This article was first published in New View magazine #113 October-December 2024  – Title illustration by David Newbatt (2006) from Kaspar Hauser – Where did he come from? (2006) by Terry Boardman

This summer I went again to the Kaspar Hauser Festspiele (festival) that is held every two years in the south German city of Ansbach. I have been going to the Festspiele since 2004. It is a festival that has been organised since 1998 by its multi-talented director, Eckart Boehmer, and commemorates the life of the remarkable phenomenon that was Kaspar Hauser (1812-1833). Born on Michaelmas Day, 29 September 1812, when Napoleon was sitting in Moscow waiting for the Russian surrender that never came, the individual later known as Kaspar Hauser was in fact the son of Napoleon’s adopted daughter, Stephanie de Beauharnais, and of her husband Karl, the ruler of the Grand Duchy of Baden, which today is part of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. Kaspar was therefore the rightful heir to the grand ducal throne  of Baden, but he was abducted two weeks after his birth and kept, until the age of 15 in increasingly restricted states of incarceration, the last 11 years of which were in complete isolation, so that he became unable to walk or speak, as he was kept chained to the wall in a sitting position, and shortly before his release was taught to stand a walk a little.  While his initial abduction was for reasons of sordid dynastic ambition all too common in history, his later incarceration and his life in public following his release in Nuremberg in 1828 became involved with ‘high’ issues of European politics and also profound psychological, moral and philosophical issues, all of which are too complex to be described in this article.¹ Suffice it to say that not only was his mother the adopted daughter of the man feared by rulers throughout Europe but if he had become the Grand Duke of Baden, German and European history may well have been very different in the 19th and 20th centuries.

 Another test

I was glad to see that despite difficulties during the COVID-19 years the event continues to flourish. However, the venal opposition to Kaspar Hauser, even after 190 years, has also continued. Although a mountain of evidence now exists that, when seen in combination, proves that Kaspar Hauser was indeed the rightful heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, in 1996 the German magazine Der Spiegel employed a team at the University of Munich and a British scientist, John Bark (dates? None available, I’m afraid.), to try and use genetic science to disprove the claim that Kaspar Hauser had been the heir to the throne of Baden.² However, it was plausibly objected that the material used for the DNA test did not come from Kaspar Hauser and a second DNA test done in 2002 at the German University of Münster came to a very different conclusion, saying the test did not rule out that that Hauser could have been the heir. This followed the publication of a particularly vicious attack on Kaspar Hauser in a book by a Canadian professor of German military and imperial British history³ in 2001.

This year, on 1 August, while the Festspiele was taking place, news was released that another DNA test had recently been done by a team led by the Canadian Prof. Turi King that has supposedly conclusively proved that Kaspar Hauser was not related to the House of Baden. These findings were immediately taken up by the mainstream media, just as the Der Spiegel test result had been in 1996. It is too early yet to judge whether, as with the 1996 test, they will also be without merit. Against them is the accumulated evidence of almost 190 years, beginning with the investigations by the famous criminologist Paul Anselm von Feuerbach (1775-1833), who was the first to identify Kaspar Hauser’s link to the House of Baden and the crime that had taken place in that House, and paid for the private propagation  of his findings with his life; he was murdered by poisoning in May 1833, exactly 5 years after Kaspar Hauser appeared in Nuremberg and six months before Kaspar himself was murdered.

