite the fact that he appears to limp, or shuffle, from some type of hereditary condition or perhaps from an injury such as a broken ankle.  He walks as someone who is unsteady on their feet and unused to walking at all.

Jacob Freidrich Binder, the Mayor of Nuremberg in 1828, and the highest acting legal official in the area at the time is called in to interview the boy in an attempt to ascertain what local authorities should do with this mysterious teenager that has somehow magically appeared in their midst.

Over the course of the next several days Binder will spend many hours with Kaspar Hauser attempting to elicit more information from him about his origins, but after many interviews, Mayor Binder is only able to conclude that Hauser, “despite having a good memory is somehow intellectually insufficient”.

The boy has a pleasant demeanor towards all visitors, though he does have a tendency to burst into tears and uncontrollable weeping for no apparent reason and seems to eat very little, refusing all food that is offered to him, aside from bread and water which he eats once each day.

Unable to tell the authorities any further information about himself and unsure of how to proceed with the boy, Kaspar Hauser is jailed inside Nuremberg Castle under the charge of being a vagabond, an offense somewhat akin to being arrested and jailed for vagrancy today.

A Nuremberg Court of Appeals took up the case of Kaspar Hauser while he was being held in Nuremberg Castle.  Paul von Feuerbach, a legal scholar took up Hauser’s case while it was in the hands of the Court of Appeals and Hauser was soon released and formally adopted by the city of Nuremberg where money was raised for his care and upkeep.

Nuremberg Castle

Eventually, custody of Kaspar Hauser was given over to Frederich Daumer, a local school teacher and philosopher, who educated the teen and soon discovered that Hauser had an innate natural talent for art, specifically drawing and painting.

It was while under the care of Daumer that Hauser was first able to relate in writing the details of his upbringing and life story.

Initially, interviewers and medical experts had believed that Kaspar Hauser had been raised “half-wild” like an animal having spent the majority of his early life in forests and been kept away from all human contact, but in writing Hauser claimed that he was able to recall having spent most of his life locked up in a small dark cell about six feet long, three feet wide and two feet high.

Hauser wrote that he remembered having slept on straw on the floor of the cell and that he had three carved wooden toys, two horses and a dog, that he spent most of his time playing with in almost complete darkness.  He said each night he fell asleep and that when he awoke in the morning rye bread and a cup of water would appear next to where he slept.

He claimed that weeks prior to his appearance in Nuremberg a man began to visit him in his cell, though Hauser said he never got to see the man’s face, he asserted that this man taught him how to stand and walk and how to say the words, “I want to be a cavalryman,” in an archaic Bavarian dialect though he claimed he never understood what the words actually meant at the time.

Pencil Drawing by Kaspar Hauser

On October 17, 1829, when Hauser failed to appear for a meal at Daumer’s home, it was feared that the boy had once again inexplicably disappeared.  However, Kaspar Hauser was soon discovered lying on the floor in Daumer’s cellar bleeding profusely from a cut wound on his forehead.

The teenager claimed that he had been attacked by a hooded man who had snuck into Daumer’s home and threatened him by saying, “You still have to die or become a cavalryman ere you leave the city of Nuremberg.”

Though Kaspar said he could not see the face of his attacker, he claimed that he recognized the man’s voice as being the same as the voice of the man who had first brought him to Nuremberg.  Given the location of blood trails throughout the home it was apparent to investigators that Hauser had moved upstairs to the first floor of the house after suffering the wound but that at some point he had gone back down to the cellar without revealing his location or condition to anyone in the home.

Alarmed at the situation, care of Kaspar Hauser was once again turned over to local authorities.  Daumer had recently had several arguments with the boy and told investigators that he had noticed that Hauser had, “a tendency to lie and exaggerate”.

It was at about this time, with debate raging over the  mysterious attack on the boy and in conjunction with his own written statements, that the case of Kaspar Hauser first began to gain widespread international attention.

