Dear Kaspar Hauser,You were born at sixteen and so barely lived, ending with a knife in your heart at twenty-one. Your life was both truncated and delayed1. Cut thin and sparse.
At the beginning, you were alone and struggled with being alone for the remainder of it; for sixteen years, they - whoever they might have been - kept you locked away in the dark. Then, you shuffled dumbly into Nuremberg one day and refused to speak other than this: "I want to be a calvary man, as my father was." Did you even know what those words meant? You carried two letters penned in the same hand - one from your mother another from the man who kept you in your room; you hoped that was enough. If only you could get them to take you in.
Having been alone, you were strangely well-behaved. A man claimed you grew up in the wild, but that wasn't the case. You had grown up caged.
You were, at first, a curiousity. People kept you2. They visited you, which you enjoyed. Visitors had been hard to find. They had you speak, though you knew little German and less Hungarian (two words). They had you talk about the "dungeon" in which you matured: the beastly childhood.
Science took you in. Schoolteachers took you in. All of them at first enamored with a strange thought of educating you or learning from you - an even stranger thought. You seemed even to be affected by magnets - another lie, it would seem3. Some said you were a prince, lost in some way or hidden - and that explained the attempts on your life, in some way4.
Loneliness, which I'm projecting upon you though it may not have been the case, is a strange state. One that isn't immediately assuaged by company. Loneliness can and does exist in the largest mass. There are degrees to such a thing because once one thing is obtained there is always another to have. Human company to comrade to friendship to love to spurned love to enemy to nemesis. All of these.
There were lessons liar learnt, every liar but you, it would seem. To lie is to tell a story, and a good story is told without letting on that these are lies. You were too young to be any good at it. It takes age and experience to escape telling the truth. But you tried. You just went too deep.
Take care of yourself,
1 It was and still remains believed by many that Hauser's account of his childhood was truthful, however, mostly as myth - as one likes to believe something so unbelievable. The absurd conditions of his life (and death) are implausible; everyone knows that. Hauser described a small room with no room to move and hardly to stand, a pile of hay on which he slept, and total darkness. Every morning he was fed bread and water, which he would later request solely. Drugged every so often, his hair would be trimmed and nails cut and hay exchanged when he woke. Undoubtedly, though, a knife was in his chest at twenty-one as he stumbled from a garden.
2 Hauser was at first kept in the Vestner Gate Tower then with a series of philathropic keepers who had taken an interest in him. One by one, they came to believe he was a hoax, a series of lies; one eventually complained not only of his lies but of his intense vanity.
3 Freidrich Daumer was entrusted with Hauser. Daumer included magnetic studies in Hauser's education. It has been described that when the positive side of a magnet moved across Hauser, the boy held his stomach and claimed he was pulled forward slightly and just the opposite with the negative - a wind blowing him back, as he said.
4 Each of these attempts on Hauser's life have been arguably self-inflicted, including the one leading to his demise. For instance, while at the porcelain sink, a cloaked man apparently appeared from no where, as Kaspar washed and watched in the mirror; he suffered a cut along his arm.