Who Was Kaspar Hauser?

Vol. I · Entry 7 · People Who Should Not Have Existed

Kaspar Hauser was a teenage boy who appeared in a Nuremberg square on 26 May 1828, barely able to walk or speak, carrying two letters and claiming he had been raised alone in a dark cell. He was taken in, taught to talk and write, became a European sensation, and died in December 1833 of a stab wound to the chest. Who he was, where he came from, and whether he stabbed himself have never been settled.

He existed — that is documented past any doubt. It is the last thing about him that is.

What happened in the square

On Whit Monday, 1828, a boy of about sixteen was found standing near the Unschlittplatz, unable to walk properly and repeating a phrase he seemed not to understand. He carried two letters, both apparently written by the same hand though they claimed different authors: one from a labourer who said the boy had been left with him as an infant, one purporting to be from his mother.

He could write one thing — a name, Kaspar Hauser. His vocabulary was a handful of words. He could not manage stairs. Bright light and loud noise distressed him. He refused anything but bread and water.

Over the following weeks, as language came, he gave an account: he had lived his whole life in a small dark cell, never seeing the person who fed him, sleeping on straw, waking to find bread and water left beside him. Shortly before his release a man had taught him to write his name and to say the phrase.

What the doctors found

The medical reports are the part of this case that resists dismissal.

Examiners recorded muscular development consistent with someone who had not walked normally — particularly in the legs — and deformation of the knees consistent with prolonged sitting. His soles were soft, without the callus of a person who had walked outdoors. He was unusually sensitive to light, and his hearing and sense of smell were reported as acute to the point of discomfort.

A deprived childhood of some kind is the most economical reading of those findings. It does not tell you whose child he was.

The prince theory

The claim that took hold in his lifetime and has never gone away is that Hauser was the hereditary prince of Baden — a son of Grand Duke Karl and Stéphanie de Beauharnais, born in 1812, officially dead in infancy — swapped at birth so the succession would pass to a rival line.

It is a clean story. It gives him an identity, a motive for imprisonment, and a reason for the two attacks on his life. It also rests on no document. There is no contemporary evidence of a swap, and the infant prince's death was recorded in the ordinary way.

DNA has been brought to bear twice and has made things worse rather than better. A 1996 test on bloodstains from his clothing found a profile that did not match the Baden line. A 2002 analysis of hair and clothing samples produced a result reported as consistent with a maternal relative of the House of Baden. The two studies used different samples of uncertain provenance, and neither has settled the question. Material handled for a century and a half by people invested in the answer is poor evidence either way.

How he died

On 14 December 1833, in the court garden at Ansbach, Hauser received a deep stab wound to the chest. He said a stranger had lured him there with the promise of information about his mother and stabbed him. He died three days later.

A purse was found at the scene containing a note in mirror writing, signed with initials, of no evident help.

Two readings have competed ever since. Either he was murdered to silence him, which requires the prince theory or something like it to be true. Or he inflicted the wound himself, intending a shallow cut to revive public interest in a story that had cooled, and went too deep. The wound's angle and depth have been argued both ways by people who never examined it.

He had also been attacked in Nuremberg in 1829, cut on the forehead by an assailant he described but who was never found. That attack is likewise readable as attempted murder or as self-inflicted.

Where the record goes silent

His origin. Nothing in the Bavarian or Baden archives identifies him. No family ever came forward. No cell was ever found.

The letters. Both appear to be in one hand, which means whoever wrote them intended the boy to be taken in and given an identity. That person is unknown.

The stab wound. There is no living witness, no recovered weapon tied to anyone, and no confession. The forensic case for either reading is inference laid over a wound described in 1833.

His gravestone at Ansbach says he was murdered, and calls his birth and death alike unknown. Given the file, that is about as far as the evidence goes.

Sources

• Nuremberg and Ansbach police files and court records, 1828–1834.
• Feuerbach, P. J. A. von, Kaspar Hauser: Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen, 1832 — the presiding jurist's study.
• Medical examination reports, Nuremberg, 1828; post-mortem findings, Ansbach, December 1833.
• Mitochondrial DNA analyses of bloodstained clothing (1996) and of hair and clothing samples (2002), published with contradictory conclusions.