After a lifetime's captivity in a prison cell Caspar Hauser, then barely seventeen years old, stumbled into a Nuremberg square to begin life among human beings. His strange innocence and the mystery of his origins immediately excited public curiosity.

The true story of Caspar Hauser has inspired artists as various as Rilke, Verlaine, Werner Herzog, and, not least, Jakob Wassermann. A Dostoevskian study of crime and innocence, his Caspar Hauser (1908) is Gothic in atmosphere and wonderfully rich in psychological insight and dramatic tension.