This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series Managing Monsters, given by Marina Warner, was originally broadcast in 1994.

In 1828, a young man was found in the Market Square of Nuremberg.

He could write his name, Caspar Hauser, but he couldn't speak, except for a single sentence,

I want to be a rider like my father. He had been kept all his life in a cellar, alone in the dark,

until his unexplained release that day. Although he was in his teens when he suddenly appeared,

he seemed a symbolic child, a stranger to society, a tabular rasa, in whom ignorance

and innocence perfectly coincided. In his wild state, Caspar Hauser offered his new-minders

and teachers a blueprint of human nature, untouched. And in his case, his character fulfilled

the most idealized image of original innocence.

He was sick when given meat to eat, passed out when given beer,

and showed so little aggression and cruelty that he picked off his fleas without crushing them to set them free.

His story attracted myth-making in his own time and has continued to inspire writers and filmmakers. The most recent work, a book-length narrative poem by the English poet David Constantine,

opens with the apparition of Caspar Hauser out of nowhere.

He stood there swaying on his sticky feet. His head was bowed. The light had hurt his eyes.

The pigeons ran between his feet like toys, and he was

mithed by the scissoring swifts. Even an embryo raises its little pause against the din,

but Casper stood there, sucking it all in. There he remained, until the windows folded their

wooden lids back in rows.

From all the openings of their ordinary lives, the people stared.

They inched, already aghast, at all the questions he would make them ask.

Kaspahuser was an enigma, and after his mysterious return to the world, his life never did become free from strange, turbulent incident.

...