The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) is a Werner Herzog drama you can watch online on iFILM, drawn from a real 19th-century mystery: a young man who spent his entire life shut away from human contact.

Until he was a grown man, Kaspar had never seen the sky and knew almost no words. Someone kept him for years in a dark cellar with nothing but a toy horse, fed him, then one day set him down in a Nuremberg square with a letter pressed into his hand. The town has no idea what to do with him. He learns to walk, to speak, to play the piano, and his plain questions about God, women and logic leave the local professors looking foolish. Kaspar is played by Bruno S., a street musician with a brutal past whom Herzog cast instead of a trained actor.

The original German title translates as "Every Man for Himself and God Against All" — a bleak verdict on a society that punishes the outsider. The film took the Grand Jury Prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and ranks among the high points of New German Cinema. It is slow, strange and very quiet: not for viewers chasing plot turns, but for anyone drawn to watching a person meet the world for the first time. Stream The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser online on iFILM.