There will be those who, in view of this latest DNA test, say that the question of whether Kaspar Hauser was the rightful Prince of Baden or not was not the most important thing about him and his story and that it does not matter if he is proved not to have been a member of the House of Baden by a DNA test. Such people could, however, ask themselves why Siddartha Gautama (the Buddha) was the son of a king, why the two Gospels of Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies of Jesus, why Jesus is related to the lines of Solomon and Nathan; why ‘kings’ or ‘wise men’, as well as shepherds, visited the baby Jesus. Jesus was not just any carpenter; He was a carpenter descended from a king. At the end of His life on earth he stood judged between a religious leader (Caiaphas) and a political leader (Pilate) and on the cross He hung between two thieves, one who accepted Him and one who rejected Him. Anthroposophers can recall that the Foundation Stone meditation given by Rudolf Steiner at a conference in Dornach, Switzerland at Christmas 1923 refers in its final verse both to “poor shepherds’ hearts” and to “the wise heads of kings”. Christianity as a religion (the word ‘re-ligion’ means to ‘re-bind’, or ‘re-unite’) brings together the spiritual, or heavenly, with the material or earthly. To be human means to live with the heavenly and the earthly and to unite both in oneself and with others. The question of the truth about Kaspar Hauser’s earthly origins – the truth about which ‘house’ (Haus) Kaspar belonged to – is not therefore unimportant, not least because it is very much connected with the reasons why he was mistreated as he was. His was not only a case of an innocent abused by callous human beings. It was also the case of an innocent who was abused because he was a particularly important prince in a time when lines of descent were still of considerable significance, even if the importance of ‘blood’ in family lineages was at that time already not what it had been for millennia and which over the following 200 years would become even less important.

 Kaspar and Christ

In 2012, all those interested in the story of Kaspar Hauser commemorated his birth in Karlsruhe, Germany 200 years earlier. In 2028, we will commemorate the 200th anniversary of his appearance in Nuremberg, in the Unschlittplatz, the square that was named after the candlewax that came from the slaughter of innocents.⁴ In 2033, 200 years  after his death in Ansbach near the statue of the Ansbach poet Johann Peter Uz (1720-1796 who worked at the imperial court of Justice in Nuremberg), we can remember Kaspar’s sad end by the fatal stabbing attack on him five years after his remarkable appearance at Whitsun 1828 in the Unschlittplatz. This region, which includes the geographical waystages of the 21 years of Kaspar’s life – Karlsruhe – Beuggen – Pilsach – Nuremberg – Ansbach – lies in the very heart of Europe.

In the same year of 2033, Christians all over the world will commemorate 2000 years since the central events that define Christianity: the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ and the Whitsun Event 10 days after His Ascension. Those Easter events brought to a culmination the 3 years of Christ’s preaching, teaching and healing activity in public, which had begun with His Baptism in the Jordan in the year 30. And in the year 2030 we shall also commemorate the beginning, with the Baptism, of those 3 years of Christ’s work activity on Earth. The year 2030 and the decade of the 2030s have, for at least 10 years now, been very much the focus of attention for the world’s elites who have repeatedly referred to that year and that decade as a kind of ‘deadline’, or target date, by which various goals of theirs must be achieved.

We are witnessing the crisis building once again in the Israel/Palestine region, which is near to the salty Dead Sea. North of the region is the Black Sea, the axis of which is basically horizontal or east-west and, south of it, the Red Sea, the axis of which is basically vertical or north-south. To the west of the region is the Mediterranean Sea (the name means ‘the middle of the earth’). The whole region lies in the heart of what has been called the ‘World Island’⁵ of Eurasia and Africa. From the traditionally collectivist societies of East Asia to the individualist society of the USA in the West, Israel/Palestine lies in the heart of Time and Space on this planet and the events which took place there 2000 years ago form the basis of our global chronology in the modern era. In both of these events, with Kaspar in Germany 200 years ago and Jesus Christ in Israel 2000 years ago, an innocent was persecuted and killed by a society that did not care enough about him. In both cases, within about 100 years of each event, the society concerned was devastated by the world power of the age. However, the devastation was not only caused by that world power – the legions of Rome and the bombs of Anglo-America. After what the novelist Jakob Wassermann, in his much-admired novel about Kaspar Hauser (1908) Caspar Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Herzens (“Caspar Hauser or the Indolence of the Heart”), called the uncaring inertia, or indolence of the heart, had come the consequence for those two societies of that uncaring inertia, namely, the turn to materialism and militarism and the awful fate that they brought to that society as a result of inner failures and attacks from outside. 

