On Whit Monday, May 26, 1828, around four in the afternoon, a cobbler named Georg Weichmann spotted a teenage boy limping through Nuremberg’s Unschlittplatz. The boy was fresh-complexioned, short for his apparent age of sixteen or seventeen, dusty, barely able to walk in his ill-fitting boots. He carried two letters. When spoken to, he could produce only one sentence: “I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was.” Everything else was met with “Don’t know.”
He was taken to the house of Captain von Wessenig of the 4th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment, to whom one letter was addressed. The anonymous writer claimed the boy had been in his custody since October 7, 1812, that he had taught him reading, writing, and the Christian religion, but had never let him take a single step outside the house. The second letter, supposedly from the boy’s mother, gave his name as Kaspar and stated he was born on April 30, 1812.
When a police officer tried to guide Kaspar’s hand to sign a report with an X, the boy grabbed the quill and wrote his own name in firm, clear handwriting.
Five years, six months, and twenty-two days later, he was dead from a stab wound. Nobody has determined, with certainty, who he was, where he came from, or who killed him. Nearly two hundred years of investigation, including DNA testing with techniques originally developed for Neanderthal genomes, have answered only one question: who he was not.
Werner Herzog made a film about it.
The Boy in the Tower
The authorities treated Kaspar as a vagrant and locked him in the Luginsland Tower of Nuremberg Castle. The gaoler gave him paper and pencil. Kaspar covered the sheets with letters and syllables arranged as in a copybook, writing “Kaspar Hauser” and “Reiter” (cavalryman) again and again. Word spread. Visitors came in great numbers to see the strange boy in the tower.
His account of his past, delivered in fragments as his language slowly expanded, described a life of total confinement. A small dark cell, roughly two meters long and one meter wide. Straw on the ground. Rye bread and water. Two wooden toy horses. He never saw the face of the man who brought his food. Sometimes the water tasted bitter and he slept more deeply than usual. One day the man taught him to write his name and say the cavalryman sentence, then carried him on foot to Nuremberg.
The city’s municipal physician, Dr. Preu, examined him and concluded that Kaspar was “neither crazy nor feeble-minded, but has evidently been forcibly removed in the most dreadful way from all human and societal culture and education.”
Two months later, Kaspar was transferred to the house of Georg Friedrich Daumer, a Nuremberg schoolmaster with interests that extended well beyond pedagogy. Daumer was a speculative philosopher deeply invested in mesmerism, homeopathy, and dream interpretation. He corresponded with Samuel Hahnemann himself. Under Daumer’s round-the-clock instruction, Kaspar learned to read, write, draw (a previously unknown talent emerged), and play chess with a rapidity that both sides of the debate later claimed as evidence. Supporters said it showed an intelligent person recovering from deprivation. Skeptics said it proved he had never been truly isolated.
Daumer also reported extraordinary sensory abilities in his charge: acute sensitivity to light, sound, taste, and smell. An alleged ability to see in near-total darkness. Reactions to homeopathic substances from several steps away. Sensitivity to magnetic poles. The boy was initially repelled by the smell of meat and subsisted on bread and water alone. Daumer later theorized that the gradual introduction of a carnivorous diet corrupted Kaspar’s nature, making him prone to lying. This says more about Daumer’s philosophical convictions than about Kaspar.
Wounds, Guardians, and Disillusionment
On October 17, 1829, Kaspar failed to appear for the midday meal. He was found bleeding from a cut on his forehead in the cellar of Daumer’s house. He claimed a hooded man had attacked him, saying: “You still have to die before you leave the city of Nuremberg.” But the blood trail told a different story: Kaspar had first run upstairs to his own room (where a razor was found), then gone back down and climbed through a trap door into the cellar. The forensic doctors agreed the wound could have been self-inflicted.
This was the first of a pattern. On April 3, 1830, a pistol discharged in Kaspar’s room at the Biberbach household, where he had been transferred after the first incident. The wound was suspiciously minor for a gunshot. His explanation was not convincing.
