By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  WHAT KIND OF APPEAL COULD A SPORT HAVE THAT MADE A CULT of such injuries? Nicholas Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader, has Max Ackerman, the hero of his novel Hopeful Monsters, move with his father to Heidelberg, after which he is sent to Freiburg University. The year is 1928. It is not long before Max encounters the dueling halls, and he is simultaneously attracted and revolted. “If this sort of thing is a ritual,” he asks his father, “is it more sophisticated or more silly than just to be decorated by tribal witch-doctors with knives?” The senior Ackerman replies, “What would be sophisticated, I suppose, would be to be able to look at why one wanted to be cut by knives.”12 A fair point, but for an answer we need to return to Germany’s past.

  When in 1348 the first Central European university was opened in Prague, the student population was divided, as was customary, along geographical lines, and the many foreign students were housed according to their “nations,” home countries or provinces. The same principle was followed when an exodus of scholars from Prague founded Leipzig University in 1409. This practice spread to other universities, and soon any new student, or “bean,” had to undergo initiation before being accepted by his comrades. The ceremony was usually concluded with the “bean” having his mouth filled and salt and wine being poured over his head, symbolically absolving him of his callowness, his Beanismus. These rites were never subtle affairs. As early as 1385 students at the University of Heidelberg were forbidden to attend fencing schools.

  By the 1780s students were quartered in small groups called “Kränzchen.” In 1798 the Kränzchen at Onoldia in Erlangen became the first fraternity to put “corps” as a prefix to its name. With defeat at the hands of Napoleon at the Battle of Jena in 1806, nationalism came into student life and a new association for all German students grew up, known as the “Deutschen Burschenschaften”—one of which branches was forced by the authorities to disband in 1817 partly because of dueling.

  The following year fourteen of these Burschenschaften adopted a constitution pledging their members to the ideals of a Christian-German physical and intellectual education for the service of the Fatherland. Foreigners and Jews were excluded. There was considerable rivalry between various wings of the association, and at certain universities violent dueling was common. These transformations may seem interminably convoluted, but they marked attempts by student bodies to organize themselves, and with each development came a renewed emphasis on the importance of loyalty to the new order. “The student’s most valued asset was his word of honor,” wrote the historian R. G. S. Weber, “for it was that which allowed him access to the university when taking his oath at matriculation. It was his word of honor which allowed him to have credit authorized by the university. The student was honor bound to keep his word, for it was his only negotiable possession and his word of honor was seen as the outward indication of his true character and worth.”13

  By the late nineteenth century each federation of fraternities—the exclusive Corps, the slightly more “democratic” Burschenschaften, the Turnerschaften, and the rest—had established their own criteria of what constituted honor. This ideal was multifaceted and less a measure of social status than a reflection of the inner man. How did a student become an educated gentleman? The corps decided that there were three elements: self-observation, self-answerability, and self-control.

  It was here that dueling played its part, as an activity that required and embodied all three. The corps expected their members to exercise self-control and to fence well regardless of where or how badly they were hit. Thus the student fraternities, to echo Coriolanus, “by rare example turned terror into sport.” Jerome put it succinctly: “That he may fight the better for the Fatherland, the German lad must be made indifferent to wounds and suffering: so the Mensur with all its bloody paraphernalia was conceived.”14

  Only some of the student bodies were fencing fraternities, but these tended to produce particularly successful alumni. Fraternity members fought both Mensuren and duels, but the two were very different. The Mensur, with its antecedents in medieval chivalry, was a challenge that fostered character and camaraderie. To use the words of the old Catholic Catechism, it became a means of showing “an outward sign of inward grace”—demonstrating inner qualities through outward indications of honor. Thus the scars of a Mensur were a badge that told the informed observer that the bearer was a man of worth. A duel, conducted with the intent to maim or kill, was a sinister and less honorable affair.

