The curious tale of Peter the Wild Boy

In the summer of 1725 a peculiar youth was found in the forest of Hertswold near Hameln in northern Germany. Aged about 12, he walked on all fours and fed on grass and leaves. ‘A naked, brownish, blackhaired creature’, he would run up trees when approached and could utter no intelligible sound. The latest in a long line of feral children – in turn celebrated, shunned and cursed through the ages – ‘The Wild Boy of Hameln’ would be the first to achieve real fame.

After a spell in the House of Correction in Celle, the boy was taken to the court of George, Duke of Hanover and King of the United Kingdom, at Herrenhausen. There the young curiosity was initially treated as an honoured guest. Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away. He was given the name of Peter, but was variously known as ‘Wild Peter’, ‘Peter of Hanover’, or, most famously,‘Peter the Wild Boy’.

In the spring of 1726, after briefly escaping back to the forest, Peter was brought to London where his tale had aroused particular interest. As in Hanover, he caused a sensation and his carefree nature provided an amusing antidote to the stultifying boredom and decorum of court life. He appealed especially to Caroline, Princess of Wales, who persuaded the king to allow Peter to move to her residence in the West End, where he was kept virtually as a pet. Though he insisted on sleeping on the floor, he was dressed carefully each morning in a tailor-made suit of green and red. He was also appointed a tutor, who had him baptised and taught him to bow and kiss the hands of the ladies at court.

Peter quickly became a celebrity. On one level, tales of his antics busied the London gazettes. Jonathan Swift, whose fictional ‘Yahoos’ Peter appeared to personify, noted sourly that ‘there is scarcely talk of anything else’. He was soon the ‘talk of the town’, his portrait graced the walls of the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace and an effigy of him was erected in a waxworks on the Strand. In 1727 a premature report of his death gave rise to a mocking epitaph in the British Journal. His resemblance to Swift’s fantastical characters had clearly not been missed:

Ye Yahoos mourn, for in this Place
Lies dead the Glory of your Race,
One, who from Adam had Descent,
Yet ne’er did what he might repent;
But liv’d, unblemish’d, to fifteen,
And yet, O strange, a Court had seen,
Was solely rul’d by Nature’s Laws,
And dy’d a Martyr in her Cause!
Now reign, ye Houynhnms, for Mankind,
Have no such Peter left behind,
None like the dear departed Youth,
Renown’d for Purity and Truth,
He was your Rival, and our Boast,
For ever, ever, ever lost!

But Peter could not to live up to the popular interest invested in him and a fickle public quickly abandoned him in favour of the next unfortunate. His academic progress also failed to match his earlier promise. He was declared ‘unable to receive instruction’, despite the attentions of ‘the ablest masters’. He could say nothing beyond his own name and a garbled form of ‘King George’. By 1728, his tutor had given up his efforts and Peter was retired to the country. A home was found for him on a farm near Northchurch in Hertfordshire and a generous crown pension of £35 per annum was supplied for his upkeep. The ‘talk of the town’ became a humble farm hand.

Though still only an adolescent, Peter faded into provincial obscurity and thereafter rarely troubled the gossip columns. He developed a taste for gin and loved music, reportedly swaying and clapping with glee and dancing until he was exhausted. But he never learned to speak and his lack of any sense of direction gave cause for concern. In 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion, he was arrested as a suspected Highlander and, six years later, he wandered as far as Norwich, where he was thought to be a Spanish subversive. As a result he was fitted with a heavy leather collar bearing the inscription: ‘Peter, the Wild Man of Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr Fenn at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, shall be paid for their trouble.’ He finally died, aged around 72, in 1785.

Though Peter’s life is remarkable enough, what is most astounding is the sheer scale of scientific and philosophical interest that his case aroused. While wits opined that the boy might be corrupted by the sybaritic life of London high society, others saw in him an ideal test case for the nascent sciences of anthropology and psychology.

To the thinkers of the Age of Reason, Peter represented a blank slate. As humanity in its ‘raw’ state, he was what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called ‘the noble savage’, man ‘unspoilt’ by society and civilisation. He was indeed a fascinating subject, but he provoked further, disquieting, enquiry. He was undoubtedly human but, lacking speech and socialisation, could he be classed as a man? Could he have a soul? Could he possess the power of thought?

