In 1828, a very strange boy walked into Nuremberg. He was well fed and healthy-looking, but seemed dazed and confused, and unable to understand much of what was said to him. He spoke intelligibly, albeit not intelligently, and was able to convey that his name was Kaspar Hauser and that he wanted to enlist as a trooper in the local regiment. The military did not know what to do with this extraordinary recruit, however, and since no one knew who Kaspar was, he was imprisoned as a vagabond in the Luginsland prison tower. The warder was amazed that his charge ate only black bread and drank only water, refusing any other food. He behaved like a small child, looking behind a mirror to see who was hiding there, and burning his hand on the flame of a candle. When the warder hammered a nail into his wooden horse, Kaspar was inconsolable. Rumours began to fly that a mysterious ‘wild boy’ had been captured, and he began to receive an incessant stream of visitors.

Eventually, Kaspar told all he knew about his past. For as long as he could remember, he said, he had been imprisoned in a low, narrow dungeon, and fed only bread and water. He had three toys, two wooden horses and a wooden dog, and he used to play contentedly all day, decorating them with ribbons. But one day, an arm stretched into the dungeon, and the boy was taught to write a few words on a sheet of paper. When questioned whether he had wondered where this arm was coming from, the pathetic boy replied: “Why should I? I had no idea there were other people in the world!” Kaspar was then dragged out of the dungeon by his mysterious jailer, taught to walk and to say a few words, and then released into Nuremberg. There was great uproar at this unheard-of treatment, and much speculation about who the boy really was. Clearly, he had to be someone quite important, it was reasoned, since such extreme pains had been taken to keep him isolated from the rest of humanity. Judge Anselm von Feuerbach, a notable criminologist of the time, suspected that Kaspar was the Crown Prince of Baden, who had been substituted by a dying child a few days after birth.

Kaspar was looked after by a quack and schoolmaster named Georg Friedrich Daumer, who used him as a ‘guinea pig’ in a series of spectacular homeopathic experiments. In October 1829, Kaspar was found half-unconscious in Daumer’s basement, with a bleeding wound on his forehead. He said that his old jailer had returned and tried to assassinate him. Although the wound was a trifling one, the Nuremberg burghers were aghast at this persistent persecution of poor Kaspar by sinister and mysterious forces. Daumer relinquished his tutorship, saying that his feeble physique did not make him the right candidate to guard someone who was a prime target for assassination. Kaspar was later adopted by Lord Stanhope, a wealthy, germanophile aristocrat, who spent lavishly to try to find out more about the origins of the Nuremberg mystery boy. After his attempts to prove that Kaspar was a Hungarian aristocrat had failed miserably, Stanhope lost interest and turned him over to Johann Meyer, a schoolmaster in nearby Ansbach. Meyer was a nasty, small-minded pedant who disliked Kaspar intensely. Bullied and mistreated by this German Wackford Squeers, Kaspar hoped that Lord Stanhope would one day come to take him away, but the mystery peer never showed up.

On Saturday, 14 December 1833, Kaspar went to his religious lessons at 8am. The parson wanted his help in fabricating a cardboard box, and Kaspar began working with alacrity. At 9am, he went to his clerical work in the chancery, before having luncheon with Meyer at 12.30. Such was his enthusiasm for the cardboard box, however, that he returned to the parson’s house at 12.45 and kept working diligently until the parson told him, at 2.27pm, that he was going to church. A few minutes later, Kaspar reluctantly left his handiwork, and walked with the parson for a few blocks. He seemed cheerful and vigorous, and told the parson that he was now going to call on Miss Lilla von Stichaner, whom he had met at one of Feuerbach’s dinner-parties, to help her make a fire-screen, something he had promised to do the previous Wednesday. He then parted from the parson, following the proper way to reach Miss von Stichaner’s house. But then something must have happened that made him change his plans.

Just before 3pm, two people saw him heading towards the Hofgarten park and, shortly after, the wife and daughter of another Ansbach parson saw him walking there. The weather was very cold and windy, and Kaspar was alone. The workman Joseph Leich later saw him walking in the park together with a strange man; he was amazed that they were outdoors in this abominable weather, particularly as Kaspar wore no overcoat. He described the man as being 6ft (1.8m) tall, in his 40s, with a dark beard and moustache; he wore a blue coat and a round black hat. Seven other witnesses had seen a stranger fitting this description lurking in the square or in the Hofgarten.