 Jews and Germans

The Jews turned to the nationalist Zealots and twice – in 66 AD and 132 AD – resorted to violence and war to try to expel the Romans and restore a unified Jewish kingdom. Having ousted the Greek Seleucid dynasty⁶ by warfare more than 100 years before the time of Christ and having restored a native Jewish monarchy, the Jews felt they could also defeat the Romans. In the war of 66-73 AD against the Emperor Nero – and then against Vespasian – they failed disastrously. The Temple in Jerusalem, the very centre and focus of their religion for almost 1000 years, was destroyed. They failed to learn the lesson and repeated the failure some 60 years later in the war of 132-136 AD against Emperor Hadrian. This second war resulted in even greater devastation. Jews were then forbidden even to enter Jerusalem, which was renamed Aelia Capitolina after the family (the Aelia) of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Millions died in those two wars of nationalist fanaticism.

Masada (now in Israel)  – the place of the Jews’ last stand

in their first war against Rome 73 AD  (Andrew Shiva, wikipedia)

A similar pattern can be seen in Germany in the period from the 1840s-1940s. Looking to the West, to the French models of State nationalism and militarism, and to the British models of commercialism, industrial power, colonialism, and navalism, the Germans sought to build a Reich (‘Empire’) united around the image of the sword that was held high by the Hermannsdenkmal, the great memorial statue built in the 19^th century to Hermann, or in his Roman name, Arminius (he was raised in Rome), the ancient Germanic chieftain of the Cherusci tribe and the victor over the Romans in 9 AD, in a great battle in the Teutoburger Forest, the greatest victory over the Romans by any European people and a defeat the Romans recalled with horror and never forgot.

The construction of the Hermannsdenkmal (see pic. above) began in the mind of Ernst von Bandel in 1836, three years after Kaspar Hauser’s death, and was completed by von Bandel in 1875. He was born in 1800 in Ansbach, the town where Kaspar was killed 33 years later. In his early years as an artist, von Bandel was financed by King Ludwig I of Bavaria but he disliked the king’s neo-classicist preferences and moved to Prussian Berlin in 1834 – a symbolic move perhaps. Ironically, the whole spirit of the Hermannsdenkmal was directed against the West, against France, yet the Second Reich, the Bismarck Reich (1871-1918), was thoroughly western in the many ways it sought to emulate the West instead of looking to a genuinely German cultural spirit. This readiness to adapt foreign models has to do with what the anthroposophical historian Karl Heyer has called ‘the mercurial spirit’ of Germany and the Germans. The German state of Prussia, as distinct from the original Prussian people who were pagan Balts, was created by the German crusaders of the Teutonic Knights in the Middle Ages and therefore always had a strong military aspect to it that was oriented towards the conquest of the remaining pagan peoples of northeastern Europe and then to competition with the Catholic and Orthodox states of Poland/Lithuania and Russia respectively. The later Prussian state therefore became defined by its military struggles towards the East.

British teutophobic propaganda from the 1870s to the end of the First World War usually identified all Germans with the goose-stepping, pickelhaube (spiked leather or metal helmet)-wearing, martial Prussians, but this was a gross exaggeration. The Germans were many peoples speaking dialects of the same language and were shaped by their experience of life in the heart of Europe, east and west Germans, north and south Germans:  Prussians contrasted with Rhinelanders; Holsteiners and Saxons contrasted with Swabians, Bavarians, and Austrians. The anthroposophical writer Maria Schindler, in her book Europe, A Cosmic Picture (1975 and 2019⁷), which related European peoples with the 12 constellations of the Zodiac, saw the Germans as the people of Aquarius, as the mid-winter season of Aquarius is associated with the Roman god Janus, who looks both ways, back towards the old year and forwards to the new. This seems appropriate, because one can see from German history how these Germanic peoples, living in the middle of Europe, readily absorbed and imitated in a mercurial way, elements from East and West and from Scandinavia to the north and the Mediterranean in the south. They did not remain fixed in their own cultures, but adjusted to and adapted elements from those cultures around them.

