The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle
Werner Herzog (1974)
In 1828 a youth called Kaspar Hauser appeared on the town square in Nuremberg. He had very little language but, after first being exhibited as a fairground freak, was taken in by an affluent, elderly man with whose help he learned to read and write – and to be able to tell of his previous existence. Kaspar spent the first seventeen years of his life locked in a cellar, with just a toy horse for company. He had no human contact except through a black-clad man who brought him food and who, shortly before depositing Kaspar in the outside world, taught him a few phrases and how to walk. Kaspar’s education enabled him to develop interests in logic, philosophy and music. In 1833, he died as unexpectedly as he appeared, from a stab wound inflicted by a person and for reasons unknown. In Werner Herzog’s famous film, the enigma of Kaspar is juxtaposed with a laborious and soon predictable demonstration of the varieties of human vice and folly – represented by clerics, a logician, a fencer, thickos who scare and laugh at Kaspar, a fairground proprietor. (Kaspar’s being put on display as a freak also illustrates the meanness of the townspeople who take the view that he needs to earn his keep.) The final emblems of inhumanity are the medics who dissect his corpse and explain his ‘abnormality’ as the result of an enlarged liver and cerebellum. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is an example of a movie deemed to have intellectual substance because its moralising intent is so clear, not to say obvious. As tends to happen in this kind of set-up, the benign if ineffectual characters – the elderly man who takes Kaspar in (Walter Ladengast), a motherly housekeeper (Brigitte Mira), a peasant family – are naturally and effectively played; the malign and/or representative ones are overdone, as ludicrous as they’re rebarbative. A subset of other characters – most notably the wizened, crooked town clerk (Clemens Scheitz) – are so physically and vocally eccentric that the actors’ unvarying quality doesn’t matter: they provide undeniably potent sights and sounds.
Herzog departs from the facts in one important respect. Bruno Schleinstein (‘Bruno S’), who plays Kaspar, was over forty when the film was made (although Herzog’s script still has other characters referring to him as ‘lad’). Bruno S’s own experiences – he spent much of his childhood in mental institutions – are clearly meant not only to resonate with those of Kaspar but also to transcend quibbles around realism. Bruno S dominates the film and Herzog said, on Schleinstein’s death in 2010, that he was by far the finest actor he’d ever worked with. He may well be better than Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s best-known leading man, but it’s difficult to judge Bruno S as an actor in this film. This wasn’t because I hadn’t him seen before – after this debut, he appeared in only two or three other features, including Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) – but because Kaspar is so very singular. It’s therefore hard to read what you see as an actor’s performance. Kaspar is some kind of visionary. If not exactly a cliché, he’s a member of quite a large film family, of individuals who are not equipped to manage in the conventional world but who can somehow see beyond it: the careful composition of his particular visions also suggests that he has the eye of an arthouse film-maker decades before the invention of cinema. I’m not sure if my failure to work out quite how Kaspar develops intellectually is evidence of the enigma that he is or of my dim-wittedness. I was intimidated by the prospect of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser when I was a twenty-year-old and I’m relieved that I’ve not seen it until now – when I’ve reached an age at which I’m not so bothered about how stupid my reactions to a film may be. The classical music on the soundtrack reinforces the movie’s unarguable artistic credentials. The aggressive German title – ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ – is much sharper and more challenging than the English one.
10 July 2013