At 3.30pm, the bell rang at Meyer’s house. When the door was opened, Kaspar burst into the house. Grimacing spastically, he gestured first towards the left side of his chest, then towards the street. Still without a word, he grasped the schoolmaster’s hand and pulled him after him towards the Hofgarten. Meyer saw that Kaspar was bleeding slightly from the chest, and asked him whether he had suffered an accident in the park. Kaspar nodded and, gasping for breath, finally blurted out, “Went to the Hofgarten – Man had knife – Gave me purse – Stabbed – Ran as fast as I could – Purse is still there!” The schoolmaster asked him what he was doing in the park in the first place, in this foul weather, and he replied, “Man came to the chancery in the morning – Message I should be in the Hofgarten at 2.30 for something to be shown to me!” He then collapsed, and Meyer dragged him home, where he was put to bed.

Having gathered his wits after these dramatic events, Meyer put his narrow mind to work. He strongly suspected that the foundling had faked another attack on himself to gain attention and compassion. After all, the injury did not look serious. Meyer roundly told Kaspar about his suspicions, and upbraided him for this stupid prank. As the boy lay groaning with pain on the couch, Meyer threatened him with a sound birching. Although bullied for more than an hour, Kaspar did not change his story, and the furious schoolmaster finally stomped off to fetch a doctor. A certain Dr Heidenreich came to the schoolmaster’s house and examined Kaspar. Probably influenced by Meyer’s opinion that the wound was not dangerous, he thrust his finger into the open stab wound to find out how deep it was. Even at this time, there was some awareness that it was not particularly wise for a doctor to use his own finger to probe a wound in this way, but Heidenreich was not exactly a leading light of the medical profession. To his amazement, the wound was very deep indeed, and it must have given this bungling practitioner a nasty shock when his finger practically touched the still beating heart. The shaken Heidenreich declared that Kaspar’s life was certainly in danger; aghast at this information, the schoolmaster belatedly ran off to the police station to report the crime. A constable went to the place where Kaspar said he had been stabbed. He found a small purse there, with an obscure and cryptic message inside, but no trace of the perpetrator of the crime or any other worthwhile clue. Kaspar’s condition steadily deteriorated, and he died in agony a few days later, the direct cause of death being bacterial pleuritis and pericarditis caused by the doctor’s polluted finger probing the wound canal. After Kaspar’s death, Lord Stanhope and his hireling Meyer immediately spoke out to denounce him as an impostor, who had ended his days as a miserable suicide.

Stanhope was right that there were several inconsistencies in Kaspar’s version of events on that fateful day. If he was fearful for his life, why had he skulked off on his own to a desolate part of town, and why had he not run away when a stranger accosted him? No gardener or workman from the Hofgarten had been dispatched to see him. Several people had seen him running at speed from the park towards Meyer’s house, but he had not cried out for help. Even more damningly, the purse had previously been observed in Kaspar’s possession, and the cryptic note was written in mirror-image writing, which he had been seen practising. It was written on paper that matched some found in his waste paper basket, and folded just as he liked to fold his letters. Thus, it seems likely that Kaspar had not told the truth about the events that led to his death.

Kaspar was as badly served by the medical profession after death as he had been during life, and the four doctors performing the autopsy were incapable of expressing any definite opinion in the question of murder versus suicide. But as any modern forensic scientist will know, suicide by self-stabbing in the chest or abdomen is quite a rare phenomenon. It is both a painful and an uncertain method of suicide, and most people lack an adequate knowledge of anatomy to make a lethal hit. If a dead body is found with a stab wound to the chest, there are several ways to differentiate murder from suicide. A suicide often has ‘hesitation marks’, where unsuccessful attempts have been made to penetrate the chest wall; there were none on Kaspar’s chest. It is also known that a vertical line of entrance of the stab wound in the chest, as in Kaspar’s case, would indicate murder. Suicides usually bare their chest, and certainly very seldom stab themselves through four layers of thick clothing as Kaspar was presumed to have done. Thus it seems very likely that he was in fact murdered.

The debate about the Kaspar Hauser mystery rumbled on in Germany for decade after decade. In the eyes of his supporters, Kaspar was a lost prince, whose strange via dolorosa almost made him into a modern Christ. There was extravagant speculation about the motives for kidnapping the Crown Prince of Baden, the whereabouts of the dungeon, and the motives for the sinister Lord Stanhope to meddle in the mystery. But in 1996, Der Spiegel magazine used analysis of mitochondrial DNA, taken from what were believed to be Kaspar’s underpants, to test the hypothesis that he was the Crown Prince of Baden. The mitochondria are subcellular organelles that play an important role in the generation of cellular energy. They contain their own DNA, which is always inherited in the female line, since the mitochondria are transferred through the egg, not the sperm. Mitochondrial DNA has two regions on its so-called D-loop that vary considerably between individuals who do not share the same matrilineal descent, and it is possible to use analysis of sequences from these regions in cases of disputed identity. If Kaspar were the Prince, his mitochondrial DNA would be identical with that of two latter-day descendants of his presumed mother.

