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eye WEEKLY                                               April 27 1995

Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday

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THE AISLE SEAT                                          THE AISLE SEAT



KASPAR HAUSER



Starring Andr‚ Eisermann, Katharina Thalbach and Uwe Ochsenknecht.

Written and directed by Peter Sehr.

(STC) Opens April 28.

So who is this Kaspar Hauser and why is he the raw stuff of so much German art? Kaspar has been, after all, an opera, a ballet, poems, a whole slew of novels, and -- his best-known manifestation -- the subject of German writer/director Werner Herzog's now-classic film, The Mystery Of Kaspar Hauser ('75).

Since the Herzog film, there has arisen in Germany, according to Sehr, an entire scholarly Kaspar industry, 2,000 books worth of it so far, dedicated to a search for the truth about Kaspar -- what Sehr calls the "post-Herzogian" researches into the short and mysterious life of this enigmatic figure.

Kaspar (1812-1833), feral child, natural man, symbolic orphan, rider on the storm, "the child of Europe" who dies from "lethargy of the heart," was presumably the legitimate heir to the throne of Baden. As the long-awaited Crown Prince of Baden and the son of St‚phanie Von Baden (n‚e Beauharnais), Napoleon's stepdaughter, the infant was to take his rightful place as the ruler of one of 19th-century Europe's most powerful duchies.

What happens then depends on which books you read or what film you see. According to Sehr's new film, the royal infant is spirited from his cradle by Baden's eternal political foes, the Bavarians, and hidden away -- forever. In his place, as a changeling, is left a weak and injured infant, who is then brutally damaged by a blow to the head so savage I can still hear the sickening dull thwunk of it, and who dies soon after. Thus is savagely altered the course of the succession.

And what of the true heir? Locked up for the next 16 years in a dark room, kept from all human contact, he becomes -- what? -- a "pure" human being? A blank slate upon which (ah! the heredity-environmental thrill of it all!) society can scratch its runic messages, or try to?

Shortly after `Kaspar Hauser' (for so he is now called) is released, he is found standing like a statue in the marketplace in Nuremberg. He is mute, immobile, terrified. In his hand he clutches a note telling any compassionate passerby that his former keeper, a "poor laborer with 10 children of my own to support," cannot deal with him any longer. "If you do not want to look after him," the note reads, "pass him by or hang him from the chimney."

It's not long before Kaspar is the hottest attraction in Europe. The very embodiment of Rousseau's insistence, shortly before this, that people would be better off if they aligned themselves to nature, Kaspar is a living fiction, an experiment in pedagogy, a key to the true nature of humanness.

"When Herzog made his Kaspar," Sehr points out, "he was interested in how such a person would learn, and how he would determine whether or not what he was taught was the truth. My Kaspar is more political than Herzog's. I was more interested in the intrigue behind Kaspar's short, unhappy life (he was murdered at 22) and a resulting political and social portrait of Europe at the time. And I was fascinated by an aspect of Kaspar never really central to Herzog's film: the bringing together of the wild child and the idea of Kaspar's aristocratic origins.

"The story has a lot in common with the oral tradition of the stories of the Brothers Grimm -- you know, all those stories about children being separated from their parents and abandoned in the woods, about children being turned into animals and then turned back again, the frog prince who, when kissed by the princess, turns back into royalty ..."

Sehr's first version, packed to its rafters with recent Kaspar research, was over three hours long. Now, after exposure and discussion at a number of festival showings since its completion in '93, it is being released in what Sehr calls a "cinema version" of 137 minutes.

There've been, I guess, gains and losses. So opulently historical is Sehr's vision of the Kaspar story, and so resplendent in its cinematic detailing, one would like to have a good wallow in the original. Also, the gnarled machinations that vector Kaspar's strange and tragic life are a little puzzling in their present compression.

But as it is, Kaspar's story moves smartly enough along, raising more questions than it answers, certainly, about the nature of power and the hypnotic spell cast by the spectre of the bloodline, as well as tackling the whole question of the shaping of consciousness and its relationships with meaning.

"Certainly," Sehr says, "the story, as I saw it in Herzog's film 20 years ago, touched my romantic side. It was the film that made me want to make films myself. There was a suggestion that, at the end of my film, there be a segment where Herzog and I talk about our Kaspars. Herzog wouldn't do it.

"He told me," smiling the smile of a man over his Oedipus complex, "that he didn't intend to talk about it for the next 2,000 years!"

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