Of the numerous thinkers and writers who addressed the subject, Daniel Defoe did so with the most clarity in his pamphlet Mere Nature Delineated, published in 1726. He described Peter as an ‘object of pity’ but cast doubt on the story of his origins, dismissing it as a ‘Fib’. On the issue of Peter’s soul, he was more charitable. Possessed of the gift of laughter and thought, Peter clearly had a soul, he wrote, but its powers did not yet act within him. He was, in sum, ‘in a state of Mere Nature … a ship without a Rudder’. And it was the task of his tutors to bring him to ‘the Use of his Reason’. He deferred the final verdict on Peter, therefore, until the results of his education became apparent. If he could receive instruction – if he could be taught to heed his soul – then he would become a man. And, what was more, he would be a lesson to us all, especially, wrote Defoe, ‘those who think nobody so wise as themselves’.

Defoe wrestled manfully with the uncomfortable question that Peter posed: what was it that divided ‘us’ from ‘them’, man from the animals? Different minds arrived at different conclusions. But the habitual tidier of nature Carl Linnaeus was typical. He reassured mankind by creating a separate species of ‘wild men’ or homo ferens. Peter was still clearly an outsider – one of ‘them’.

Peter’s example was later used in numerous theories of child development, socialisation and the role of language. Many thinkers dwelt on his inability to learn to speak. The philosopher James Burnett (Lord Monboddo), whose ideas anticipated some of Darwin’s, presented him as an illustration of his theory of the evolution of language in the human species. He saw Peter as evidence that ‘man was born mute, and that articulation is altogether … a habit acquired by custom and exercise’. To others, Peter was thought to demonstrate the existence of a ‘critical window’ in which language and other skills are developed in the child. Having missed the ‘window’, Peter could never learn such skills again. Hence the apparent failure of his esteemed tutors.

Other scientists concentrated on the role of ‘socialisation’ in child development. After a childhood supposedly devoid of parental care and nurture, Peter was considered to have developed a ‘mental indifference’ and a lack of empathy, reflection and memory. In common with other feral children, it was argued, he ‘lived solely to survive’, satisfying only his base desires for food and sleep. In other interpretations, Peter’s mental shortcomings were attributed primarily to his lack of language. Having never learned to speak, it was suggested, how could he comprehend his own ‘inner voice’? How could he order and make sense of his world? The result was that he was virtually unable to display higher mental functions. He was trapped in the mind of a toddler.

The 19th-century German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) then rather spoiled the intellectual party. Examining contemporary accounts, which suggested that Peter had been tonguetied (hence his inability to speak) and had webbed fingers on one hand (a common corollary to mental impairment), he concluded that ‘the Wild Boy’ was most probably mentally retarded. If this was the case, he argued, it would help to explain Peter’s peculiar origins – a point that had also bothered Defoe.

Rather than being a genuine ‘feral child’ then, Peter was most probably abandoned, possibly only weeks before his discovery. Most importantly, however, if he had been mentally disabled, then all the noble theories of development and socialisation which relied on his example were rendered lame. The ‘noble savage’ had been a simple charity case, worthy of pity certainly, but not philosophical enquiry.

Feral children have always aroused man’s fascination. But when Peter stumbled out of the forest in 1725 he encountered a world in intellectual ferment. Inspired by the Light of Reason and the Scientific Revolution, Europe’s new secular intelligentsia was examining the world anew after centuries of obscurantism and superstition. An army of frustrated empiricists, they submitted everything and everyone to rational investigation. To them, Peter was a godsend: ‘the very Creature which the learned World have … pretended to wish for’. They pamphleteered, polemicised and pontificated. But, like their subject, they were stumbling into the unknown, often lacking the words to pose the right questions and the knowledge to interpret their observations correctly. As a mute, Peter was unable to disabuse them of their wilder conjectures and his mystery only deepened, fuelling the debate and spurring the theorists. In a sense, the philosophers of the Age of Reason had met their match. They were faced with a man who did not make sense. But, for all their theories, it did not occur to them that he could not make sense – that there was no ‘sense’ to make. As Defoe had suggested, it is quite possible that they brought ‘an Ideot upon the Stage, and made a great Something out of Nothing’.

