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About Bruno Schleinstein

Bruno Schleinstein was born in 1932 as the illegitimate child of a German father and a Polish mother. He was brought up in orphanages and in institutions for the mentally ill. In 1955, he was released after several escapes. Living in Berlin in the sixties, working as a forklift operator, he began to play the accordion and illustrate his songs with drawings. In 1974, he starred as Kaspar Hauser in Werner Herzog's film Every Man for Himself and God Against All; two years later he acted in another Herzog film, Stroszek. The filmmaker Miron Zwonir recently released a documentary about Bruno S.'s life entitled Estrangement Is Death.