Herzog's images are reflections of his inner landscapes. Like those Expressionist filmmakers whose legacy he has inherited, he is possessed by dreams so powerful, they can only be exorcised through cinematic creation. The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, Or Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Herzog's mysterious film of a nineteenth-century wild child, can then be seen as a meditation on its subject through a conscious awareness of the classic German film of the Weimar Republic…. (p. 223)

[The] sense of the physicality of nature, of its material reality, and of man's position within it, yet apart from it, seems central to Herzog's personal universe. In previous films such as Signs of Life, or Aguirre, the landscape is a dangerous force, threatening by the very nature of its cosmic indifference to man. In Kaspar Hauser, and even more so in Heart of Glass …, the landscape exudes an aura...