Who was Caspar Hauser? No-one knew. He stepped into the world in Nuremberg on Whit Monday in 1828 towards the end of the afternoon. A shoemaker in the Unschlitt Platz – named for the city’s nearby store of fat and tallow – saw him first. Hauser’s posture and gait caught the eye: he struggled to stand up right or walk properly. His clothes were faded and worn, and he wore high-heeled boots, too small, from which his bare toes protruded.
Who was Caspar Hauser? He didn’t seem to know himself. From earliest childhood, he said, he had been kept in a dark cell so cramped he could neither stand up nor lie down properly. He had been fed exclusively on bread and water. He had three wooden toys to play with: a dog and two horses. He particularly delighted in horses. The people of Nuremberg, horrified by such cruelty, took charge of him.
Hauser was prone to dreams and visions; he “went into convulsions as he always did when he was thinking deeply about something”, one supporter noted. There was a great hall lined with paintings in a house that once was his, a woman in a yellow hat with white feathers and a man in black wearing a sword and a medal. There was another woman whom he thought was his mother, who called him Gottfried. Were they dreams or memories, though?
If Hauser didn’t know who he was, other people did. He was the crown prince of Baden, some said, snatched from his cot at birth. He was the son of Napoleon. Lord Stanhope, an English nobleman who took up Hauser’s cause and practically adopted him, took him to Hungary in the hope of prompting his memory.
In October 1829 Hauser suffered a wound to his head. A masked assassin had attacked him with a cleaver, he said, and told him he must die – a prophecy the assassin had refrained from fulfilling himself. Earlier that day, Hauser’s tutor and de facto guardian, Georg Friedrich Daumer – once a firm adherent – had accused him of lying.
Stanhope too, who had promised to take Hauser to England, began to think him a fraud.
Hauser died on 17 December 1833, as a result of another stab wound. He had been set up on by an unknown with a moustache whom he had arranged to meet in a park six days earlier. At first he remembered the man’s whiskers as fair; later they were black.
Some thought the wound self-inflicted, self-dramatising, a stunt that went awry. Among the naysayers was Lord Stanhope, who found fully twenty reasons to doubt Hauser’s account, among them the fact that the weather was bad and that Hauser hated walks.
“His story acquired an importance which in no way belonged to it,” Stanhope wrote looking back. But the importance of those blank spaces in the story lingered. In 1996, the German magazine Der Spiegel paid for a blood stain on Hauser’s underpants, preserved in a museum in Ansbach, to be analysed for DNA. Had he really been the crown prince of Baden? Science answered. He had not.
Who then was Caspar Hauser? Still, no-one knows.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the December 2023 issue of History Today.
Like this? You can read more of Mathew’s History Today Months Past pieces here.
Mathew Lyons 
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