The Crime of Kaspar Hauser

Salik Shah   | Review | July 19, 2009 at 3:39 am         Print

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This is not a comparison that will please Werner Herzog. Kaspar Hauser’s story, Herzog says, is about what civilization does to us all, how it deforms us by bringing us into societal line. Kaspar was 16 when he was ‘set free’ from the dark dungeon where he spent all his life tied to the ground with a belt which he thought was a natural extension of his body. All that Kaspar knew, before being horrified by buildings and bourgeois existence of the world outside in 1828, was limited to a loaf of bread and a glass of water, and that he should become a gallant rider like his father before him, though he hardly knew what it meant. This man, without any culture, would inspire awe. Yet, he was harmless. He was one man who had no sense of danger or death.

Kaspar wasn’t trained to kill, and they didn’t turn him into a killing machine. Well, that was also Germany. A wounded Ajmal Kasab, being interrogated by policemen in a hospital ward, looks too much of a Kaspar Hauser. These young men were dispatched on a suicide mission to Mumbai. While they were executing their ‘job,’ they were also communicating with their handlers. These confused boys were promised a paradise upon the successful completion of the mission with their death. Kasab and his friends were operating by their mentors’ logic, not their own. Yet they showed some sign of humanity. They were lost and enamored by the grandeur of the city.

The idea of justice is a very odd one. Bruno S., who ‘transmitted’ Kaspar Hauser’s character, had spent all his early life in homes, institutions, asylums and prisons. Werner says by the time he met him, Bruno’s treatment at the hands of the authorities had totally destroyed even the most basic human functions within him, including the desire to take care of himself. After the death scene in the film, Bruno desperately wanted to have the autopsy table used in the film. Bruno insisted it was the table of justice: One day you will put me on the table and I will die, and you will all die, the rich and the poor. This is justice. And all those who have done me wrong will confront justice here.

In a scene with the professor of logic, Werner mocks our sense of law and rationality. The professor believes there is only one question to solve a particular problem. The professor is not willing to accept any other question besides it. He insists there is ‘one question, and only one, to solve this problem of logic.’ The professor says he can’t accept Kaspar’s question. “That’s no logic; logic is deduction, not description. What you’ve done is describe something, not deduce it . . . Understanding is secondary; the reasoning is the thing. In Logic and Mathematics, we do not understand things . . . we reason and deduce: l cannot accept that question.” What Kaspar says is not important, for ‘there is no other question, by the laws of logic.’

What was Kasab’s crime? We didn’t want anybody to take up Kasab’s case in the court. Which one is a bigger crime? Kaspar left an autobiography, so we know, two years and a half outside in the cruel world, the only place he felt really happy was in his bed. ‘It seems to me that my coming into this world was a terribly hard fall,’ Kaspar would say about himself, and perhaps for people yet to be born and brought up this way. Kaspar was murdered. Kasab? The poor guy is probably my age, and now, perhaps, a little afraid of death.