: Handke eschews theatrical illusion. There are no acts, only numbered paragraphs. The play focuses entirely on "speech acts" rather than psychological development.
: Upon its 1968 premiere in Frankfurt, Kaspar was hailed by Max Frisch as the "play of the decade". It established Handke as a leading voice of postmodernism alongside figures like Samuel Beckett. Peter Handke's Kaspar
The play is loosely based on the real-life figure of , a 16-year-old who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828 possessing only one sentence: "I want to be someone like somebody else was once" . : Handke eschews theatrical illusion