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Updated: May 20, 2025
The Burgomaster, Binder, had a portrait, and a facsimile of Kaspar's signature engraved, but Feuerbach would not allow them to be circulated, heaven knows why. How Kaspar fell, as it were from the clouds, and unseen, into the middle of Nuremberg, even on a holiday when almost every one was out of town, is certainly a puzzle.
Ample funds were provided for his maintenance, but the journey to England was again and again put off; and at last there were signs that Lord Stanhope was not quite satisfied with his new plaything. So much had been said about Kaspar's cleverness, that his new teachers were disappointed to find that his acquirements were about those of a boy of eight.
Later he took to speaking of himself as 'Kaspar, in the manner of small children, and some hysterical patients under hypnotism. But this was an after-thought, for Kaspar's line came to be that he had only learned a few words, like a parrot, words which he used to express all senses indifferently.
Herr Daumer, before this cruel outrage, had remarked, in Kaspar, 'a highly regrettable tendency to dissimulation and untruthfulness, and, just before the attack, had told the pupil that he was a humbug. In any case Daumer clove to the romantic theory of Kaspar's origin. Kaspar left Daumer's house and stayed with various good people, being accompanied by a policeman in his walks.
A later expedition into Hungary, by Hickel, in February 1832, on the strength of more Hungarian excitement on Kaspar's part, discovered that there was nothing to discover, and shook the credulity of Lord Stanhope. He could not believe Kaspar's narrative, but still hoped that he had been terrorised into falsehood.
He told Binder that his windows were shuttered: he told Hiltel, the gaoler, that from his windows he saw 'a pile of wood and above it the top of a tree. Obviously Kaspar's legends about himself, whether spoken in June 1828, or written in February 1829, are absurdly false. He was for three weeks in the tower, and was daily visited by the curious.
Whether he suppressed facts in 1829, or, in 1834, invented fables, we do not know. The evidence of the police, taken in 1834, was remote in time, but went to prove that Kaspar's eyesight and power of writing were normal. Feuerbach absolutely discredits all the sworn evidence of 1829, without giving his own sources.
Kaspar, on his deathbed, kept muttering incoherences about 'what is written with lead, no one can read. The note contained vague phrases about coming from the Bavarian frontier. After Kaspar's death, the question of 'murder or suicide? agitated Germany, and gave birth to a long succession of pamphlets. Other pamphlets came out, directed against the House of Baden.
On December 20, 1829, Merk, the captain's servant, spoke to Kaspar's fatigue, 'he reeled as he walked, and would answer no questions. In 1834 Merk expanded, and said 'we had a long chat. Kaspar averred that he could read and write, and had crossed the frontier daily on his way to school. 'He did not know where he came from. Certainly Merk, in 1834, remembered much more than in 1829.
He found no one at the well, and went to the monument of the rather forgotten poet Uz. Here a man came forward, gave him a bag, stabbed him, and fled. Of the man he gave discrepant descriptions. He became incoherent, and died. There was snow lying, when Kaspar was stabbed, but there were no footmarks near the well, and elsewhere, only one man's track was in the Hofgarten. Was that track Kaspar's?
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