KASPAR HAUSER

1. Public Record

26 May 1828, Nuremberg. A teenage boy was found in the streets carrying two letters. One, headed from the unnamed Bavarian border, told Captain von Wessenig of the 6th cavalry that the writer had kept the boy indoors since 1812 and that the boy wished to be a cavalryman as his father was. Take him in, the letter said, or hang him. The second note gave a name, Kaspar, a birth date of 30 April 1812, and a dead cavalry father.

The boy could write the name Kaspar Hauser. He repeated that he wanted to be a cavalryman. Asked more, he said he did not know, or cried. He was lodged in Luginsland Tower. Later stories of a dark cellar and a diet of bread and water come from him and from Anselm von Feuerbach. In 1833 he was stabbed in Ansbach. He died three days later. The note left at that scene named a river and then went blank. Origin never fixed.

I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was.

2. Date of Incident

Appearance 26 May 1828. Death 17 December 1833 after a stabbing on the 14th. The cellar years, if they happened, are 1812 to 1828 on his own later telling.

3. Location

Nuremberg streets and castle. Approximate 49°27 N 011°05 E. Ansbach for the last wound. The Bavarian border in the letter is a heading, not a mapped house.

4. Official Narrative

City and later court paper treated him as a foundling of unknown origin. Princely-switch theories (Baden) were politics. Official narrative is a boy who arrived with letters, learned to speak in public, and died of a wound he said a stranger gave him.

5. Witness Layer

Von Wessenig. Jailer Andreas Hiltel. Feuerbach. Teachers who watched him learn too fast or too theatrically, depending on the memoir. He touched a sabre and said he wanted to be that. The taught sentence is the first layer. The cellar is the second. Keep them labelled.

Don’t know.

From the Bavarian border. The place is unnamed. 1828.

6. Recovery Logistics

The two letters. Later the Ansbach note with blank river. A body in 1833. No house at the Bavarian border that anyone locked.

7. Assessment

A foundling file that Europe turned into a prince. The letters are real objects. The cellar is a story he told once he had words. Fraud, abuse, and dynastic fantasy have all sat on the same chair. The archive keeps the arrival and the taught sentence. The rest is argument.

8. Materials & Remains

The 1828 letters. Feuerbach’s account. The 1833 wound and note. Grave at Ansbach.

9. Key Personnel

Kaspar Hauser : The found boy.

Captain von Wessenig : Addressee of the first letter.

Andreas Hiltel : Tower jailer.

Anselm von Feuerbach : The book that made him Europe’s child.

10. Aftermath

Pamphlets, plays, a plaque. DNA from later exhumations has been argued both ways. The name is now a German sentence for a person without a past.

11. Current Archive Status

Status: Foundling of unknown origin, Nuremberg, 26 May 1828. Letters extant. Death by stabbing, 1833. Origin not fixed.

Confidence: High that a teenage boy arrived in Nuremberg with those letters and that taught cavalry sentence. High that he died of a wound in Ansbach. Low that the cellar years can be proved. Low that a princely identification will close the file.

Filing note

A boy in a square, two letters, a sentence about cavalry he could say and almost nothing else he could say. He learned words. He died of a knife. The border in the heading was never given a house number.

The letter told von Wessenig to take him in or hang him. Not a plea. An instruction with a rope in it. That small bureaucratic cruelty makes the taught sentence colder than any later pamphlet about a stolen prince.