Baden and Prussia

The last three years of Kaspar Hauser’s life (1830-1833) were a time of growing nationalist zealotry in the German states, inspired not least by the 1830 July Revolution in Paris. The nationalist and militarist spirit, absorbed from France and focused on stablishing a unified German state that had never before existed, culminated in the Prussian victory over France in 1871 and the foundation of the new German Reich in the Hall of Mirrors in the palace built by the French king Louis XIV at Versailles 200 years earlier. In Anton von Werner’s famous painting Ausruf des deutschen Reiches or Die Proklamierung des deutschen Kaiserreiches (the Proclamation of the German Empire; see picture above) the man standing next to Wilhelm I of Prussia and leading the “Hurrah” of the assembled throng with his right arm raised is Grand Duke Friedrich I von Baden, the son of former Grand Duke Leopold of Baden and his wife Grand Duchess Sophie. Leopold and Sophie were the couple who, in 1830, had become the reigning grand ducal couple in the southwestern state of Baden precisely because of the abduction in 1812 of the rightful heir to the Grand Duchy of Baden, the baby who was in fact Kaspar Hauser, the son of Grand Duke Karl and his French wife Stéphanie de Beauharnais, the adopted daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte.⁸ It was the ambitious and ruthless Grand Duchess Sophie who arranged for the murder of Kaspar Hauser in Ansbach in 1833. Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden, the man raising the Hurrah in von Werner’s painting, was married to Princess Luise of Prussia. It had been Prussian troops who had crushed the revolution in Baden in 1849 and restored Leopold and Sophie as Grand Duke and Duchess of Baden. The liberal revolutions in Germany in 1848-49 had begun in Baden and also ended in Baden. If the liberal spirit that had begun in Baden had prevailed in Germany after 1848, then Bismarck’s Prussia would not have become the dominant power in German-speaking lands. If Kaspar Hauser had become the Grand Prince as he was supposed to, he would have been 36 in 1848 – in the prime of life, and not least, able to collaborate with Prince Albert, the young German husband of Queen Victoria; Albert was only 7 years older than Kaspar, and Kaspar’s younger sister Marie Amelie was married (1843) to William Hamilton, who in 1852 became the Duke of Hamilton, the premier nobleman in the hierarchy of Scottish aristocracy.

The nullity…

We should note also that the nephew of Grand Duke Friedrich, and therefore the grandson of Leopold and Sophie, was Prince Max von Baden (see pic below), the last Imperial German Chancellor, who surrendered Germany to the western Allies on the basis of US President Woodrow Wilson’s “14 Points” programme in 1918.⁹  Rudolf Steiner had met with Prince Max in 1918 and had tried to convince him to end the war on the basis of a genuinely Middle European conception – the threefold social organism – Steiner’s ideas about how modern society is constituted in three spheres – the cultural/spiritual, the legal/political, and the economic – which are related to the three main constituents of human physiology (nerves, circulation, metabolism)  and psychology (thinking, feeling and willing)¹⁰.  This would also have been an opportunity for Prince Max to do something in the direction of righting the wrong that his forebears had done to Kaspar Hauser and thus also to Germany. Indeed, Prince Max had earlier declared his intention, when he became Grand Duke of Baden, to transfer the body of Kaspar Hauser from its present grave in Ansbach to the tomb of the Von Baden family in Pforzheim. This shows that he acknowledged the crime that had been committed against Kaspar.

But Prince Max, as Imperial Chancellor, chose instead to end the war on the basis of a western conception that stemmed from the new world power. This was felt by Rudolf Steiner to be a spiritual capitulation by Germany that paralleled the military capitulation by the German High Command and the German government. In his book Kaspar Hauser – The Struggle for the Spirit, Peter Tradowsky wrote that Steiner expected on 3 October 1918 ‘“the new Imperial Chancellor to find the appropriate words, that is, to have the courage, to proclaim straightaway to the German people in his inaugural speech… the idea of the Threefold Commonwealth, as proof of a profound change and wish for peace of the German nation”. Rudolf Steiner was very anxious to learn about the text of the inaugural speech when he got hold of the newspaper. Never afterwards did I see Rudolf Steiner so shattered as by this disappointment, which signified the defeat and path of suffering for the German nation. The Prince (see pic. ) was unable to carry out the task assigned to him by destiny. He subscribed far rather to the thoughts of Woodrow Wilson about the ‘future happiness of nations’. Hardly noticed or acknowledged up till now, a decisive turning-point in German history passed by almost in secret. “The beginning of the war”, said Steiner, “had already demonstrated the nullity of German policy. It was again demonstrated in October 1918. So came that awful spiritual capitulation at the hands of a man on whom many in German lands had staked, as it were, their last hope.” With this spiritual capitulation Prince Max of Baden places himself, unknowingly, among the ranks of Kaspar Hauser’s enemies and the opponents of the spiritual evolution proceeding out of Central Europe.’¹¹

