Werner Herzog’s enduringly gripping and influential movie is rereleased for its 50th anniversary; it is Herzog’s early masterpiece, a bold and brilliant retelling of a strange true story from German history, plainly and candidly staged, full of poignancy, and pathos as well as mystery, but which is also revealed here to be about the arbitrary nature of survival and death. The original German title is Jeder für Sich und Gott Gegen Alle, whch translates as Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which Herzog used as the title of his recent autobiography.
In 1828, a disturbed and feral youth appears apparently from nowhere in Nuremberg, claiming to have grown up alone, imprisoned in a dungeon like an animal and then abruptly released and abandoned. The astonished townsfolk take him in; a kindly schoolmaster looks after his education, and his rapid learning of speech and behaviour makes him celebrated in high society where he is rumoured to have noble birth – for who but a well-born family would take the trouble to conceal a disturbed child like this? And could it be that his very existence is politically embarrassing?
Herzog’s superb film centres on a masterstroke of nonprofessional casting: 42-year-old Bruno Schleinstein, who had spent much of his life in care, with learning and educational difficulties, and untrained musical talents and who had already been the subject of a documentary. In the film he was credited as Bruno S (perhaps patronisingly, to emphasise his childlike primitive credentials). Herzog used Schleinstein again in the 1977 film Stroszek. Like other nonprofessional actors briefly elevated to iconic movie stardom and then returned to obscurity, Schleinstein reportedly had mixed feelings about the experience.
Watched again now, this film reveals Schleinstein to be quite as much of an enigma as Kaspar Hauser. His performance has a stolid dignity and self-possession, understated and calm, where a regular actor might be expected to be histrionic and hammy. And with this new viewing, I could see the sly and mischievous comedy in his performance: a twinkle in the wide-eyed gaze and the determined set in the mouth. He is a holy innocent among the people crowding around him, variously good-natured or malign.
Herzog gives this savant Kaspar showstopping insights and pensées: “Why can one not play the piano like breathing?” he asks; he also says that the silence of a church congregation is to him like screaming. He defeats a pompous professor of logic in debate and grows his own name in garden cress. But the sinister cloaked figure who dumped him in the town in the first place makes a reappearance, perhaps worried that the newly articulate Kaspar will start to remember things and talk, although Herzog does not emphasise the conspiracist side of the story.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser inspired David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots and Yorgos Lanthimos’s recent Poor Things; these film-makers responded to the rich dramatic potential in middle-class polite society’s tortuous reaction to a dissident outsider in their midst, someone who artlessly exposes their fears and whom they can neither accommodate nor reject.
Moreover, there is something overwhelmingly sad in Kaspar as he tries to explain his recurring dreams, particularly one about a caravan of camels in the desert (perhaps inspired by the camel and the showman in the circus where he was briefly forced to appear as an attraction, to pay for his upkeep). The caravan is leading … where? Kaspar is stupefied by his realisation that he does not know but, like a child, dwells on the mystery long after an adult would have shrugged and forgotten about it. Kaspar is transfixed by the potent poetry of unknowing that surrounds everyone’s life and death.
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is released on 19 January in UK and Irish cinemas.
