The bizarre story of the boy who walked out of a German forest speaking English and knowing only his first name could hardly be a more appealing one for Germans. It engages with childhood, heroism and deeply felt ideas about being German, which a British observer can hardly engage with.
The idea of a genuine, tangled wilderness of the sort seemingly favoured by the "Forest Boy", named Ray, has been out of the question here for centuries. But for Germans the dark primeval wood, in which their ancestors defeated the Romans, in which the magical heroes and villains of Grimms' fairytales lurked, or in which countless Romantic knights errant wandered, is as much part of the national DNA as heart-bursting pork dishes.
At the front of everyone's minds will be the enigma of Kaspar Hauser – according to both Werner Herzog's classic film and the simple facts of the real story itself – a mysterious teenager (of about the same age as the boy who has turned up in Berlin) who stumbled into Nuremberg in 1828 with almost no knowledge of himself and a tiny vocabulary. Assumed at first to have been raised in the woods, he eventually came up with a story about being raised in a darkened cell – but nobody could ever make head or tail of him and he eventually stabbed himself and died, leaving an unresolved mystery ever since as to whether or not he had been a charlatan all along.
The right attitude to take with the new "Forest Boy" is hard to gauge. It could be a genuinely tragic and strange tale. I am uneasy because I have spent a fair amount of time walking in the German forests and, while they are extensive, they are also a sort of Piccadilly Circus of spry old hikers in special gear, mushroom pickers, scarlet-faced hunters and helpful park rangers of a kind unlikely to leave him in peace. There is also an anxiety about how to survive in the heavy snow that routinely covers the most obvious area, the Giant Mountains, and there would be no food: the teenager would be quite quickly battling with the last wild boar for the last conker.
We will know more soon: Did he bury his father? Why does he speak English? But perhaps he will, like Hauser, never really give up his secret.