Whatever his ailments, Peter was not forgotten by the royal court. His keep was paid by the crown for nearly 60 years through three reigns and when he died a brass tablet was erected to his memory at royal expense. But Peter was no more loquacious in death than he had been in life. He was given a prime spot in the graveyard at Northchurch, close to the south porch, and his rough-hewn stone, now shaded by an unruly dog rose, reads simply: ‘Peter the Wild Boy – 1785’.

© Roger Moorhouse 2010

(This article was first published in "History Today" April, 2010.)

An item in The Times today caught my eye. A commission of German historians has concluded that the death toll from the notorious bombing of Dresden on 13th February 1945 was no more than 25,000.

This is significant in a number of respects. Firstly, it puts to bed the long-running argument about the 'morality' of the bombing, which had in turn been fuelled by the assumption that as many as 200,000 civilians died in the city that night.

The moral outrage than many felt - in some cases genuinely, and in some cases with a rather more nefarious ulterior motive - was primarily a result of that disproportionate figure. If the assumption is now that 'only' 25,000 died that night, then it rather robs the dissenters of their case.

Secondly, it is highly likely that the original figure was shamlessly inflated by the Nazis themselves, most probably by simply adding a '0' to their own casualty estimate. They certainly had a track-record of doing this. A few weeks later, a massive daylight USAAF raid on Berlin caused huge destruction and large-scale loss of life - but the Nazi authorities claimed that fully 25,000 Berliners lost their lives that day. Given that Berlin was the best defended and best-prepared city in the whole of Europe, this figure is utterly implausible. No Allied raid - even during the "Battle of Berlin" of 1943 - came even close to such a total; with most registering hundreds of deaths, rarely even thousands.

Thirdly, it is worth mentioning that 25,000 deaths that night is still an enormous figure. As the above example demonstrates, air raid death figures rarely reached even four figures. So, even the 'downgraded' Dresden death-toll should still serve to remind us of the horror of the air war.
We should remember that the 25,000 deaths reaped in a single night (or couple of nights) at Dresden represents fully half of the British civilian death toll from air attack over 6 years of warfare...

Gedenkbuch Berlin

In 1995, fifty years after the demise of Hitler’s Third Reich, a long-standing research enterprise finally bore fruit. As early as the 1960s, the idea of a memorial book for the Jews of Berlin had been mooted. Finally, following the collapse of the GDR in 1989, and the granting of access to the archival materials formerly in communist possession, the volume was published. The Gedenkbuch Berlins draws on the available documentary sources to list as many as possible of those Jews deported from the German capital between 1941 and 1945, who subsequently died at the hands of the Nazis. Each entry begins with the victim’s name in bold, followed by a date and place of birth, a date and destination of ‘evacuation’ and finally a date of death. The very first entry is that of Jutta Aal, who was born in November 1860 in Bavaria and was deported to Theresienstadt in the autumn of 1942. Already 81 years-old at the time of her deportation, Jutta survived the ghetto for barely two weeks.

From that entry, the victims proceed – around 40 per page – for nearly 1,400 pages. Entire extended families are listed; children alongside parents and grandparents, the great and the good alongside the unremarkable and unexceptional. Many are listed simply as ‘declared dead’; others bear the euphemism “verschollen”, literally meaning ‘vanished’. A few are listed as “schicksal unbekannt”, ‘fate unknown’. There are 6 pages of ‘Abraham’s, 11 pages of ‘Hirsch’s, 12 pages of ‘Levy’s and 13 pages of ‘Wolff’s. The total number of victims listed is 55,696. The final entry is that of Leo Zyzman from Berlin, who was only just 16 when he was sent to Auschwitz in the autumn of 1942. It is a deeply moving and fitting memorial to a community annihilated.

9th November - A Day that will live in History

Today - 9th November - is a very important day. As you will have seen in your morning newspaper, it is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; perhaps the most important single event in our recent history. It was 20 years ago this evening, that East German border guards stood aside for the very first time, opened the gates and border crossings and allowed the East German people to simply walk through to the west. Momentous, you would think, and rightly so.

