The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by Ole Holgersen ★★★★★

  "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser", and other translations of this title is a disgrace to the original German title, "Every Man For Himself, and God Against All". It's obviously that Herzog want's to shake our view on the world by allowing us to observe the world with a fresh mind through the eyes of Kaspar Hauser. The movie is actually not that mysterious, and to me it don't seem that it's in Herzog's intentions to make a mystery film either.

  The story of Kasper Hauser is madly intoxicating, and I was so caught up in the story and the character of Kaspar that I barely noticed the construction workers outside my house! Bruno S. is simply amazing as the troubled…

• Review by Luke McCarthy 7

  In many ways feels like the most measured, literary distillation of Herzog's key preoccupations - the utter absurdity of cultured civility, the struggle to know the unknowable and to find meaning and art within struggle, all filtered through a style which is distinctly less experiential than much of his other work (especially his collaborations with Kinski). Here his camera isn't so much a journeyman as it is a Brechtian observer, more immediately inspired by other German New-Wavers such as Fassbinder in the way he wrings emotion and humour out of the somewhat stilted, artificial rhythms which he's consciously working with here. Bruno's wide-eyed, singularly odd performance works in near-perfect contrast to the satirical civility which surrounds him - the first…

• Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 13

  The dissection of a unique character in history through the immaculate arthouse perspective of Herzog: calmed in the surface, audiovisually breathtaking, emotionally jarring, and yet dissonantly comedic with Herzog's common symptom of adding dark humor to the situations. Kaspar Hauser is the psychological vehicle through which the New German Cinema auteur exposes several thoughts about contemporary society as extrapolations of the universality of its themes. That is, he widely shows his concerns towards society, acceptance of social outcasts and the perspective of rare psychiatric cases as scientific research instead of humanism statements through a 19th Century biopic focused more on achieving a balance between the character under study and his surrounding material and human world. Judging by Herzog's documentary-construction abilities,…

• Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★½ 3

  It is God who hides us, chained, in the basement from the time we are born. It is God who sets us free. It is God who appears occasionally to rap us with his stick. And it is God who comes to stab us when our time in the world is done. It is every man for himself, and God against all.

  The Herzog project marches on.

• Review by shookone ★★★★

  Werner Herzog's version of the tale of Kaspar Hauser is a heavily hysterical and neurotic trip. As usual Werner knows what he's doing, goes baseline and hits the fadeaway J smoothly: The glaring, mordaciously formulated criticism of man's striving for authorities and bureaucracy in a world encapsulated between the church and the bourgeoisie is derived from the highlighting of stupidity and egotism of the individual in a vacuum-sealed society.

• Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★½ 22

  18th Werner Herzog (after Into the Abyss, Grizzly Man, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, My Best Fiend, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, Wings of Hope, Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Last Words, Land of Silence and Darkness, Wheel of Time, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Even Dwarves Started Small, Salt and Fire, God’s Angry Man, Heart of Glass, HandicappedFuture and Fata Morgana)

  Thank you to everyone who came to my talk yesterday at the BFI! For those who weren't able to attend, I've attached a video of my introduction so you can see what I sound like in presenter mode. As much as I love Lb, it's not my natural mode for communicating my…

• Review by Sally Jane Black

  Upon watching this, I had to immediately read up a little (on Wikipedia) on Kaspar Hauser. The film differs vastly from the historical description in that it makes Hauser a very sympathetic figure.

  There is a haunting ambiguity in this film, fitting considering the American title (the original German title translates apparently to "Every Man For Himself, and God Against All," which rates highly on my list of best movie titles of all time).

  The chilly Teutonic (I really just wanted an excuse to use that word) atmosphere of the film helps make the whole thing inscrutable, wrapping the tale of Hauser even further in unanswered questions and satisfying mystery. It's the portrait of an alien.

• Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★

  “Let us suppose that a child had at his birth the stature and the strength of a grown man, that he emerged, so to speak, fully armed from his mother's womb as did Pallas from the brain of Jupiter. This man-child would be a perfect imbecile, an automaton, an immobile and almost insensible statue. He would see nothing, hear nothing, know no one, would not be able to turn his eyes toward what he needed to see…Nor would this man formed all of a sudden be able to stand on his feet; he would need a good deal of time to learn to maintain himself in equilibrium on them. Perhaps he would not even make the attempt, and you would…

• Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★½

  Fernando and Sally (among others) have written nicely about the human dimensions of the story, so I don't feel like I have to, I'll be wonky and Aspergers-y and focus on ideology.

  The 'feral child' trope is usually handled in terms that reinforce Enlightenment dogma; their process of mainstreaming themselves is framed as a progression from pre-civilized to civilized, from ignorance to knowledge; Herzog is the only film-maker I'm aware of to subvert that, granting validity and worth to the 'alternative ways of knowledge' that have developed in Kaspar's consciousness during the twenty-odd years when he wasn't being indoctrinated in Aristotelian/Cartesian scientific method (and Christianity). Apples are aware and have agency, dreams exist independently of the dreamer...

  Also, Bruno's eyes!

• Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★½ 6

  18th Werner Herzog (after Into the Abyss, Grizzly Man, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, My Best Fiend, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, Wings of Hope, Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Last Words, Land of Silence and Darkness, Wheel of Time, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Even Dwarves Started Small, Salt and Fire, God’s Angry Man, Heart of Glass, HandicappedFuture and Fata Morgana)

  The real Kaspar Hauser was likely a charlatan, a smart scheming codger whose tissue of lies was gradually undone and whose death likely came at his own hand, a botched attempt to curry favour with those he’d alienated. Herzog’s Kaspar is a product of a Romantic imagination, an outsider who is compromised…

• Review by Andra 🦋 ★★★★ 4

  The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser follows the events that characterized the particular life of Kaspar Hauser. Grown up alone away from society, his life abruptly changes when he is brought into society. Just like a child he starts to learn the ways of men, but soon he discovers that those who call themselves civilized are everything but that, Kaspar becomes a freak, something to exhibit on occasion, offered to all for them to laugh at him, too intelligent for his own good, his ideas are not well received, they escape from the borders of faith and logic established by men, they go beyond what society accepts, and so Kaspar is alone in this mass of people, more than when he…

• Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 11

  The delicate touch with which Herzog uses to tap into something so profoundly relatable for anyone who has ever felt isolated from the rest of the world is simply astounding. What we are delivered with here is a work of pure humanism from one of the masters of cinema in the 20th century. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauserqualifies as a biopic, but I believe it is autobiographical in how Herzog channels himself into the titular Kaspar—by extension, I was easily able to peer through the lens of purity that is Kaspar Hauser; to see the world through unsullied impressions and exist amidst the outside strata over time, while maintaining the innocence and—purely subconscious—virtue gained by way of a lifetime of…