The guardians tell their own story. Every household that took Kaspar in eventually turned against him. Klara Biberbach publicly spoke of his “horrendous mendacity” and “art of dissimulation.” Baron von Tucher, the next guardian, complained about his “exorbitant vanity and lies.” The schoolteacher Johann Georg Meyer, who took custody in Ansbach in December 1831, was openly hostile.
Philip Henry Stanhope, 4th Earl Stanhope, entered the picture in 1831 with money, enthusiasm, and a plan. He financed inquiries into Kaspar’s origins and arranged a trip to Hungary, where Kaspar had claimed to recognize some Hungarian words and had once declared that a Countess Maytheny was his mother. The trip produced nothing. Kaspar failed to recognize a single building, monument, or landmark. Stanhope’s faith collapsed. He arranged for Kaspar’s transfer to Ansbach and the care of schoolteacher Meyer, then withdrew emotionally and financially. After Kaspar’s death, Stanhope published Materialien zur Geschichte Kaspar Hausers (1835), in which he declared that Kaspar had been an impostor.
Meanwhile, the most powerful figure in Kaspar’s corner was dying. Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach, the great Bavarian legal reformer who had originated the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine praevia lege poenali (no crime and no punishment without a pre-existing law), had taken a deep interest in the case and published Kaspar Hauser: Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen (“Example of a Crime Against the Soul Life of Man”) in 1832. He died on May 29, 1833, seven months before Kaspar. His family believed he had been poisoned for his investigations. This was never proven.
The Hofgarten
On Saturday, December 14, 1833, Kaspar arrived at the house of schoolteacher Meyer in Ansbach, bleeding from a stab wound, and gasped out fragmented words: “Went court garden … man … had a knife … gave a bag … struck.”
His account: a man had brought him a message from the court gardener, asking him to come look at clay from a newly bored artesian well. In the Hofgarten, a stranger approached, gave him a small violet purse, and stabbed him.
The wound was narrow and deep, under the center of his left breast. It penetrated the diaphragm and reached the liver. Kaspar Hauser died on December 17, 1833.
A policeman found the violet purse in the garden. Inside was a penciled note in Spiegelschrift, mirror writing: “Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come … I come from … the Bavarian border … On the river … I will even tell you the name: M. L. O.” The note contained spelling and grammatical errors typical of Kaspar’s own writing. It was folded in the triangular form Kaspar characteristically used for his letters.
The Ansbach court of inquiry suspected he had stabbed himself and invented the attacker. Forensic doctors agreed the wound could have been self-inflicted. A 1928 medical study supported this, arguing Kaspar accidentally went too deep. A 2005 forensic analysis could not definitively rule out either homicide or self-harm.
His tombstone in Ansbach reads: HIC JACET CASPARUS HAUSER, AENIGMA SUI TEMPORIS, IGNOTA NATIVITAS, OCCULTA MORS. “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious.”
A memorial stone in the Hofgarten where he was stabbed bears a different inscription: HIC OCCULTUS OCCULTO OCCISUS EST. “Here a mysterious one was killed in a mysterious manner.”
The Prince Question, Answered
The theory that persisted longest was the most dramatic. In September 1812, Grand Duke Karl of Baden and his wife Stephanie de Beauharnais (Napoleon’s adopted daughter) had a son. The infant officially died within weeks. The theory holds that Countess Louise Caroline von Hochberg, whose own sons stood to inherit if the legitimate line died out, arranged a swap: the healthy heir was replaced by a dying infant, and the real prince was hidden away. When one of Hochberg’s sons became Grand Duke in 1830, the motive seemed clear.
Feuerbach believed it. The newspapers called Kaspar “the Child of Europe,” a foundling who belonged to no family or nation, claimed by the whole continent.
