Kaspar Hauser: Europe's Child. .

Kaspar Hauser: Europe's Child. By Martin Kitchen (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave MacMillain, 2001. xv plus 237pp.).

If the name Kaspar Hauser brings anything to mind today, it probably conjures up Werner Herzog's 1974 film of the same name, that began the brief celebrity career of its autistic star, Bruno S. The film is vaguely based on an actual person, a strange teenage boy who mysteriously appeared in Nuremberg one day in 1828 and died, just as mysteriously, in Ansbach, five years later. Martin Kitchen's book is an exploration of Kaspar Hauser's life, times and artistic legacy. Working with the extensive, if often not very scholarly, secondary literature on Kaspar Hauser, and a scattering of primary sources, the author examines Kaspar Hauser's physical and mental condition, the known events of his life and the rumors about his origins and the circumstances of his death. Rather along the lines of recent interest in micro-history, he also uses Hauser's life-story and the impact it had on contemporary public opinion to investigate politics and culture in Germany (to some extent in all of western Europe) during the first ha lf of the nineteenth century. Among the topics he considers are the state of psychiatric and medical treatment, ideas about criminal law and legal reform, dynastic politics and court life in the mid-sized German states and radical critiques of monarchical government. A final chapter on literary, theatrical and cinematic representations of Kaspar Hauser takes the story down to the 1990s.

When Hauser appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, he had difficulty with simple physical activities and spoke haltingly and strangely. He asserted that as far back as he could remember, he had been imprisoned in a cellar, under the care of an anonymous and mysterious stranger. This story spurred widespread speculation on his identity, converging on the notion that he was the legitimate heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden. Conspirators at the grand-ducal court had supposedly switched him in his infancy with a dying baby, so that the throne would pass to a side line of the grand-ducal Zahringen family, descended from what had originally been a morganatic marriage.

As astute contemporaries understood, this story was proposterous; its chief twentieth century proponents have come from the followers of the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, who, among his many odd notions, believed that Hauser was a modem-day Christ figure. Recent DNA tests have shown definitively that Hauser was not a Zahringen. Kitchen suggests the most plausible explanation of his identity was that he was a Tyrolean, possibly the illegitimate child of a Bavarian soldier, who suffered from epilepsy and a form of hereditary mental illness.

However, the boy's royal origins seemed plausible to many contemporaries and Kitchen investigates the reasons for this. His chapter on the Grand-Ducal court in Baden reveals, if no conspiracy to switch babies, a decadent, drunken and degenerate royal family, scheming courtiers and incompetent bureaucrats. Radical political exiles used the Kaspar Hauser story as a way to attack German monarchism, and Kitchen's account of the grand ducal court does suggest the virtues of a republican government. Kaspar Hauser had other, mote powerful and less marginal patrons, in particular the rulers of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Possessing designs on Badenese territory, Bavarian statesmen hoped to cast into doubt the legitimacy of the grand-ducal line occupying the throne.

The author might have made more of this political context of the Kaspar Hauser story. All its themes--republicanism and its critique of monarchy, the Badenese royal family (usually portrayed, very much in contrast this book, as the most progressive of the German ruling houses) and rivalries among the pre-unification German states--have been the subject of considerable recent scholarship. Kitchen does nor consider the literature on these themes or how the Kaspar Hauser story might modify our understanding of them.

Kitchen has an interesting chapter on homeopathy, the German "natural" medicine (still flourishing today), which involves treating illnesses with extremely diluted doses of various poisons. One of Kaspar Hauser's guardians was a strong believer in homeopathy and his ward was subjected to various treatments in an attempt to cure his many ailments. Afterwards, he usually felt much worse. The account of the treatments is eminently readable, but remains very narrowly focused on Kaspar Hauser's symptoms and is not well linked to broader questions of conventional and alternative medical care of the time.

Kitchen does use Hauser's life to criticize Michel Foucault's idea of a "grand confinement" of the mentally ill by an oppressive state bureaucracy in psychiatric institutions. He points out that such institutions were few and far between at the time in Central Europe. If the mentally ill were confined, it was by their families in attics and basements. Such a confinement may have been the basis for Kaspar Hauser's story about his own experiences. This is plausible, as far as it goes, although one wishes that Kitchen had discussed the literature on insanity and psychiatry in nineteenth century Germany.

The consideration of other aspects of Kaspar Hauser's life is less successful. There is a chapter on feral children in European history, but, as the author himself notes, Hauser was not raised by wild animals. Anselm von Feuerbach, the Bavarian legal reformer (and Ludwig Feuerbach's father) was a prominent proponent of Kaspar Hauser and leading promoter of the theory that he was the legitimate heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, but the connections between his advocacy of Hauser and his authorship of the new Bavarian Criminal Code are not clear. The only unpublished sources used by Kitchen are the papers of the eccentric English nobleman, Philip Henry, Lord Stanhope, who was Hauser's leading advocate outside of Germany, his patron, and probably his homosexual lover as well. The author does not have much to say about the history of sexuality, either.

Europe's Child is a nicely-written, and well argued English language account of the strange story of Kaspar Hauser and can be recommended for that reason. As a micro-history, an attempt to use that story to investigate German and European cultural and political life in the first half of the nineteenth century, it suffers from a thin base of evidence, an insufficient consideration of the scholarly literature, and an unsystematic approach to the contemporary context.