Not reviewed at press time. Undaunted by the fact that approximately 2,000 books have been written that explore the enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser — the wild child who turned up, without explanation, on the streets of Nuremburg in 1828 and was presumed to be of royal parentage — and that Werner Herzog, in 1975, also used the mystery as the subject matter for what is, perhaps, his most inspired film, The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser: Every Man for Himself and God Against All, German filmmaker Peter Sehr spent four years immersed in new research and emerged with this 1994 movie. His efforts were rewarded when his film Kaspar Hauser won the German Oscar equivalents for best film, best director, and best actor of 1994. Sehr surrounds his epic documentation with generous measures of palace intrigue and costume melodrama.
This article appears in November 22 • 1996 (Cover).
