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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 185 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 185, April 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
Dir: Werner Herzog
Tartan Video £15.99
Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is a tale woven around real events. Hauser was a young man who appeared alone in a small town in Germany one day in 1828. He was unable to speak more than a single sentence and was apparently brought up in complete isolation from the outside world.
This is a complex and subtle film and Herzog doesn’t settle for easy cliché. Kaspar Hauser is not simply a noble savage or a victim of society. He is, rather, a mixture of these things, and as his relationships with other people flourish and his grasp of language deepens, so his faculties and abilities alter. Over the course of the film Hauser develops from a man who meekly accepts being part of a freak show into a person who can leave a professor of philosophy with egg on his face.
The story of an uncivilised outsider suddenly being exposed to the modern world has been the theme of previous films, including Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke and more recently the Jodie Foster vehicle, Nell. But The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser also calls to mind films like Edward Scissorhands and The Elephant Man. This is partly because these films share a certain lyricism, but also because Herzog has made the character of Kaspar Hauser too well-rounded to be easily captured by a simple formula. He is treated as, variously, a spectacle for the ignorant, a specimen to be studied, a soul to be saved, a burden on the community, or an object of pity.
This film is, on one level, very much about ideas, and Herzog takes a critical position not so much by attributing some genius to Kaspar Hauser, but by showing how establishment bourgeois thinkers fail to offer a convincing explanation for things.
Hauser lived a short life which was ended in a violent attack by an unknown assailant. Those who had searched most diligently for a solution to the ‘enigma’ found consolation in the supposed deformities in the dead man’s brain and liver which they claimed bore the secret of his peculiar life.
That this is an attitude with which Herzog profoundly disagrees is obvious. He seems to be saying that life cannot be dissected, analysed, and ‘solved’ in any simplistic way. Theologians, third rate philosophers and the sort of scientists who would today be called sociobiologists fail to understand this, and their empty schemes can’t capture Hauser’s experiences.
Herzog himself makes no attempt to provide a definitive solution to the enigma, except to hint that this is a condition common to all our lives. In doing so he has made a film of considerable grace, economy and wit.
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