The Sad Boy

The strange and sad story of Kaspar Hauser - "the man who came out from nowhere":

On May 26, 1828 in Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria, a shoemaker named Georg Weichmann saw a young man of about 15 to 20 years old, all in rags, limping and making incomprehensible screams, approaching him. Weichmann asked the man if everything was okay, if something had happened to him, but in response he only received an indeterminate mumble - when the young man gave him a letter addressed - To the captain of the 4th squadron, 6th cavalry regiment, Nuremberg. Feeling sorry for the young, starving and apparently disoriented man, Weichmann decided to try to help him. He takes him home, gives him food and sees that something is wrong with the child, he is panickingly afraid of various objects and runs away from the light...

The only thing they receive in response from the unknown person is - ``Weiss nicht'', I don't know anything. After some time, the shoemaker finds the captain of the 4th Bavarian squadron Wessenig, who opens the letter in astonishment and reads in it that the child's name is Kaspar Hauser, that he was born in 1812 and that for his entire life he was locked in a basement underground where he had contact with light once a day (when they brought him food), he was never let out of the basement where during the 16 years of captivity he was kept company by rats and a few wooden toy horses. It is also stated that he was the unwanted fruit of someone's passion and that it would be best if Captain Wessenig took care of him (!?) and enrolled him in a military school. Wessenig, not intending to care for Kaspar - takes him to the police where the case should be clarified. People consider Kaspar an imbecile because he cannot compose at least one sensible sentence. He is put in prison, where it becomes obvious that Kaspar is used to solitude and darkness. Even his constitution is strange, like someone who has spent his whole life in a low cell, hunched over.

His fate intrigues several people who try to solve the mystery. With the first contacts with people with better intentions than ridicule, Kaspar denies the claims that he is mentally retarded - on the contrary, he very quickly learns to read and write, and after a while comes under the guardianship of Georg Friedrich Daumer, a professor and philosopher. Here, a complete transformation of Kaspar takes place, who in a few months from being illiterate and half-mute manages to read philosophical works and talk with his mentor Daumer. Which represents an unprecedented speed of intellectual development in known history. Kaspar learned to draw in a few weeks, painted his first landscapes, engaged in composition, used both his right and left hands (ambidexterous) and began writing his autobiography.

In it, he said that he did not know who he was, who his parents were, where he was from, or how he ended up in Nuremberg. He knew that he lived in a basement, that someone fed him food through some kind of opening, that from time to time the water he was given had a strange taste that made him fall asleep, that he had never seen a fully human face until the day he appeared in Nuremberg, and he did not even know who gave him the letter in which he asked a completely unknown man (Captain Wessenig) to take care of him...

This autobiography made him a celebrity throughout Europe at that time. The public became interested in the bizarre fate that befell Kaspar Hauser. The city of Nuremberg offers a reward for information that will solve the mystery, but no one takes it. There is no Hauser family. An investigation is opened, which after a while becomes bogged down, because the facts cannot be separated from the speculations that claim that Caspar is of royal descent from this or that dynasty.

Little by little, Caspar hopes to return to a normal life, but on October 7, 1829, an attempt is made to assassinate him. Caspar is found with a large wound to the head caused by a hammer. The assassination attempt takes place in the house of his mentor Daumer. After this event, other people who want to help him appear, Anselm von Feuerbach and the English millionaire Lord Stanhope, who decide to protect Caspar's life. A mercenary is hired to guard Caspar, but everything is in vain.

On December 11, 1833, Kaspar Hauser was murdered not far from his new home. The murderer was never found.

Whether it was a sadistic experiment, the continuous maintenance of a tabula rasa over a span of 17 years, imprisonment due to belonging to an aristocratic hereditary right, or something else entirely, is unknown. Kaspar Hauser's latent mental superpowers that came to the fore after he was rescued from the cellar are also a reason for speculation about his fate and death.

Only sadness remains...

On his tombstone in Ansbach were the words :

"In this place,

for reasons unknown,

an unknown man,

was killed by another unknown man.

In this place lies,

the riddle of our time,

Place and time of birth - unknown,

Cause of death - unknown."

(Roger Mortis, 056)