Yet, the 9th November has had a curious resonance through German history. Not only was it the day that the Wall fell, it was also a red-letter day for the Nazis, too. The 9th November was the day in 1923 that Hitler launched his attempted coup against the Weimar Republic - the so-called Beer-Hall Putsch - which ended with his imprisonment and the virtual collapse of his movement. In later years and during the Third Reich, the 9th November then became one of the most important dates in the Nazi calendar; a day of commemorations and of solemn ceremonies across the Reich, and especially in Munich (where the original Putsch had taken place), where the Nazi martyrs were honoured.

The 9th November 1938 was also the date of the famed Reich "Kristallnacht" - the state-sponsored pogrom against Jewish homes and businesses, by which Nazi anti-Semitism first showed its teeth. Around a hundred German jews were murdered and 30,000 or so were consigned to the concentration camps. In addition, hundreds of synagogues across Germany were destroyed or desecrated.

The following year, the 9th November brought yet more momentous events. On that day in 1939 - 70 years ago today - Georg Elser made his little-known attempt to rid the world of Adolf Hitler. His bomb - planted in the Burgerbraukeller in Munich - exploded barely 13 minutes after Hitler had given a speech there. In the aftermath, 8 lay dead and around 60 were injured. Had Hitler been standing at the lectern, he would most certainly have been killed, but the speech had been cut short.

Lastly, 9th November 1918 was the day on which the German Republic was proclaimed at the end of the First World War.

Of course, this is not all mere happenstance. There is a thread running through at least some of these events. Hitler chose the anniversary of the proclamation of the (to him) hated German Republic to launch his grasp for power. Then, during the Third Reich, the commemoration of that putsch then gave Georg Elser his opportunity to seek to do away with the German dictator. The other two events - Kristallnacht and the fall of the Wall in 1989 - are the only coincidences.

So, 9th November, is a day which is central to modern German history - a day which commemorates both the best and the worst in Germany and the Germans.

Of Skulls, Suicides and Conspiracists

I came to this one a bit late, I'm afraid, as I have been struggling to get my latest book finished.

Anyway... It seems Hitler is never far from the news. A couple of weeks ago the story broke that American researchers had undertaken DNA testing on the fragment of Hitler's skull - held by the Russian archives in Moscow - and had concluded that it could not belong to the German dictator as it belonged to a woman under the age of 40.

Well, blow me down.

An interesting footnote in history. In fact, this has been discussed before. When the Russian authorities put the skull on display in 2000, German historian Werner Maser said that it was not Hitler's, but was largely ignored. Indeed, when I was researching for my book "Killing Hitler", I looked into the circumstance of his death in some detail, and it struck me then that it was very strange that most informed witnesses and commentators conclude that Hitler shot himself in his right temple, yet the skull in Moscow is clearly of someone who has shot themselves through the mouth...

So, the skull fragment is not Hitler's. Big news. Or not... Given the chaos of Berlin in the spring of 1945 and the sheer number of bodies littering the streets - and even the Reich Chancellery Garden - it is hardly surprising that the skull that the NKVD men picked up was not the right one...

But this does not give the world's conspiracists free rein to spout preposterous and long-discredited theories that Hitler might have survived the battle for Berlin. He didn't. He died, by his own hand, on 30 April 1945 in his apartment in the Reich Chancellery Bunker. The precise identity of the mysterious Moscow skull doesn't change that fact...

Playing Politics with World War Two

It seems that none of the major political players, gathered at Gdansk yesterday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two, could resist playing politics with the event.

Worst offender, predictably, was Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who demonstrated his nation's idiosyncratic grasp of 20th century history to full effect. He started by paying tribute to the "bravery and heroism" of the Polish people, soldiers and officers, who had been the first to "stand up to Nazism" in 1939.


So far, so uncontroversial, you might think - but think again. Aren't those the same Polish people and soldiers whose homeland was invaded by the Soviet Army on 17th September 1939 - two weeks after the Wehrmacht? The same Polish people and soldiers whom the Soviets deported in their thousands to Siberia, many of them never to return? And the same Polish officers who were murdered in cold blood by Putin's own former employers - the NKVD/KGB - and buried in the forests of Byelorussia?


As if that were not enough double-speak for one day - Putin went on. Before the assembled audience of worthies and the world's press, he condemned any collaboration with the Nazis between 1934 and 1939 as “morally unacceptable and politically and practically senseless, harmful and dangerous”. A reference, you might think, to the Nazi-Soviet Pact - even a veiled apology? No. Nothing of the sort. It is in fact a rather barbed and cynical reference to the Polish-German non-aggression pact of 1934 - a rather cack-handed attempt to equate that defensive agreement with the cynical carve-up agreed between Hitler and Stalin five years later.


