Friday 16 September 2011

mowgli or babelsberg

We may well all have been had, but this sort of story, tragic and mysterious, is engrossing and seems a little too quiet to be a hoax--the English daily the local reports on a teenage boy who emerged from the forests outside Berlin in early September, healthy but apparently oblivious of his origins and identity after having lived in the woods for five years with his father. He only speaks English and demonstrates only rudimentary understanding of German. I am reminded about another supposed wild youth of Germany, Kaspar Hauser of Ansbach, who may have, as a rightful heir to the throne, been cast into the wilderness and hidden away by a pretender or usurper. The story, just told in brief, seems quite sad and I am sure that the German Sprachraum is sensitive to such dramatic appearances, especially considering the continuing revelations of kept basement-women and cases of decades of mistreatment and isolation. In fact, this sort of thing seems to be a particularly German leit-motif, with Rapunzel, the Bamberg Boy who was raised by cows, Peter of Hamelin (same town where the villagers lost their children because they failed to pay the piper) who was adopted by the British monarchy. There is also the film Hanna (a German-American venture from Babelsberg studios), about a prodigious and deadly little girl, raised alone by her father in arctic wastelands and intensely tutored in what to do in case of an emergency, like the youth found outside of Berlin was instructed to go north. It is a mystery--and I wonder what kind of escapism it is to feel estrangement, savage otherness, that such things happen to anybody but at the same time hope it's not a prank.