The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) - film review

In 1828, a young man dressed in ragged clothes is found standing in the town square at Nuremberg.  No one recognises him and he can only speak one phrase, "I want to be a cavalryman, like my father."  The townsfolk adopt him as one of their own and attempt to civilise him, although when he becomes a financial burden he ends up as an exhibit in a sideshow.   The kindly Herr Daumer takes pity on the strange young man and takes charge of his education.   Kaspar Hauser, for that is the stranger’s name, remains an enigma, attracting the attention of academics and noblemen.  Encouraged by Daumer, Kaspar begins to write his memoirs, in which he attempts to shed light on his past.  He reveals that for the first seventeen years of his life, he was locked up in a cellar, with only a small wooden horse to keep him amused.  He never saw or spoke to another person until the day he was taken out of the cellar and abandoned in Nuremberg...

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is the baffling literal translation of the original German title of this bizarre yet thoroughly beguiling film from director Werner Herzog, the winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1975.  Quite what Herzog was getting at is hard to divine but the film is an eloquent, albeit somewhat romanticised, account of a true story about a mysterious German foundling who was once thought to be a deposed heir to the House of Baden.

The part of Kaspar Hauser is played by Bruno S., a non-professional actor whom Herzog met by chance whilst making a documentary about street musicians.  The 41-year-old actor had spent most of his life in mental institutions, having been physically abused by his mother at an early age.  Much of the film’s authenticity and poignancy comes from Bruno S.’s vivid portrayal of a vulnerable outsider trying and failing to be assimilated into so-called civilised society.  No professional actor could have played the part as convincingly, nor with such gut-wrenching pathos.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is certainly one of Werner Herzog’s more accessible films, but that does not prevent it from having a great deal of intellectual and moral complexity beneath its seductively placid surface.  At first glance, the film appears to be about how we as individuals are shaped by the environment that we inhabit, particularly in the earliest years of life.  Lock someone up in a cellar for 17 years with only a wooden horse for company and he is unlikely to find work as a chirpy daytime TV presenter (although he could still end up as Prime Minister of Great Britain). 

At a deeper level, the film is a dark satire on those (primarily cocksure academics) who seek to explain the world by pure logic.  The wise men who try to unravel the mystery of Kaspar Hauser do so by purely forensic means; they believe that the enigma cannot be resolved until the facts have been thoroughly dissected, codified and interpreted by cold reason.  Does cutting up an individual’s brain tell us anything about who he was?  Of course not.  Herzog’s thesis is that the world (just like most of his films) cannot be interpreted by mere reductionist reasoning.  If there is an answer it must surely be glimpsed through the more abstract portals of consciousness: imagination, instinct and faith.   That is, unless the answer happens to be forty-two, in which case a pocket calculator might do the trick.

© James Travers 2009

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