Sun Demon

Tradowsky goes on to note that just 10 days after this failure by Prince Max, who was the grandson of Grand Duchess Sophie of Baden, Adolf Hitler was blinded in a British gas attack on the Western Front at Ypres (13-14 October 1918); this poisoning led to “that sinister change in Hitler which made his human organism into the willing tool of an evil spiritual nature.”¹² At the very same time, 11-13 October, Steiner spoke for the first time about the being of Sorath, or the Sun Demon who, he said, intervenes in human history (though not as an incarnated human being) every 666 years – the Being that directly assaults the human ‘I’ (the kernel of each human being, their essential self) and which Steiner associated with the impulse to black magic. He contrasted the ‘Mystery of Golgotha’ (the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ) with the Sorath impulse around the year 666 (the first of three such historical interventions by this Being¹³ up to our present time) and thus gave to humanity knowledge of this Being Sorath at the very time when Adolf Hitler was about to take the path that would eventually lead him and the National Socialist movement to their assault on the freedom of countless human I’s throughout Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

In that same lecture of 13 October 1918, Steiner went on to speak of the Etheric Christ Event of the 1930s, when the Christ would begin to become visible to human beings, not physically but etherically, as a spiritual experience of Christ in the etheric (the life realm)  aura of the Earth.  It was precisely in the 1930s, at the end of the first third of the 20th century, that Adolf Hitler, darkly inspired, was given power in the heart of Europe and chose, not Berlin or Munich, but Nuremberg – the city where, after Kaspar Hauser’s  release from his incarceration, he had first appeared to the world – as the location from which he would proclaim his message to the world in his huge National Socialist Party rallies that were held there.

Because Prince Max had chosen to end the First World War in 1918 in the way that he did, he also brought to an end the imperial, Bismarckian Reich by requiring the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany became a republic, and all the old state titles rulerships were abolished, including that of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Prince Max therefore did not become the Grand Duke and did not fulfil his intention to transfer Kaspar Hauser’s body to the family tomb in Pforzheim.  Almost exactly 3 x 33⅓ years after the killing of Kaspar Hauser – a murder arranged by Prince Max’s grandmother, Grand Duchess Sophie – Adolf Hitler gained control of Germany and just 12 years later, in 1945, the devastation of Germany was analogous to the devastation of Judaea in 136 AD after two terrible wars against the world Power of that time.

                                                                                                  The ruins of Dresden 1945

A better humanity

The Jewish people, or at least the Jewish elite, failed to recognise Who was among them in Jesus of Nazareth for those 3 short years. They turned away from Him and took instead the martial path of Mars, hurling themselves against the very Power that essentially represented the forces of Mars and materialism in that epoch, Imperial Rome. Some 1800 years later, the German people, or at least the German elite, also failed to recognise who was among them in Kaspar Hauser for those five short years of his very ‘public life’ (1828-1833) and failed to respond to the essentially spiritual questions that he posed to them – Who am I? Who are you? Where have I come from? Where am I going? They turned away from him and took instead the path of materialism and Mars which led them ultimately against the very Powers that essentially represented the forces of materialism and Mars in the modern epoch – Britain, the USA and Soviet Russia.

Those forces of Mars and materialism cannot be countered by resorting to the very same means they themselves employ. They can only be transformed by qualities such as those shown by Kaspar Hauser’s three greatest supporters in Nuremberg and Ansbach and also by Kaspar Hauser himself: qualities such as ardent and courageous truth-seeking, as inspired Kaspar’s champion from Ansbach, the criminologist and judge, Paul Anselm von Feuerbach; by a spirit of loving imagination, which filled the heart and mind of Kaspar’s teacher in Nuremberg, Georg Friedrich Daumer; by a sincere and steadfast mood of caring responsibility, as shown by Kaspar’s last guardian in Nuremberg, Baron Gottlieb von Tucher, and by Kaspar’s own spirit of open-hearted listening, and contentment. He himself wrote:

Contentment is the greatest worker of miracles.

