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| Via Newspapers.com |
This curious little tale--slightly reminiscent of the famed Kaspar Hauser--appeared in the “Alabama Beacon,” April 5, 1879:
The "Offenbach lady," who has for so many years been a riddle to Germans, has just died in her house at Offenbach, leaving the problem of her name and origin still unsolved.
The London Globe says of her: Nearly all she knew of herself was that she was a Hungarian by birth. On the 9th of November, 1853, a splendid equipage was driven to the border of a large wood near Frankfort. An old lady descended from the carriage, the servants handed out a beautiful little girl to her, and the two wandered some distance into the forest. The old lady, having given the child some meat and bread wrapped in a fine linen napkin, said: "Wait here a few minutes. I must go back to the carriage and will bring mamma to you.”
She never returned. The child wandered, as she said, three days and three nights in the forest, crying for "Mamma" and “Bertha." On the morning of the fourth day she was found by a peasant girl, who took her to a house in a neighboring village, where she slept for one night, but on the next morning she was stripped of her handsome clothes, her ear-rings and a gold medallion, was dressed in poor rags and turned out upon the road. She wandered to the village of Weinkirchen, crying out in Hungarian: "Where is mamma?" The people could not understand her. She was taken before a judge at Offenbach, but, as he knew no Hungarian, he could not get at her story.
She was supposed to be a beggar who had been taught to feign dumbness, for her questioner imagined that her Magyar explanations did not belong to any human language. She was condemned to a month's imprisonment, but her remarkable beauty and the refinement of her manners made such an impression that the sentence was not carried out. The town officials of Offenbach decreed that she should be taught to read and write German, and she remained for a long time the favored ward of the corporation. When she knew sufficient German she certainly unfolded a most extraordinary story. She could only remember two names: "Temeser" (Temesvar?) and "Bertha." She and her brother had been kept for some months in a cellar, where there were geese. Bertha fetched her from the cellar.
Frederick Eck published the story, as taken from her own lips, and it caused a great sensation both in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Vienna papers demanded that stringent inquiries should be made at all the great houses in the neighborhood of Temesvar, but the proposal was never carried out. Professor Hermann Weber, of Kasmark, visited Offenbach, spoke Hungarian with her, and communicated her tale to the Pesti Napto; and other Hungarian scholars interested themselves in the attempt to unravel the mystery. She married an Offenbach, and had two children; but, although her marriage was a singularly happy and prosperous one, she was never able to shake off a certain melancholy, and she has died without any discovery as to who and what she originally was.
I'd love to see a dna test of her to find more information, but I don't see that ever happening.
ReplyDeleteWhy would she be imprisoned, and why abandoned? If she were from a wealthy and influential family, and someone wanted her out of the way (a la the Man in the Iron Mask), it would surely be dangerous for the perpetrators to allow her to live. After all, a beautiful child, speaking only Hungarian, in a German village, was bound to attract attention. Very mysterious.
ReplyDeleteThe link below leads to quite a long piece about the girl. It was written in Offenbach in 1858, shortly after the truth came out. The ‘beautiful little girl’ was in fact 22 years old when found in 1853. Friedrich Eck, a schoolmaster, was charged with educating her. He grew to love her as a daughter and published the pamphlet which made her famous as a ‘female Kaspar Hauser’.
ReplyDelete‘Caroline B’ as she was known lived in Offenbach for five years. During that time she never married nor bore children. Instead she lived with several different families. Each reported her extremely difficult to live with.
By then she had completed her religious studies and was scheduled to be baptized and confirmed. But Caroline was in actually a charlatan who already undergone these rituals. Her conscience would not permit her to commit sacrilege. She fled.
She was discovered in her native Bavaria, in jail for vagrancy under her real name- Kunigunde Lechner. She had grown up an orphan, and her prior life was quite tragic.
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ein_aufgel%C3%B6stes_R%C3%A4thsel