"The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser"

Kaspar Hauser is probably the most famous of all recorded cases of unidentified people. He was found as a teenager in the city of Nuremberg with a Bible and a poorly-written letter purportedly written by a guardian, explaining that he had been instructed in reading and writing but had never set foot out of his house until now, and that he wished to become a cavalryman. Though he initially seemed barely able to speak or understand German, Kaspar knew how to write his name and eventually became loquacious enough to tell people he had spent his entire life locked in a small dark cellar, visited only by the same man who later released him into Nuremberg. His custody was passed on to several people until he died of a mysterious stab wound in 1833.

Over the centuries, there has been a great deal of speculation about Kaspar’s identity. A popular theory was that he was an illegitimate heir to the House of Baden. Others point to his stories’ inconsistencies and reputation as an attention-seeking liar, and deduce that he may have been nothing more than a vagabond trickster who ran away from home and feigned mental illness for attention, sympathy and free lodging.

Whatever the factual truth may be, it is the least of Werner Herzog’s concerns. Though the opening scenes depicting Hauser’s last days in his cellar and subsequent abandonment seem to indicate he believes Kaspar’s story, Herzog is not interested in historical reconstitution or drama. He exposes the mystery of Kaspar Hauser’s identity as mere blinds covering a window into a more elusive and fascinating mystery altogether; that of human nature.

 
Kaspar Hauser, if his story is accurate, has spent his entire childhood without any contact with the outside world other than his mysterious black-clad captor, whose face is never completely clear. The man is seen teaching him how to write and how to say certain specific words and phrases, such as “I want to be a gallant rider like my father before me”, rewarding him with toy horses and punishing him with a stick to the arm. Kaspar takes all of this unquestioningly, without protest or resistance. When a police officer tests him by pretending to thrust a sword at him, he does not react. He accepts a brief career as a circus freak, where schoolmaster Daumer finds him, and takes him under his wing.

A two-year ellipse passes. Kaspar has a better grasp of the German language and can better express how he feels and what he thinks, but that does not make him any less hard to understand or more in tune with his fellow man: The thoughts he expresses are at times childlike and seem to indicate mental retardation.

Consider: Kaspar is in the garden with Daumer and a pastor, looking at the apple tree. He talks of apples as if they were living, sentient beings. Daumer gently corrects him, telling him that they have no mind of their own and are subject to human will. To prove it, he tells him he can throw it and it will land where he wants, on the path. Instead, it lands in the grass. He tries again, this time aiming at the pastor’s foot. It goes over it. “Smart apple”, remarks Kaspar.

 

This would seem to indicate a mentally retarded man, except that his way of thinking and acting defy such simplistic diagnosis. At times, he expresses himself with a strange kind of poetry that would indicate a creative and philosophical mind. Upon hearing the music of a blind pianist, he remarks “The music feels strong in my heart…I feel so unexpectedly old”. Earlier, when rocking a baby’s cradle, he pronounces those mysterious words to no one in particular: “Mother, I am so far away from everything”. He has strange, beautiful dreams whose abstract nature and visual presentation – as grainy video footage – seem to suggest distant memories of a past life.

 At other times, it is unclear whether Kaspar operates within his own logic or whether he possesses logical abilities that simply do not fit into society’s conventions:

-          The former is illustrated by a scene in which he walks by the tower he briefly lived in before coming into Daumer’s care. This does not make sense to him: Whether he looked right, left, frontwards or backwards, all he could see was room; whereas he just has to turn away from the tower to stop seeing it. Therefore, to Kaspar’s mind, the room is bigger than the tower. Of course Kaspar is incorrect, but one can see the thought process that led him to such a nonsensical deduction.

-          The latter is illustrated by a scene in which Kaspar is visited by a professor who gives him a test of logic that goes thus: Two villages, one inhabited by liars, the other inhabited by truth-tellers. Each have a road that cross into one. You are at that crossroad, where you meet a man coming from one of the villages. What is the one question that will inevitably lead you to know which village the man comes from? To the professor, there can be only one correct question: Do you come from the liars’ village? Kaspar has a much odder yet simpler solution: Ask the man if he is a tree-frog.

Of course, in both cases, Kaspar is incorrect – the question may let him know where the man is from but it would not give him the direction of the villages. Yet in both cases, one can see the thought process that would lead him to such deductions. Kaspar confronts us with common knowledge so obvious that it never required any explanation for us, knowledge and common sense we take for granted, that he was not introduced to and therefore is as alien to him as he is to us.

Herzog’s previously-reviewed 1970 gem “Even Dwarfs Started Small” gets a couple of shout-outs in the form of cameo appearances by lead actor Helmut Döring as a circus freak and the kneeling camel he was laughing at. It is fitting, even logical: Both films examine otherness, challenge our perceptions of it with respectful restraint and detachment. Herzog shoots in mostly short focals and keeps a certain distance from his characters, usually filming in middle shots. He is an observer in a way only an artist can be, watching this man interact with a strange, foreign environment and people that feel so familiar to us despite being set in a historical past. He does not consciously try to teach us a lesson in humanity or make us feel empathy for Kaspar.

 He does so because he trusts Kaspar to do all the necessary work. That work is achieved through one of the purest, most authentic performances you will ever see in your life. The actor in question is Bruno Schleinstein, credited as Bruno S. Bruno was the mentally ill, unwanted son of a prostitute who, according to his IMDb biography, had been experimented upon by the Nazis and had spent most of his life in a mental hospital until he caught Herzog’s eye in the documentary “Bruno The Black”. As Kaspar Hauser, he captures your attention without any conscious effort on his part. His eyes are all over the place, even when his body is stiff and still. When he speaks, he makes a habit of punctuating every word with his index and thumb, in remarkably successful attempts to look and sound as dignified as possible. Herzog could not possibly have obtained this kind of truth with a professional actor, no matter how skilled. Everything about Schleinstein’s performance feels simultaneously real and alien, a very difficult combination indeed.

 “The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser” is part of a certain group of films that all evoke the mystery of human nature and examine the age-old question of nature versus nurture. Those films include Arthur Penn’s “The Miracle Worker”, François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child” – whose lead titular character was also played by a non-professional – and Hugh Hudson’s “Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes”. All of these films are admirable, but I feel Herzog’s film supersedes them by the humility it displays in refusing to answer the many questions it asks. Just as we will never know what happened after the beginning of the story he tells before dying, we will never solve the enigma of Kaspar Hauser and, more importantly, we will never solve the enigma of the other’s perception of ourselves and our world. And it is doubtful that any scientific progress will ever make us come closer to understanding ourselves. Like the film’s scientists, we may perform an autopsy on Kaspar and find several abnormalities in his liver and brains (the latter part is historically disputed) and we may congratulate ourselves on our discovery, but we will hardly know him better for it. That, I suppose, is the artist’s job. At least to try.