Cheap Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (Book) (Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson) Price

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Kaspar Hauser is the title article of the November 25th, 1996,issue of German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. DNA investigation, using bloodstains from Kaspar Hauser's clothing, has shown conclusively that he is not related to the house of Baden. Also, a war memorial from Napoleonic times in the remote <
>Tirolean village of Reith, near Kitzbuehel, has been found to have this name as one of the fallen. The supposition is that <
>"Kaspar Hauser" was a simpleton from the region who was transported to Nuremberg by soldiers as a practical joke and the pranksters used the name off this monument. <
>The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden era for this sort of thing (see Cardiff Giant, Kensington Runestone, Princess Caraboo, Piltdown Man). You can buy a "dossier" on Kaspar Hauser from Der Spiegel over the internet.

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mystery solved?
Masson has gone back to original source material (and even discovered some documents long thought lost) to re-examine the story of Kaspar Hauser. With his background in psychology, he was able to analyze the story like no previous writer had, and come to some surprising revelations, not the least of which Kaspar may well have been a member of German royalty, and was quite likely imprisoned and killed for just that reason. Though I gave the book five stars, I do have some minor complaints: 1) Masson is a believer in Recovered Memory Syndrome, 2) he doesn't consider any physiological causes for Hauser's seeming lack of education and his subsequent steep learning curve (Charles Fort, oddly enough, is the only one to present convincing evidence that a bump on the head could have caused temporary amnesia, which then gradually receded as time went on), 3) he doesn't explain why Hauser was released from his imprisonment, especially after so many years, 4) Though he had asked a few pediatricians about the effects of long-term nutritional deficiences (Hauser supposedly subsisted on just bread and water), it is distressing that none of them could tell Masson anything specific (Just for the record, scurvy from Vitamin C deficiency, marasmus and hypoalbuminemic-type PEM (kwashiorkor) from too little protein and other nutrients, and rickets from Vitamin D deficiency, just to name some examples). Still, this book is worth it just for the Introduction alone, and is likely to remain the definitive work on this mysterious child.

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A chapter a day
Some books are meant to be page turners. When you buy one of those, you put an extra log on the fire, make some hot chocolate, and read till you fall asleep.

That plan of attack will not work with LOST PRINCE. You may as well try to read the complete works of Sigmund Freud in one sitting. Yet LOST PRINCE is as brilliant as it is disturbing. You may stop reading at the end of a chapter, but you will not stop thinking about this book.

The German language has turned Kaspar Hauser into a cliche of sorts. Someone who's vexing and exasperating, yet basically innocent and naive, is called a "Kaspar". German majors at most universities learn only the roughest information about him, generally in terms of his being an interesting case study for how people turn out when they are denied human contact in their formative years.

But Kaspar's story is so much more than that. It is child abuse, political intrigue, good vs. evil, and a murder mystery all rolled into one. When you finish this book, you still cannot tell the bad guys from the good. All you know is that Kaspar Hauser was treated like no human should ever have been treated, and that nothing he could have done would ever justify the inhumanity of the persons who placed him in that dark and cruel prison.

It is therefore a little eerie to realize that all this took place 101 years before Hitler, in a city called Nuremberg.