Given that the 'tone' had evidently been set, others followed suit. Polish President Kaczynski is never one to shirk an opinion, and he duly denounced the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 as "a stab in the back", and stated that the mass murder of Polish officers by the Soviets in 1940, at Katyn, must be treated as a war crime. He closed with a rousing "Glory to the heroes of Westerplatte, glory to all of the soldiers who fought in World War II against German Nazism, and against Bolshevik totalitarianism."


Polish Prime Minster Donald Tusk then joined in - referring to a Red Army cemetery close to his home. "Tens of thousands of young people lost their lives here", he said, "They gave their lives for liberation, but they didn't bring us freedom." He was right, of course, the arrival of the Soviet Army in 1945 certainly drove out the Nazis, but it also ushered in over 4 decades of communist rule. If he was listening, Putin would have been squirming.


German Chancellor Angela Merkel was perhaps the least controversial of the three. She began by paying tribute to all those who died in a war "unleashed by Germany" and perhaps in a conscious echo of Willy Brandt in Warsaw in 1970, added that she "bowed before the victims".


Yet, Merkel too, had an axe to grind. Though she stated clearly that nothing could dilute Germany's "eternal historic responsibility" for the war, she nonetheless felt moved to remember the plight of the many millions of German refugees deported out of the historic eastern provinces after 1945. Given that they were deported from lands that were subsequently taken by Poland - and were displaced primarily by Poles - this reference was certainly not uncontroversial. This time, Kaczynski and Tusk would have been squirming.


Then she aimed a broadside at Putin, referring to Germany's good relations with her neighbours and Germany's ability to "confront" its history - an ability sadly lacking in Putin's Russia.


So, all in all, another reminder that recent history is never far below the surface in Europe. Little wonder perhaps that it was an American who famously proclaimed "The End of History" a few years ago - how very wrong he was.

On Memory, History and Human Experience

The death, earlier this week, of Harry Patch, the last surviving British veteran on World War One, coming as it did so soon after the death of our other WW1 veteran Henry Allingham, set me thinking about the nature of memory and our links with the past.

Patch, of course, wrote (or had ghosted) a memoir - called "The Last Fighting Tommy" - which I confess I haven't read, but which I am sure details his experiences in the trenches. But I wonder how much he can really tell us about that most awful conflict, that we don't already know. Apart from being our last surviving 'Tommy', I thought, what can he really contribute? Surely his significance lies - to put it rather bluntly - purely in his longevity?

Well, whilst musing on this rather uncharitable thought, it occurred to me that it would not be long before we would be facing a similar situation with regard to veterans of the Second World War. After all, any 'fighting' veteran of that conflict would now be 80-years-old at the very least - well beyond the biblical allocation of "threescore years and ten". And, I well recall interviewing Lord Haig last year - about his experiences in the Italian campaign and then in Colditz - and he too passed away a couple of weeks ago at the ripe old age of 91. And, given that the Second World War it much more my patch - excuse the pun - how would I feel about seeing the last tommy of that conflict pass away?

Well, that rather alters things, for me. I have spent the last three years researching a book on the civilian experience of World War Two in the German capital, Berlin. In the process, I have interview many Berliners - civilian 'veterans' of the war - and have sought to record and contextualise their experiences. Many of them are still in rude health, a few quite astonishingly sprightly, and a few on my list sadly did not survive long enough for me to interview them.

But, the experience of interviewing them has demonstrated to me that the personal absolutely has a role to play in amongst even the most documented and investigated conflicts; personal accounts and anecdotes can always bring a fresh perspective, colour or context to even the most hackneyed and well-trodden narrative. Some purist historians are a little sniffy about this perceived 'personalisation of history' - the elevation of the personal above the political and empirical - but I think that if it is done correctly and responsibly, then it not only has a role to play in historiography, it is an absolutely essential ingredient of the narrative.

For this reason, as a historian, the death of the last British veteran of World War One, is something that we should all mourn. Our last personal, immediate contact to that, most brutal and seminally important of conflicts is now gone. I must now make a pact with myself to get hold of his memoir... Tempus fugit.