In Ansbach you meet Kaspar Hauser at every turn. In the courtyard garden, where the knife attack took place on December 14, 1833, from which Europe’s most famous boulder died a few days later, there is a memorial stone with a Latin inscription. Translated it reads: “Here a mysterious man was killed in a mysterious way.”
There is a Kaspar Hauser department in the Markgrafenmuseum in the city centre. The bloodstained underpants exhibited there left The mirror investigate in 1996. With the supposed result that Hauser could never have been a Baden prince. But does the clothing and blood actually come from him? Finally, his tombstone in the city cemetery: “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, a mystery of his time, unknown birth, mysterious death.”
Kaspar Hauser’s origins and his violent end still give rise to all sorts of speculation between the hereditary prince theory and the theory of fraud. In addition, the historic Hauser, who appeared on Whit Monday 1828 at the age of about sixteen in a neglected peasant costume on Nuremberg’s Unschlittplatz and addressed passers-by, faltering and stammering, has become a myth.
His fate, shrouded in mystery, has left numerous traces in art and literature. The young man who appeared out of nowhere seems to be the ideal projection surface for addressing one’s own longings and problems. Georg Trakl, despairing of himself, composed the following line in his “Kaspar Hauser Lied”: “God spoke a gentle flame to his heart:/O man!” In July 1917, Kafka noted the beginning of a story in his diary: “When Kaspar Hauser woke up enough to recognize people and things around him…” The series could be continued with Peter Handke’s “Kaspar”, a play that wants to be understood as “speech torture” and does not show how it really was, but “what is possible with someone”. Or with Werner Herzog’s film “Everyone for Himself and God Against All”.
Kaspar Hauser and his little wooden horse: Scene from Werner Herzog’s 1974 film “Everyone for Himself and God Against All”.
(Photo: imago images/Collection Kharbine Tapabor)
Whoever talks about Kaspar Hauser also always talks about himself. This applies in particular to the work that can be considered the most beautiful adaptation of the myth: Jakob Wassermann’s 1908 novel “Caspar Hauser or The Inertia of the Heart”. In it, Wassermann gives an exciting account of the Hauser criminal case. Above all, however, he tells in a very touching way, in a deliberately archaic language, how a person who is innocence personified is destroyed by the ruthlessness and coldness of those around him.
Thomas Kraft, author of a Wassermann biography and author of the epilogue to the dtv edition, quotes Wassermann as saying: “The human heart against the world; when I found this formula, the veil lifted…” What Wassermann meant by that, becomes clear right from the first pages of the book, which is enriched with a lot of Franconian local color. There Hauser, whom the authorities initially had locked up in the Nuremberg Castle prison tower, is gawked at by the crowd like a circus attraction: “But since the silent, gentle-hearted boy did nothing of what she was imagining in her lustful expectation, they began either cursing as if they had paid the entrance fee and been cheated for it, or committing the most amazing follies.”
In all his works, the moralist Wassermann describes the suffering of people who are marginalized. When Hugo von Hofmannsthal was once asked who a good person was, he replied: “Jakob. Jacob is a good person.” Jakob Wassermann was born in Fürth in 1873 as the son of a Jewish haberdashery merchant. His mother died when he was nine years old, and from then on the sensitive boy had a strict father and a hated stepmother against him. At sixteen, exactly the age when Kaspar Hauser appeared, he was already completely on his own and would probably have disappeared from the world if, after years of wandering about, Ernst von Wolzogen had not made him his secretary in Munich.
A rift ran through Wassermann’s life
This encouraged him to write, and Wassermann seized his chance, moved to Vienna and later to Altaussee and became one of the most successful writers of his time. But even the immense success could not heal the rift that plagued him throughout his life and for which he found impressive words in his life report “My way as a German and a Jew” from 1921: “The Jews, the Germans, I didn’t want this separation of terms in mind, not out of mind.”
Wassermann, who never had the privilege of living as a Jew and a German at the same time, had to endure the burning of his books by the Nazis. He died in Altaussee on New Year’s morning 1934 at the age of sixty. Around a hundred years after Kaspar Hauser, whose tragedy inspired him to write one of his most important books, along with “The Jews of Zirndorf”, “The Goose Man” and “The Maurizius Case”. It ends with the words: “Innocent, my dear, only God is innocent.”
Jakob Wassermann, Caspar Hauser or the inertia of the heart. dtv, Munich 2012. 480 pages, 12.90 euros.