Every Man for Himself and God Against All) is a 1974 West German drama film written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Bruno S. and Walter Ladengast.

The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who has lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man wearing a black overcoat and top hat, who fed him.

Hauser becomes the subject of much curiosity, and is exhibited in a circus before being rescued by Professor Georg Friedrich Daumer, who patiently attempts to transform him.

The casting and character names are based on the submission to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences:[3] Herzog has been quoted as saying that the title for the film (German: Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) was inspired by a sentence in the novel Macunaíma by Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade.

In Herzog's commentary for the English language DVD release, he recalls that Schleinstein remained in costume for the entire duration of the production, even after shooting was done for the day.

The music includes pieces by a number of notable composers:[11] In 2005, critic Walter Chaw summed up the film as "a strange, brave performance housed in an anti-linear film stuffed with obscure images and silent passages of profound, frightening insight", adding "That the director identifies so deeply with a foundling in 19th century Germany who appeared in the middle of a town square having spent his whole life chained to a floor in a basement dungeon speaks volumes to Herzog's feeling of detachment in intellectual, artistic, and social environments.

"[12] In 2007, the critic Roger Ebert wrote a retrospective review of the film, which he had included in his list of "Great Movies", saying "In Herzog the line between fact and fiction is a shifting one.

"[13] Writing in 2001, Maria Racheva said ".. Herzog, the director, unlike François Truffaut in The Wild Child, is not interested in showing the painful process of adaptation to civilized surroundings; Kaspar has a special consciousness in which the laws of nature have a central place and in which the conventions and norms of civilized behavior are as artificial and inconvenient to him as the black dinner jacket he is forced to wear.

[14] In 2017 David Fear and Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone magazine, said: "Based on the true story of a young man who spent the first 17 years of his life never leaving his tiny room – and then became a public sensation when he finally ventured out into society – Herzog's cracked biopic would have felt offbeat and intriguing enough on its own.

Still, the director thought he'd make things even more interesting by casting a 41-year-old street musician credited as "Bruno S." who had spent decades in and out of mental institutions and had never acted before.