Director Werner Herzog with Bruno S

The German title is Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, which sets up different expectations. It’s a better title, since this film is to the mystery of the real Kaspar Hauser as the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse is to murine studies. I was in two minds about bothering to watch it, but from the first I was hooked. A scratchy gramophone recording of Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön, Pachelbel’s Canon, fields of swaying cereal, mountains, lakes and quiet German squares: it appealed to all my feelings about Germany. It was indeed bezaubernd schön.

Kaspar has been kept chained in a cellar all his life – barely speaking, unable to walk, existing on bread and water. It should be a horror story – and in real life it would be, of course, but that is not Herzog’s interest. Kaspar is not unhappy with his lot; he has what he needs and is troubled by nothing. One night his captor takes him outside and abandons him in a town square, leaving him to the mercies of the townsfolk. Thus innocent, ignorant Kaspar is reborn – this time into a society with its chains of ideas and conventions. Reactions to him range from kind to curious; there is no hostility, no beatings – just a painfully slow introduction to language and ordinary human life. The worst things that happens to him are that he is exhibited in a circus to pay for his keep and briefly becomes the protégé of an English aristocrat. Outwardly he adapts and learns, but he is never comfortable. As in Evil Does Not Exist, it’s the human world, not the human himself, which is the wrong fit. We see the bizarre world of human-determined categories through Kaspar’s eyes: I was ready to applaud when he bested a pompous professor of logic! Philip Larkin’s Days came to my mind:

. . . the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields

to see how this “noble savage” could confirm their own pet theories.

Goodness knows what Bruno S had suffered in his own life, but he was perfect in the role of Kaspar – even though he was far too old for the part and not an actor. His oddness and directness and his stilted language were just right: never at ease in this new world, where he was troubled by dreams that he never had in his cellar. Liberation brought him anxiety rather than freedom. Perhaps das Bildnis was not so schön and die Empfindung was not Liebe after all.