But the evidence was always shaky. The birth date on Kaspar’s letter (April 30, 1812) did not match the Baden heir’s (September 29, 1812). In 1876, Otto Mittelstadt presented documentary evidence of the prince’s emergency baptism, autopsy, and burial that made the baby-switch scenario difficult to sustain. And a 2023 study in Clinics in Dermatology noted that Kaspar bore cowpox vaccination scars consistent with Bavaria’s mandatory vaccination program, introduced in 1807. This means someone had taken him to a vaccination site during childhood, contradicting his claim of total isolation from birth.
The DNA settled the maternal line. In 1998, blood from stains on Kaspar’s alleged underpants was analyzed at the University of Munich and the Forensic Science Service Laboratory in Birmingham. The mitochondrial DNA did not match living maternal relatives of Stephanie de Beauharnais. A 2002 study at the University of Munster, using hair samples, found a close match, but the sample authenticity was disputed.
In 2024, Professor Turi King at the University of Leicester led a team using capture-based and whole genome-based massively parallel sequencing, techniques originally developed for Neanderthal ancient DNA. They re-analyzed hair samples attributed to Kaspar. The result: the mtDNA haplotypes from different samples were identical to each other (proving the samples were genuine for the first time), but did not match Baden family members. The 2024 study was published in iScience and definitively ruled out the hereditary prince theory on the maternal line.
We know who Kaspar Hauser was not. We do not know who he was.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All
The German title of Werner Herzog’s film, Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle, inverts a conventional German proverb: “Jeder fur sich und Gott fur uns alle” (Every man for himself and God for all of us). By changing fur to gegen, “for” to “against,” Herzog transforms a pious platitude into existential bleakness.
He discovered the actor through a 1970 documentary called Bruno der Schwarze by Lutz Eisholz, a thesis film from the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin that aired on ARD in 1973. The subject was Bruno Schleinstein, born June 2, 1932, in Berlin. His mother, a prostitute, beat him so severely at age three that he became temporarily deaf. He was placed in institutions, where he spent the next twenty-three years. During the Nazi era, he was subjected to medical experiments as a Reichsausschusskind. After his eventual release around 1956, he became a street musician (piano, accordion, glockenspiel) and forklift operator. He was forty-two years old, had zero acting experience, and had spent more of his life inside institutions than outside them.
Herzog cast him as Kaspar Hauser.
The result is not acting in any conventional sense. Bruno S. (he never used his surname publicly) brings to the role something no trained performer could manufacture: the unguarded quality of a person who has actually been institutionalized, who has actually had to learn how the world works from the outside in. His bewilderment at a piano, his way of looking at a garden as though encountering the concept of “garden” for the first time, his distress at the logic puzzle: these are not performances. They are something closer to a person’s real relationship with bewilderment.
The film was shot in 1974, primarily in Dinkelsbuhl, a medieval walled town in Bavaria, and on Hesselberg mountain nearby. Cinematographer Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein shot in color with the kind of plainness that makes beauty arrive without announcement: grain fields, stone interiors, a face lit by a single window. The editor was Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. The music consists entirely of pre-existing pieces: Pachelbel’s Canon in D (the famous opening shot of wheat fields blowing in the wind), Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, Orlando di Lasso’s Requiem a 5, and an aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflote. Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh appears in the film as a blind pianist.
The Screaming Men Call Silence
The film opens with a title card over those wheat fields: “Don’t you hear that horrible screaming all around you? The screaming men call silence.”
Then: a cellar. A man on the floor with wooden horses. Bread and water. No face on the keeper. This is the Kaspar story compressed to its darkest image, and Herzog holds it without rushing, without explanation, without music. What you see is what you know. Everything else is withheld.
The education that follows is the film’s true subject, and its cruelest material. Kaspar is taught language, manners, religion, logic. Each lesson reveals not Kaspar’s deficiency but the arbitrariness of the system doing the teaching. The religious instruction scene exposes the circularity of theological argument. The logic puzzle scene, in which Kaspar is presented with the classic problem of the two doors (one guarded by a liar, one by a truth-teller), produces his own answer: he would ask each guard whether he was a tree frog. A truth-teller would say no. A liar would also say no. The logic collapses. The professors are baffled. Kaspar has found a hole in their system by thinking from a place they cannot reach.