Some began to believe that Hauser was perhaps the hereditary prince of the German state of Baden who had been born in September of 1812 but who was reported to have died in infancy in October of the same year.  Many throughout Germany believed that Kaspar Hauser had been switched at birth with a dying baby, so that there would be no male heirs of the marriage between Charles Duke of Baden and Stephanie de Beauhamais, Napoleon Bonaparte’s adopted daughter.  The logic behind this goes that at the time, in the year 1812, no one in Germany would have been amenable to a Royal heir being born to a daughter of the hated Napoleon Bonaparte.

Was Kaspar Hauser the son of Napoleon’s adopted daughter Stephanie de Beauhamais?  Well, many historians today believe that such tales, which were popular at the time regarding Kaspar Hauser’s true identity were mere fanciful speculation and hearsay (which truthfully is probably what they were) but in 2002 DNA from hair samples and clothing of Kaspar Hauser were compared by the University of Munster to the DNA profile of Astrid von Metinger, a direct female descendant of Stephanie de Beauhamais, and though the DNA sequences were not identical, the differences were not great enough to rule out a possible familial relationship.

Unfortunately, the House of Baden does not allow for any DNA analysis of the remains of Stephanie de Beauhamais or any access at all to the family burial vault at Pforzheimer, Germany.

Stephanie de Beauhamais in 1818

Eventually, in early 1831, the mysterious story of Kaspar Hauser would come to the attention of an English nobleman named Lord Stanhope.  Lord Stanhope would take custody of the young man and travel around Europe, all the while spending a great deal of money, attempting to verify Kaspar Hauser’s story and possible royal lineage.

All of Stanhope’s inquiries into the subject of Kaspar Hauser’s origins proved to be a complete failure and generated no true leads whatsoever when it came to determining the young man’s origins.

Whilte Stanhope was busy travelling around Europe investigating Kaspar’s lineage, he left the young man in the care of a strict school teacher named Johann Georg Meyer in the town of Ansbach, Germany in the hopes that Meyer would be able to further Kaspar’s education.  Stanhope continued to pay all the young man’s expenses while he was away and promised to return to take custody of Kaspar once he completed his investigations.

It was reported that Kaspar often quarreled with Meyer, who apparently was a very strict disciplinarian, and that during his time in Ansbach, Kaspar Hauser often felt hopeless and quite depressed.

On the night of December 14, 1833 Kaspar Hauser came home late to the residence of Johann Meyer with a deep stab wound in his chest.

Hauser said that a strange man had approached him while he was walking in the Ansbach Court Garden and had stabbed him just below the heart after giving him a small bag.  Bleeding profusely from the chest, and in great pain, Hauser said he had left the bag in the garden and stumbled home.

Policemen who searched the garden that night found a small violet colored purse that contained a folded note.  The cryptic note read, “Hauser will be able to tell you how I look and from where I am.  To save Hauser the effort I want to tell you myself from where I come.  I come from the Bavarian border on the river.  I will even tell you my name...M.L.O.”

Kaspar Hauser would die of his chest wound at the presumed age of twenty on December 17, 1833.

The note that was found in the violet purse in the garden contained both spelling and grammatical errors that Hauser was known to commonly make in all his writing, and additionally, the note itself was discovered folded in a triangular fashion identical to the way in which Kaspar Hauser, a by then prolific artist, tended to fold all his pencil drawings once he deemed them to be complete.

After a post-mortem forensic examination of Hauser’s body, medical examiners along with the authorities in Ansbach ruled that the fatal stab wound to Kaspar Hauser’s chest was most likely self-inflicted.  It is believed that Hauser had stabbed himself in an effort to regain the attention of Stanhope, who had promised to take him back to England with him, and to revive waning public interest in his case which had largely fallen out of the news by 1833.  Hauser had botched the stabbing by penetrating too deeply into his chest cavity which ultimately resulted in his untimely death.

Note Found in the Violet Purse

Today there is a statue of Kaspar Hauser, depicted as he first appeared in 1828, that stands in the old city centre of Ansbach, Germany.  The body of Kaspar Hauser lies buried in the Ansbach cemetery where his headstone reads:

HERE LIES KASPAR HAUSER, RIDDLE OF HIS TIME.

HIS BIRTH WAS UNKNOWN, HIS DEATH MYSTERIOUS.

1833