Week Eight
Lecture One
UCI International Education Week, Nov. 13-17, 2006
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) "Example of a Crime Against the Spirit of a Human Being"
Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775-1833)
Father of Ludwig Feuerbach: The Essence of Christianity (1841)
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I. Kaspar appears
He was seen in a town square of Nuremberg on May 26, 1828
"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]
Kaspar was received as:
---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--the "municipal family"
--he was a public personality, well-known throughout Europe (Child of Europe)
--"exhibited" in his jail rooms for the first few months of his stay
[the 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.
Kaspar was received as a blank slate for 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
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.
III. Kaspar's Family and State:
Kaspar's family IS the state.
---Binder's Proclamation [whoever did this to our child must be punished]
The state gave him a series of "fathers"
Kaspar's fatal stabbing and his later death on 17 December 1833 in Meyer's home.
Despite this proliferation of fathers, KH was known as the "Child of Europe." He "belonged" to the larger European community as their child.
Feuerbach, p.143.
Countess Hochberg (Luise Geyer von Geyersberg) and the Zähringer men
As 2nd 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.
Fairy Tale or "Family Romance"
The Witch (Peter Sehr, Kaspar Hauser: The Man, the Myth, the Crime, 1994)
Der Spiegel sponsored DNA tests in 1996
2 questions for you:
1. Why don't we let go of such stories?
2. What would it mean for your major field if a 16-year-old boy appeared in public after being shut up without human association for all or most of his life? What questions would you ask?
