On the eve of his 70th birthday, Kaspar Brandner receives an unexpected visitor: the Boandelkramer – death itself. As fit and vivacious Kaspar doesn’t feel like leaving the joys and pains of earthly life behind, he starts drinking with the Boandelkramer who, once drunk on raspberry schnapps, can be persuaded to leave him alone for one more year. Due to Kaspar’s savvy, 12 months eventually become 20 years…
It was a peculiar idea to produce a film about Kaspar and the Boandelkramer for a wider FRG audience. The characters are well known in the nation’s south, due especially to Franz von Kobell’s Upper Bavarian dialect story and its theatre adaptation by Joseph Maria Lutz, but really only there. Ask someone from Cologne, Hamburg or Berlin about the Boandelkramer and you will meet a blank face. Therefore, the film’s success was only relative… but it perfectly fit the moment, as Die seltsame Geschichte des Brandner Kaspar is an allegory about the fears provoked by an unknowable future. It might be Heaven that awaits, but who knows whether what one hears about that place is all true? Remember, the film was released as the same time that the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, when people moved on from one state to another.
In this film, popular anxieties are articulated and finally soothed. That the film has religious overtones also syncs with the zeitgeist – see also in this programme Bergkristall and Die Martinsklause. One curious detail is the casting of Paul Hörbiger as the Boandelkramer, if only because his brother Attila played, around the same time, the title role in the Salzburger Festspiele’s annual artistic ritual, the production of Jedermann. Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes (1911) presented on cathedral square – for isn’t Lutz’s Der Brandner Kaspar schaut ins Paradies the people’s answer to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s bourgeois classic?

Olaf Möller