![]() ![]() This theory is briefly and dismissively alluded to in Herzog’s film, which otherwise adheres largely to a selection of known facts. Sehr’s conspiracy theory account examines the widely credited theory that Kaspar was the secret child of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, adopted daughter of Napoleon, and therefore heir to the throne of Baden. ![]() ![]() But in real history, the Kaspar Hauser story only begins here: already a cause célèbre of 1830s Europe, it developed into a fully fledged cultural myth, referred to by Herman Melville, inspiring a poem by Verlaine and becoming the basis of (among others) a novel by Jakob Wassermann, a 1967 play by Peter Handke and most recently a 1993 film by German director Peter Sehr. The town registrar (the diminutive, gnome-like Clemens Scheitz) struts off into the distance, eager to prepare his latest report (‘Protokol’). They perform an autopsy, discover irregularities in his liver and brain, and close the case. The town authorities try to provide a satisfactory ending to Kaspar’s own incomplete story. The caravan goes on, reaches the city – and then, says Kaspar, the story begins. ![]() Its leader, an old blind Berber, tastes the sand and tells his people that the mountains they see are imaginary. A caravan loses its way crossing the Sahara. It is only on his deathbed, following his stabbing by an unknown assailant, that he tells the tale, illustrated by what looks like rough, flickering found footage. Käthe reminds him that Daumer believes that stories should be told from start to finish, so Kaspar gives up the attempt. He proposes to tell her a story about the desert, but admits he doesn’t know the ending. In a key scene, the mysterious foundling Kaspar (Bruno S.) is sitting with Käthe (Brigitte Mira), housekeeper to his tutor Professor Daumer (Walter Ladengast). No unifying answer can be achieved in a world where only God knows the answers and where humans can only cling to their own provisional, partial guesses. It is, as the English title suggests, an unanswered question the German title actually means ‘every man for himself and God against all’, but still the connotations of scattered disunity support the sense of enigma. In reality, Kaspar Hauser is an unfinished story – indeed, a story about unfinished stories. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is a story with a beginning and an end or at least, being based on a historical case, it feels as if it ought to have a clear beginning and end. SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot. ![]()
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