Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ghosts of Germany: Kaspar Hauser and Woyzeck

1997; Salisbury University; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

0090-4260

Ruth Perlmutter, Archie Perlmutter,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

Two stories at the core of German mythology, and already the subject of works by German director Werner Herzog, were reinterpreted in two new films presented in England in 1994 at the Cambridge Film Festival. One was researched revision of the mystery of Hauser by Peter Sehr, and the other dark Hungarian treatment of Buchner's drama Woyzeck. In Herzog's two films (The Enigma of Hauser or Every Man for Himself and God Against All, 1974; Woyzeck, 1978), both and Woyzeck are victims of scientific detachment and societal brutality. Their childlike innocence reflects Herzog's view of cinema as illiterate. His freaks embody his vision of the soul as an inexplicable immanent force in nature. The Hungarian version of Woyzeck (Janos Szasz) is the fourth screen adaptation of Buchner's unfinished play, attesting to its centrality as seminal German parable. Herzog himself has admitted to the pervasive subtextual influence of Buchner's character on his depictions of Woyzeck and Hauser. Instead of taking place in nineteenth century army barracks with delirious, crazed Klaus Kinski as the regimented, repressed Woyzeck of Herzog's version, the Hungarian Woyzeck is contemporary signalman in bleak, wintry railway yard. There, he is humiliated by doctor's forcing him to eat peas, then experimenting with and analyzing his urine. His commanding officer terrorizes him with orders blasted over loudspeaker and his sadistic girlfriend cuckolds him with the local police officer. The cumulative repression eventually drives him to erupt into rampage of slaughter. The starkness of the black-and-white cinematography combined with distancing aerial shots expresses the relentless grimness of Woyzeck's world. Slim telephone poles skewer the receding abstract lines of the tracks. The dark shed that confines the coarse, brutalized worker is silhouetted against dead-white, snow-covered landscape, while the spiritual chants on the soundtrack add tone of elegiac fatalism. In contrast to the austerity of this updated Woyzeck, Peter Sehr's Hauser details the decadent opulence of aristocratic life (reminiscent of Rossellini's Rise of Louis XIV, 1967), while the characters engage in expressionistic contortions that recall Von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress (1935). Sehr's amplified version of the case of the teenage wild boy found in Nuremberg cellar in 1828, after years of incarceration and abuse, departs from Herzog's cine-poem and reconstructs Kaspar's painstaking socialization, while in the background, European power-politics make him pawn and, ultimately, victim of conspiracy. We interviewed Peter Sehr at the Cambridge Film Festival after screening of his film. QUESTION: You have described the fascination with this quintessential, almost mythical story of child abuse and what you have termed as the Kaspar Hauser Syndrome. Besides the film by Herzog, there have been play by Peter Handke (Kaspar, 1975) and number of operas and dances. Your own film has aroused considerable interest, receiving awards in France, Switzerland, and Germany. Where do you see it in this spectrum? SEHR: Herzog's film is partly about how society corrupts humans through education. Handke's play is about the limitations of language. My interest is political and historical. I see Hauser, who has been called a true child of Europe, as symbolic buried child, into which Europe's ills and evils have been poured. I see him as an extension of Germany's guilt about Europe. He is also meaningful in terms of my own personal life; and, so, when the new facts about were revealed, I was angry and upset about his treatment and wanted to give him back his identity as way of confronting my own. I was eighteen when I left Germany and it took me twelve years to confront my love/hate relationship with my language, culture, and history. Fassbinder was strong cinematic influence, especially in terms of his ambivalence and anger about Germany's inability to confront its guilt. …