The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

On the morning of Pentecost Sunday on May 26, 1828 a strange 16-year-old young man arrived at the city of Nuremberg, Kingdom of Bavaria. The boy could barely speak and stand upright. He carried with him a letter from an unknown author, addressed to the chief of the local garrison, which assured that the young man was called Kaspar Hauser and born in 1812. The letter also said that he had spent his entire life locked inside a dark dungeon. The mysterious case drew the attention of philosophers and scientists of the time who made enormous efforts to educate and reintegrate Kaspar into society. Hauser died in 1833, as a result of injuries apparently caused by the man who imprisoned and brought him to Nuremberg. Since then, multiple theories have emerged to explain Kaspar Hauser’s origins: it is said that he was the illegitimate son of Napoleon Bonaparte or a German nobleman, that he had some kind of mental disorder, or that he was simply an imposter who created this story to live at the expense of others.

Without questioning the veracity or falsity of these facts, the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog wrote and directed The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (“Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle”; lit. “Every Man for Himself and God Against All”, 1974). The film stylistically is part of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, some directors in the German film industry made for a drastic make-over after years of post-war stagnation. Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders and Schlöndorff are some of the remarkable auteurs of this period.

Herzog’s films are characteristic of portraying weird characters on the verge of insanity. They usually end up forging a vision of the world that collides with reality and reveals the catastrophes which reality hides. The impregnable, massive and indifferent nature usually crushes the minds of these peculiar dreamers. That’s the case of the conqueror Lope de Aguirre in Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) or the rubber businessman Fitzcarraldo in the film of the same name from 1982. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is no exception. Here, the protagonist is played by Bruno Schleinstein, a self-taught actor who was the illegitimate son of a prostitute. He suffered severe physical and psychological abuse throughout his life. With just three years old, he was sent to an orphanage and spent the next 23 years in reformatories and mental health institutions- despite not mentally being ill according to Herzog. The blows and indifferences of life had shaped Schleinstein into a man of intense concentration, tunnel vision and narrow social skills. Three years after the release of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog casted Bruno again for Stroszek (1977).

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser takes us to the Bavarian landscapes and townships of the nineteenth century, accompanied by the music of masters such as Mozart, Albinoni and Pachelbel. Music from the period of Romanticism, a time where Germans saw it as crucially important to create a socially unified nation independent from the other European countries. This is the world in which Kaspar appears, he is released as a prisoner of a true Platonic cave, a man without education or social relationships who must face an unknown and cruel reality. The young man is taken care of by Professor Georg Friedrich Baumer (Walter Ladengast), who welcomes him into his house. He teaches him how to read, write, and play the piano. Baumer explains that his mission is to make him recover from the time he was isolated from men, but Kaspar replies: “Men are like wolves.”

Our protagonist is condemned to live as a curiosity among the reality in which he lives. First, we have the children, innocent like Kaspar, who just want to play with him. Later, he is handed over to a circus that exhibits him among its other “eccentricities” such as dwarfs, Andean aborigines and “crazy” musicians. Herzog reveals the denigration to which bourgeois society subjects this group of characters, pointing out the cruelty and lack of meaning inside modern life values, values which are constantly replaced by competitiveness and economic performance as forms of social scale. Some Lutheran pastors visit Kaspar and ask him if he had any natural vision of God during the years of social isolation, but Hauser doesn’t understand the faith or the existence of any deity. After a brief argument with the clergies, he is asked “not to investigate the things of faith, but to believe.” Kaspar answers, with all the difficulty that his poor command of language imposes on him: “What I have to do is learning to read and write… better.”

We also meet Lord Stanhope (Michael Kroecher), an eccentric English nobleman interested in meeting Kaspar and taking him to Great Britain. But instead of instructing him as Baumer does, he wants to present Kaspar as his personal “savage protégé” to the high society. Kaspar won’t fit into this social group, being rejected by the aristocrats that constantly try to “civilize” him in their gatherings. Taking advantage of Kaspar’s mind, free of prejudices and induced beliefs, Herzog shows us how the accumulation of knowledge and the ideological/moral tendencies tend to mislead us. The development of modern intelligence and the capacities of deduction come with an endless list of prohibitions, prejudices and reservations that usually place obstacles in terms of our development inside the world and our acceptance or rejection to others. This is clearly shown in the lucid and sensible responses of our protagonist, his mind is an absolute product of natural intuition and common sense. Therefore, Kaspar’s interactions demonstrate that the “official”, “civilized” intelligence often goes against the real desire and common sense of human beings.

Herzog, to finish off the picture about all these issues, faithfully portrays the tragic end of our protagonist. The young Kaspar Hauser was killed by an unknown person with a knife in the middle of the street. Even so, this is not the end of Kaspar, because, reviving the old interest in his case, his body will be subjected to examinations, studies, dissections and various manipulations that impose a new degradation, this time physical, without ever stopping to consider the human being beyond the scientific interest. Spanish film critic Ricardo Aldarondo concluded perfectly: “Herzog raises the difficulties of insertion and communication of the different or the marginalized in a society that, in case of paying attention to them, will do so by trying to adapt them to the rules. And the misfit, no matter how hard he tries, will find himself without weapons to survive inside a hostile environment.”

by Octavio Carbajal González