But the result was that the DNA did not match, and thus he was not the Crown Prince of Baden (see FT169:41). There was fury among Kaspar’s supporters: the cutting out of the bloodstain in the underpants was a crime equal to the destruction of a historical monument, and this wanton ‘DNA-farce’ had lost Germany its national mystery, and Ansbach its foremost tourist attraction. There was no rebirth of serious research into the mystery after the Prince Theory had been exploded: if Kaspar was no Prince, the disappointed Germans did not care who he was.

It may be worthwhile to summarise some of the hard facts about the mystery, as I perceive them:

• Kaspar’s story of his imprisonment is clearly false, since he would have died from malnutrition if imprisoned on bread and water alone for 12 years. He was sturdy and well nourished when he entered Nuremberg, and lacked decubital ulcers, joint contractures and signs of vitamin deficiency.

• His dialect would indicate that he had grown up in the Tirol countryside, and on his entry into Nuremberg, he used words intelligently which he could not have learnt in this town.

• When his pockets were searched after he came to Nuremberg, they were found to contain an old worn-out key, some religious tracts, and a folded paper containing a small quantity of gold dust. All these things were used in German folk medicine as cures for epilepsy and ‘jerks’, and Kaspar did suffer from nervous tics of the face.

• It is likely that he had had little contact with other people prior to his entry into Nuremberg. He was meek and humble, very appreciative of human kindness, and certainly no conniving liar.

• The purpose of the 1829 attack was clearly to frighten him, not to kill or seriously injure him.

• Kaspar was murdered, by a person he knew, and even on his deathbed, he was unable to tell the truth about what had happened. There is evidence to suggest that he actually wrote the cryptic message himself and put it in his purse.

So, what story would fit the small nuggets of fact we possess concerning Kaspar Hauser? I will outline my own theory, one that would account for both the strange circumstances of his arrival in Nuremburg and his eventual unhappy fate.

The furore caused by Kaspar’s arrival in Nuremberg was so great that it is reasonable to presume that some person would have recognised his description, unless he had indeed been brought up in near complete isolation. If this was the case, the cause is easy to guess: he was the illegitimate child of a respectable woman. She had most likely been seduced by one of the soldiers of the Schwolischer regiment, who were serving in the Tirol in 1812, but this soldier had basely deserted her. Kaspar’s mother, we can imagine, lived with her own parents at an isolated farm, and they decided to keep his existence a secret. He spent nearly all his time indoors, playing with his wooden horses and his wooden dog; sometimes, he was taken out to his grandfather’s stables to admire the five farm horses.

He was a sad, neglected, clumsy child, afflicted with nervous jerks in the face, which his grandparents tried to cure with folk medicine prophylactics. The family was poor, and he rarely ate salt or meat. Perhaps it is true, as Kaspar himself said in Nuremberg, that for a time, he attended a school across the Bavarian frontier, where he learnt to read and write. Perhaps, when he was 16 years old, his mother gained another suitor, who promised to make her an honest woman. Kaspar’s grandfather decided that this awkward ‘Hauser’ must be got rid of, since there was no longer any chance of hiding him away. His helper in this scheme was an individual we may call the Evil Vagabond, a criminal known to Kaspar’s family. The Vagabond’s suggestion was that Kaspar should follow the same career as his father, and become a trooper. He wrote a letter containing the true facts: that the boy’s name was Kaspar, that he was the son of a trooper in the same regiment, and that his mother was a poor unmarried woman. Kaspar’s mother could not write, so the Vagabond wrote another letter for her, at her dictation.

The Vagabond offered to accompany Kaspar to Nuremberg, and to make sure the slow-witted lad was delivered to the regimental depot. This was not due to altruism on his part, however. Kaspar was a ludicrous-looking figure in his odd clothes, and the Vagabond realised his potential as a professional beggar: surely, this pathetic boy would fill his purse, particularly if he was taught some heart-wrenching stories about how he had been abandoned and mistreated. But the boy’s dormant mind and lack of money-getting talent doomed this scheme to failure, and during the weeks they spent trudging towards Nuremberg, the Vagabond tired of his slow-witted companion, and sometimes treated him cruelly. Kaspar had a bruise from a blow on his arm when he came into Nuremberg. Reverting to the original plan, the Vagabond deserted Kaspar inside the town walls of Nuremberg before making a hasty exit.

Poor Kaspar was more confused than ever, since he had never seen such a large town before: the buildings, the throngs of people and the bullying policemen frightened him out of his senses. He did his best to play the idiot, pretending that he was unable to walk or speak, and later told his story of being kept imprisoned on water and bread, just as the Vagabond had taught him. He flinched at the unaccustomed meat and beer, and then noticed that this gained him attention. After a lifetime of neglect and deprivation, he was child-like in his receptiveness to human kindness, as noted by Feuerbach and others. In the hands of Daumer, the credulous, fanatical enthusiast, Kaspar played his role better and better. The homeopathic experiments taught him to lie and deceive to gain the reward that was forthcoming when the quacks thought their experiment a success. The reason he made such giant strides in learning to read and write was, of course, that he was recapturing skills he had been taught already.

