Chaos i ciemność. Kilka uwag o Zagadce Kaspara Hausera Wernera Herzoga

“The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” by Werner Herzog could be treated as an allegory of the human condition, akin to the vision of writers belonging to the broadly defined existentialist tradition – as far as the world vision and the conception of man, presented in the movie, are concerned. As the aforementioned allegory we can treat life history of the movie’s protagonist, Kaspar Hauser, the child of nature, thrown by an unknown dark force into completely incomprehensible for him human civilization, into the world of an absent – or negated – Absolute. It’s best formulaic description – “the empty Transcendence” – we can find in the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian. To some extent Herzog’s work could be treated as an evocation of so understood transcendence and as an expression of the existentialists’ diagnosis of our human fate: the man comes out of darkness and in the darkness he finds his ultimate destination