The desert dream sequences, shot by Herzog’s brother, show a Berber caravan led by a blind man through mountains that turn out to be illusions. These scenes have no narrative function. They are the film’s way of saying that some things exist beyond the reach of rational explanation, and that this is not a failure of knowledge but a condition of being human.
The autopsy at the end closes the film the way the Ansbach doctors closed the case: by cutting open the body. They find an enlarged liver and abnormalities in the cerebellum. The town clerk walks away satisfied: the mystery has been explained by organs. Herzog lets the camera linger on this satisfaction and makes it look like what it is: another cage. The body has been measured, classified, and filed. Kaspar has been civilized one last time.
What Happened to Bruno
After the film won the Grand Prix Special du Jury at Cannes in May 1975 (along with the FIPRESCI Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury), Herzog cast Bruno again in Stroszek (1977), the story of a German street musician who emigrates to rural Wisconsin. It was the film playing on the television set the night Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself.
Herzog had considered Bruno for Woyzeck as well, but the role went to Klaus Kinski. This decision hurt Bruno. After the late 1970s, there were no more film roles. He returned to street music, painting (his outsider art was exhibited at the 2004 New York Outsider Art Fair), and working as a forklift driver.
Bruno Schleinstein died on August 11, 2010, at the age of seventy-eight, of heart failure. He was found alone in his Berlin apartment. Herzog called him “the unknown soldier of cinema.”
Two Readings
The rationalist reading of the historical Kaspar Hauser is that he was a fraud. Both letters he carried were written by the same hand, possibly his own. His physical condition at discovery, broad-shouldered, healthy complexion, was inconsistent with sixteen years of bread and water in the dark. His vaccination scars proved adult contact during childhood. His language acquisition was too rapid for genuine total deprivation. Every household that hosted him accused him of lying. His “attacks” carried the hallmarks of self-infliction. His final wound, with its self-penned mirror-writing note folded in his characteristic style, points in the same direction. The DNA has eliminated the prince theory. What remains is a young man of unknown origin who told a remarkable story and stuck to it until it killed him, possibly at his own hand.
The other reading notes what the fraud theory cannot explain. Something happened to Kaspar Hauser before he appeared in Nuremberg. Dr. Preu’s examination found a person who had been “forcibly removed from all human and societal culture.” The hypersensitivities, even if exaggerated by Daumer’s esoteric leanings, are consistent with someone who had experienced prolonged sensory deprivation. His rapid learning, rather than disproving isolation, could indicate a person whose neural development was delayed but not destroyed, catching up under stimulation. The vaccination scars prove contact, but not normalcy. And Feuerbach, the most rigorous legal mind of his generation, a man who had reformed an entire country’s penal code, believed the case strongly enough to stake his reputation on it.
The 2024 DNA study settled one question and opened another. Kaspar was not a Baden prince. But someone confined a boy. Someone taught him to write his name and nothing else. Someone brought him to Nuremberg and vanished. The fraud theory explains the inconsistencies but not the origin. The prince theory explained the motive but not the biology.
Herzog’s film does what the historical record cannot. It places you inside the experience without requiring you to decide. Is Kaspar a victim or a performer? Is civilization rescue or assault? Is the autopsy at the end a resolution or a final violation? The film will not tell you. The German title already announced the terms: every man for himself. God against all.
Kaspar Hauser’s tombstone calls him the riddle of his time. Nearly two centuries later, the riddle has narrowed but not closed. We know the answer to the question everyone asked. He was not a prince. The question nobody asked remains: if he was not a prince, who was he, and what was done to him before he stumbled into that square on Whit Monday with a letter in his hand and almost no words?