The only person capable of identifying Kaspar was the Evil Vagabond, but he of course did not do so. Amazed at his stolid, uncomplaining charge becoming a local celebrity, he instead made plans to exploit Kaspar’s success in Nuremberg. The Vagabond crept into Daumer’s back yard and surprised Kaspar sitting on the outhouse. Bursting open the door, he gave the poor lad the shock of his life. Grinning at the terrified boy, the Vagabond suggested that he should open a door that night to enable burglars to enter Daumer’s house. But the naive Kaspar had learnt much about humanity in the few months he had stayed in Nuremberg, and this included a healthy mistrust of the violent, unpredictable Vagabond. When he threatened to cry out for help, the Vagabond struck at him with a sharp knife, before running off, being spotted only when he exited the house and when he later washed the blood off his gloves.

We then know what happened: after being deserted by Daumer, who doubted the results of his experiments, Kaspar was turned over to von Tucher, and then to the exuberant Lord Stanhope, who filled his mind with vanity and conceit. In the Hungarian language investigation, Kaspar did just what Daumer had taught him in the homeopathic experiments: he played along with the Earl and pretended to recognise some phrases, but Stanhope saw through him and began to doubt his sincerity.

In late 1833, when Kaspar was living in Meyer’s house in Ansbach, the Evil Vagabond again showed his face. Having suffered poverty and hardship in the intervening years, he was filled with anger against Kaspar for being well fed, well dressed and secure. Amazed by the rumours that Kaspar was a prince or a nobleman, he realised that there might be some profit in this for himself, by means of threatening blackmail. After all, he was the only person who knew the truth, apart from Kaspar’s family back in their isolated village. One morning, he stalked Kaspar on his walk to the chancery. Jumping out from an alleyway and grabbing the unsuspecting boy, he swore that unless Kaspar delivered a large sum of money to him, he would tell Meyer and Stanhope that the Child of Europe was just a common country yokel.

Kaspar was in a desperate quandary. He still trusted Stanhope and believed the Earl would one day come to take him to England. He could not tell anyone for fear of betraying his past in the Tirol, and it was equally impossible for him to accede to the blackmail, since Meyer had charge of the money left to him by Stanhope. Meyer said he’d thought Kaspar had been very worried and dejected about two weeks before the stabbing; was this because he had received such a threat?

For some days, there was no further sighting of the Vagabond, and Meyer noted that Kaspar was gradually becoming more cheerful. But when Kaspar left Pastor Fuhrmann and was walking towards the Stichaner residence, the Vagabond appeared, ordering him to keep quiet and walk to the Hofgarten. Petrified, Kaspar did as he was told, being observed by several people on the way. The Vagabond crept after him, taking good care not to be seen; it is curious that one witness, the forester Friedrich Rauch, saw him hide his face in his cloak. It was only the workman Leich who actually observed the two together. The Vagabond demanded money, and became angry when Kaspar said he had not been able to get hold of any. Kaspar then produced the purse with the cryptic message from his pocket; he had written it in advance (in Spiegelschrift so that Meyer should not be able to read it) and carried it with him to thwart his old opponent, should he reappear. Kaspar threatened that unless the Vagabond made himself scarce, he would tell Meyer that his jailer had returned, and deliver the note to him. He could easily fill in the names of the village, the river and the Vagabond. But this allusion was lost on the brutal Vagabond, who had no understanding of mirror-image writing: believing he was being made a fool of, he furiously stabbed Kaspar in the chest and then sped off through the park, throwing the dagger away as he ran. He was last seen by two witnesses walking quickly out of the Hofgarten into the Eyber Strasse, and then towards the post station.

In the meantime, the persistent rumour that Kaspar was the lost Prince had reached the Court of Baden. Although unfounded, this was an embarrassment that needed to be dealt with. The obvious answer was to approach the capricious Lord Stanhope. He had become tired of Kaspar, whom he had not seen for almost two years, and when the court officials offered to reward him well if he could prove Kaspar was an impostor, the peer readily agreed to help them out. As we know, he had doubted Kaspar’s story ever since the failure of the Hungarian experiments, and employed his creature Meyer to spy on him. This also explains the Earl’s energy in denigrating Kaspar as an impostor after the boy’s death.

While such a ‘theoretical’ account of the life and death of Kaspar Hauser might, of course, be some way from what actually happened, it possesses the virtue of taking what little we do know for sure and interpreting it in the least fanciful light. Perhaps readers of FT could take the same few facts and fit them to other, entirely different stories…