Week Five
Lecture One
Kaspar Hauser: Child of Europe
1. Jan Bondeson, "The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser" 2004 (HCC Reader)
2. Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser 1832 (The Wild Child)
Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775-1833)
Father of Ludwig Feuerbach: The Essence of Christianity (1841)
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I. Kaspar appears
1828 :Victor of Aveyron died; Kaspar Hauser “appeared” in Nuremberg
He was seen in a town square of Nuremberg on May 26, 1828
He was “addressed” to the Capt of a cavalry unit
“I want to be a cavalryman like my father was.”
Out of Kaspar’s incoherent speech emerges the idea of a Father
II. Reading Kaspar
The envelope, please. Kaspar arrived with letters
1. from his keeper
2. from his mother Feuerbach, p.80
The accepted story of origin was that given by Kaspar a few years later, when he learned to write and had enough language to describe his memories: [pp.189-90]
Like Victor, Kaspar was:
---A ‘wild child’ with little knowledge of civilization
---A possible "witness" to the state of nature
Kaspar was also a media event
--his story was reported in many of the European newspapers of the time
--information about him was posted in handbills on city walls and within the city squares.
Much of this information is questionable and it is clear from comparing the newspaper stories that many editors simply read about the events in other papers and then rephrased or paraphrased earlier accounts.
He was a public foundling
--the city adopted him
--he was a public personality, well-known throughout Europe
--“exhibited” in his jail rooms for the first few months of his stay, as Victor was exhibited for the Parisians in the institution.
[freak show scene in the Herzog film--was added to reflect this public exposure]
The REAL Kapsar Hauser is unrecoverable. He did exist and live in Nuremberg and Ansbach for a total of 5 ½ years before his murder, but his history is marred by a great deal of misinformation and also by numerous interested retellings of his tale.
What we do have--besides a few artifacts--are the reactions to Kaspar.
***VERSIONS of the tale and the purposes they serve or the wishes they fulfill.
He was received as a “natural innocent,” because of his lack of civilization or socialization. Because he also lacked a history, he was a mysterious figure, a blank slate for the people of Nuremberg, the intellectuals and scientists of Europe to write on.
Because Kaspar was so amiable, cooperative, non-violent, and loving, he was seen as proof that “natural man” is good at heart or, as Bondeson puts it, he was seen as the “living refutation of original sin.”
Amateur and professional historians, doctors, psychologists, jurists, philosophers, scientists, linguists, anthropologists, theologians… have taken this story in many directions.
Messianic Kaspar--anthroposophists credit him with christlike emanations
Washes away "original sin."
Feuerbach, p.131
Kaspar demanded interpretation . Over 400 books and 2,000 articles
Uses of Kaspar:
--to redeem mankind in its own eyes
--to discover the mechanics of language acquisition or reacquisition
--to study the effects of a 'life without language'
--to watch a belated education
--to observe that which we may have lost in the maturing or civilizing process
First Thesis:
Beyond the mental stimulation he offered as an oddity and as a mystery to be solved, Kaspar Hauser gave those who believed in him access to humanity’s pre-civilized past, a realm where they could discover the basic goodness of natural man. Where he deviated from this image, his behavior was attributed to the corrupting effects of civilization.
[manifestations of his corrupting include his growing tendency to tell lies and the arrogance he acquired with Stanhope]
III. Kaspar’s Family and State:
Kaspar’s family IS the state.
---Binder’s Proclamation [whoever did this to our child must be punished]
---Ultimately the state was not a good parent [failed to protect him from assassin].
But the state gave him a series of “fathers”
Georg Friedrich Daumer: Kaspar lands in a "real" family with Daumer, his mother, and his sister.
Kaspar’s fatal stabbing and his later death on 17 December 1833 in Meyer’s home.
Never saw Stanhope again.
As he lay dying, Meyer complained that he was faking the severity of the wound and that he must have inflicted it himself.
Busy and varied “family life” for one who says he never saw anyone else until his 15th or 16th year (though there is speculation that he was already 4 years old when he was imprisoned because of the rapidity of his acquisition of language.
Despite this proliferation of fathers, KH was known as the “Child of Europe.” He “belonged” to the larger European community as their child.
IV. Prince of Baden MAP
Feuerbach, p.143.
Countess Hochberg (Luise Geyer von Geyersberg) and the Zähringer men
As 2 nd wife of Grossherzog Karl Friedrich and his social inferior, she had 3 sons who were not in line for the throne unless the first line died out. It did and this was quite astonishing. One son died; the other never married. The three sons of the first son all died and one of these was born in 1812. Kaspar was though to be he, brought to the dungeon through a switch of the babies by the countess. She substituted the sickly child of a servant for the healthy young prince and that child died shortly afterward.
Fairy Tale or “Family Romance,”
The Witch (Peter Sehr, Kaspar Hauser: The Man, the Myth, the Crime, 1994)
Katharina Thalbach
Der Spiegel sponsored DNA tests in 1996
.
Why don’t we let go of such stories?