It transforms water into wine, grains of sand into pearls,

raindrops into balsam, poverty into wealth,

the smallest into the greatest,

the most common to the most noble,

earth into paradise.

Beautiful is the heart with all its stirrings,

which remains in purest harmony with itself.

Beautiful is that life

 where deeds agree most perfectly with one another

It seems to this writer that there is something almost Buddhistic about the way that Kaspar Hauser uses the word “contentment” here, namely in the sense of calmly contemplating the inner and outer worlds as they are. Then, out of that calm contemplation, we can go through life along ‘the Eightfold Path’ first taught by Gautama Buddha and recommended also by Steiner, which helps us to attain right views, right resolves, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right absorption or union (meditation).

Who am I? Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going? Especially in the years from 2028 to 2033, people around the world, and not least the people of Germany, will have another chance to consider those questions.

Can we sense that Jesus Christ, in a global, macrocosmic sense, and Kaspar Hauser, in a microcosmic sense, were victims who could ‘reverse destinies’ i.e. alter the downward direction of the lives of those people who encountered them? With Christ it was the destinies of countless individuals, but also the destiny of the world and humanity as a whole. Through Kaspar Hauser, it is perhaps  the destinies of individuals that are changed by coming to know his story, but to my way of thinking, and I sense this is shared by many of those who have attended the Kaspar Hauser Festspiele in Ansbach since they began in 1998, it was also the fate of a nation that was changed in the 19th and 20th centuries by the forced removal of Kaspar Hauser – and not changed for the better. But if enough people in that country and others would turn to Kaspar Hauser and discover what his life actually meant and still means, then they might see him not as a sad victim, but as an inspiration for a better Germany, a better Europe, a better modern human being. A human being who is constantly searching for what he or she can really become; a human being who is always in the process of becoming and who therefore never gives up. 

Afterword

It may be thought today that the Jews and the Germans have finally learned their lesson because today they are not fighting against the global hegemon – the imperial Anglo-America of the past 150 years or so – but, as apparent client states, are now ranged on its side.  However, they are still fighting – now against the opponents of the hegemon. In the case of the Jews, the Israeli elite may feel that that opponent is their opponent (rather than the hegemon’s) – namely, and ironically, the Iranians, the very people who saved the Jews from slavery and exile in Babylon 2500 years ago. But beyond Iran, even if the Israeli elite today may imagine they can do deals with the wealthy elites of Arab Gulf states or even Saudi Arabia, their opponent is actually the whole Muslim ummah (or world community), a billion people, who have looked on for decades now at what Israel has been doing to fellow Muslims in Gaza and the West Bank – and they do not forget. For their part, the Germans, who had seemed to be getting on well with the Russians 15-20 years ago and gradually overcoming the blight of their terrible heritage of their invasion of Russia in 1941, have now been forced by the hegemon to go against their own interests, even to the gross detriment of their own economy, and many (though not all) in the German elite have enthusiastically joined what looks increasingly like a kind of NATO ‘crusade’ against Russia, ostensibly in support of the hegemon’s proxy, Ukraine. And behind Russia are its allies, China, Iran, and who knows, perhaps India in the next decade? Meanwhile, the grip on reality of Germany’s transatlantic masters seems to be slipping, their social and cultural ligaments decaying at a growing rate. At the same time, the old German subconscious fear of “the asiatic hordes from the East” is competing with the new German guilty conscience and sense of shame at what Germany did to Russia (let alone Jews) in the 1940s, the healthy sense that there can be no real peace in Europe when there is enmity between the Germans and the Russians. And, indeed, Steiner repeatedly pointed out that a healthy bridge of understanding between these two peoples was essential for the future.

