Anti-Prophet

The university of vagrancy … The university of prophecy …

W. recalls how Herzog cast Bruno S. in his films. Who else could play Kaspar Hauser other than a real outsider, a man who had never acted, a man who had no interest in acting, but was only himself in the two films he made with Herzog? Kaspar Hauser: himself. Bruno S: no one other than himself!

Bruno – the real Bruno – always spoke in the third person, which W. really admires. ‘Bruno is sad. Bruno is angry’. I should take it up: ‘Fat boy hungry. Fat boy want dinner’. Seriously, though, there was always that distance … as though he were also someone else, something else, something impersonal, like fate.

They are closing all the doors on Bruno, and oh, so, politely.

Bruno’s getting pushed aside as if he didn’t exist. …

Bruno was a kind of prophet, W. says. An anti-prophet, who only sees doom, only ruination. He knows in advance that it's all going to fail. We're going down: he knows that. The end times have begun: that’s all he knows.

Bruno knows it will end, that it's all coming to an end, but he hopes nonetheless. He hopes nevertheless, against himself and against fate. He hopes: and that’s what you can see in him, too, W. says … That’s what Herzog must have seen in him. It’s pathetic. It’s nothing, nothing. The faith of a child, the hope of a child …