Kaspar Hauser: The Boy Who Came From Nowhere and Died With a Secret
On Whit Monday, the twenty-sixth of May 1828, a strange figure appeared in the streets of Nuremberg. He was a teenage boy, perhaps sixteen, dressed in ill-fitting country clothes, and he walked with the unsteady, buckling gait of someone who had rarely stood upright. He could barely speak. When people approached him he wept, or held out a letter, or repeated a handful of memorized phrases like a doll wound with a single key. He seemed to have dropped into the world fully formed and yet entirely unmade, a young man with the helplessness of an infant. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody, in the end, ever truly would. A Letter and a Name The boy carried two letters, both apparently from the same hand though pretending to be from two different people. One claimed to be from a poor laborer who had taken in the child as a baby in 1812 and raised him in secret, never letting him out of the house, and now sent him to Nuremberg to become a soldier as his late father had been. The other, posing as...