What does the future hold then for these two peoples of the global Middle – the Jews  - and the European Middle – the Germans? Both Israel and Germany have become economic and technological powerhouses. Israel’s military has been ferocious for decades, although greatly dependent on aid from the hegemon. “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid: until February 2022, [i.e. since the early 1950s] the United States had provided Israel US$ 150 billion (non-inflation-adjusted) in bilateral assistance”. The US is currently committed to providing Israel with $3.8 billion in aid annually,¹⁴ and Israel (population 9.6 million, 73% Jewish: 2022 census) has the largest number of US-made F-16 jet fighters outside the United States Air Force. Germany’s military is still comparatively small, but under western pressure could very quickly become formidable once again. Nationalism for the Jews has for over a century now been bound up with Zionism, which in recent decades has taken on an increasingly arrogant and violent form, while for the Germans today it is either, on the Right, a nostalgic harking back to the old pre-1918 Reich or else, on the Left, a ‘Pied Piper’s march’ towards the supernationalist ideology of an increasingly centralised EU State in which the likes of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock seek to lose themselves, just as nationalist zealots in small German states in the 19th century, jealous of England and France, sought to lose themselves in a greater German Reich.

The examples of the catastrophes of the two Jewish-Roman Wars stand before the Jews; the examples of the catastrophes of the two World Wars stand before the Germans. Will these disasters be repeated yet again in the 21st century? Will the Jews be cast out of the Holy Land just as the foreign Crusader kingdoms were shattered and cast out by the Muslim world in the 13th century? Will the Germans be shattered once more in a terrible war between East and West? Also standing before these two peoples of the Middle are the healing examples of Jesus Christ and Kaspar Hauser.

Notes

 1. Readers interested in all aspects of the Kaspar Hauser story are encouraged to read Peter Tradowsky, Kaspar Hauser – The Struggle for the Spirit (Temple Lodge, 1997) and the English translation of Karl Heyer, Kaspar Hauser and the Destiny of Middle Europe in the 19th Century, to be published by Temple Lodge in 2025. 

2. Although the Grand Duchy of Baden no longer exists, the aristocrats of the House of Baden still do. The current head of the family, Prince Bernhard, attended the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II along with his mother and his wife Princess Stephanie and was one of only 30 mourners at the funeral of Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh in 2021. Bernhard is first cousin once removed to King Charles III, and the mother of his late father Prince Maximilian (d. Dec 2022) was sister to Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who was partly educated at Salem the school founded by Maximilian’s grandfather, Prince Max of Baden. Bernhard’s courtesy title is: His Royal Highness the Margrave of Baden, Duke of Zähringen.

3. Martin Kitchen, Kaspar Hauser – Europe’s Child (Palgrave, 2001)

4. The butchers of Nuremberg traditionally brought the tallow from the animals they had slaughtered to this square, where it was bought by candlemakers for their wax.

5. This term was used, for example, by the influential Edwardian era ‘father of Anglo-saxon geopolitics’, Sir Halford Mackinder.

6. The Seleucids were a dynasty (312-64 BC) that ruled a large area of western Asia and was founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals and companions, Séleukos I Nikátōr (Seleukos the Victorious)

7. German original text 1967.

8. Kaspar would have become the Grand Duke, but the pair who arranged his abduction – Countess Luise von Hochberg and her lover (Kaspar’s great-uncle Ludwig) also arranged the deaths of Kaspar’s younger brother, Alexander and Kaspar’s uncle, Friedrich – all so that Ludwig would become Grand Duke and on his death then be succeeded by Countess Luise’s son, Leopold.

9.  14 Points – a utopian programme of 14 abstract and idealist principles presented to the US Congress on 8 Jan. 1918 and intended by President Wilson and his closest adviser, Col. Edward M. House, to serve as a basis for peace negotiations to end the war.

10. See R. Steiner, Towards Social Renewal (RSP, 1999) and S. Usher ed., Rudolf Steiner – Social and Political Science (RSP, 2003).

11. Tradowsky, op. cit., pp. 231-232.

12. Tradowsky, op cit., p. 232.

13. The two others being around the year 1332 (2 x 666) and around the year 1998 (3 x 666). See R. Steiner, Three Streams in Human Evolution, (RSP, rep. 1985), lectures of 11, 12, and 13 October.

12. US Congressional Research Service Report “US Foreign Aid to Israel”, 1 March 2023 https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

Terry Boardman Sept. 2024