Kasper Hauser

W. remembers how it all began. I came into his care, like Robin to Batman: a ward, a protege. How was he to know what would happen?

He taught me table manners, well, basic table manners. He tried to teach me politeness – to shake hands, to make chit-chat, but that was a disaster. He stopped me continually touching my skin through my shirt, and tried to correct my tics.

Friendship involves a lot of nagging, W. says. I had to be nagged! I was like a prisoner released blinking into the light. What had I known of life before I met him? How had I survived?

I was a scholarly Kasper Hauser, W. says. What did I know of reading, or note-taking? I could read, that much is true. But only just, only approximately, and with a great deal of pathos, with wild underlinings and illegitimate identifications. – 'You thought every book you read was all about you, didn't you?' That's me!, I would say, pointing to a passage in Leibniz. It's all about me!, I said, pointing to the Science of Logic.

I could speak – I even spoke well – but with the urgency of a preacher, or an apocalypticist. – 'You thought it was all about to end, didn't you? That this was the day of judgement'. People were impressed at first then frightened. But W. admired my pathos.

Scholarship by any means necessary, that's what I embodied. Scholarship without any ability whatsoever at scholarship, except the need to show scholarship. I can't go on, but I'll go on anyway, that was it, wasn't it? I can't go on, and I never even began …

I made audiences flinch. Professors would turn white, or leave to vomit. – 'They couldn't understand what had just happened'. But W. understood. His heart leapt up. He became my secret advocate.

Hadn't he always sought an outsider scholar? Didn't he dream of intellectual movements that took place outside the university? Of professors of desperation; of the university of alcoholism?