  Given such an intellectual underpinning, it is not surprising that the Mensur was so popular. About one student out of ten in Prussia in the nineteenth century dueled at some stage during his undergraduate days. The most usual weapon was the sword, but theological students preferred pistols because they found it difficult to make a living if their faces were scarred. Heinrich Heine, the poet, fought a number of duels. Theodor Herzl, the intellectual father of modern Israel, trained for four hours a day, fighting his obligatory Mensur on May 11, 1881. Every member of Herzl’s fraternity had a nom de combat; his was Tancred, the hero of Benjamin Disraeli’s novel who goes to Palestine.15†

  German students traditionally divided into three groups: scholars, careerists, and cavaliers. It was the last, the swaggering cavaliers, who would join a fraternity that took pride in fighting for their honor.

  In the spring of 1882 Max Weber enrolled at Heidelberg, heading off to the fencing room every morning to work out. By his third term he had fought his first Mensur and received his fraternity ribbon. Although he was considered skinny when he first entered the university, fraternity drinking soon had its effect. His widow and biographer, Marianne, records that “the lanky youth became broad and strong, and he inclined towards corpulence.”17 By the time he was nineteen, Weber was so stout that none of the uniforms in his army barracks fitted him: he had to be squeezed into a mess sergeant’s. When his mother saw him for the first time following his Mensur, corpulent and scarred across the cheek, “the vigorous woman could think of no other way to express her astonishment and fright than to give him a resounding slap in the face.”

  For all the emphasis on camaraderie, the members of a dueling fraternity were not particularly friendly toward one another. Although firm friendships did form, this was against the prevailing zeitgeist. “The brothers did not associate with friendly warmth, but were cold as ice towards one another,” Weber’s widow records with rancor. “Friendships were regarded as unmanly. Everyone kept his distance but paid close attention to what the others were doing. There was mutual criticism as well as friction—all decreed by an ideal of manliness that attached the greatest importance to formal bearing.… Anyone who managed to hold his own within this community felt extremely secure, superior and blasé towards the rest of the world.” Weber himself admitted, “There were no problems for us; we were convinced that we could somehow solve everything that arose by means of a duel.” “Say what you like against the practice,” wrote another contemporary, “but to feel oneself man to man, with cold steel in one’s hand, does one good.” In later years, Weber publicly supported dueling, especially Satisfaktionsfähigkeit, the right to vindicate one’s personal honor by such means, and when in 1910 Marianne Weber, an activist in the bourgeois women’s movement, was insulted in a newspaper, he at once declared that he was ready to defend “the honor of his wife” in a duel. Only the refusal of his adversary prevented an actual fight.

  As it happened, Germany had an unusually keen follower of duels in its future kaiser, Wilhelm II. Born in 1859 with a withered left arm, the young Wilhelm ensured that his good arm would be doubly strong and for some years took fencing lessons every day. “It is not for mere love of the sport, but for medical reasons,” one British source confided. “He suffers sometimes from difficult breathing—a difficulty which riding on horseback rather increases than diminishes. His medical advisers have therefore suggested daily exercises at fencing.”18

  The prince attended Bonn University, where he was not allowed to due
l at his club. A recent biographer records that though he joined one of the fraternities, the Borussia corps, “its members’ behaviour repelled him with their love of duelling, gambling and heavy drinking.”19 Maybe. A little over a decade later he was at a summer symposium of the university, which was always attended by the dueling clubs. Replying to a toast in his honor, he declared:

  It is my firm conviction that every youth who enters a corps or beerdrinking and dueling club will receive the true direction of his life from the spirit which prevails in them.… He who scoffs at the German students’ corps does not penetrate their real meaning. I hope that as long as there are German corps-students the spirit which is fostered in their corps, and which is steeled by strength and courage, will be preserved, and that you will always take delight in handling the duelling-blade. There are many people who do not understand what our duels really mean, but that must not lead us astray. You and I, who have been corps-students, know better than that. As in the Middle Ages manly strength and courage were steeled by the practice of jousting or tournaments, so the spirit and habits which are acquired from membership of a corps furnish us with that degree of fortitude which is necessary to us when we go out into the world.20

  The less attractive aspects of corps life—arrogance, drunkenness, and aggressive swagger—would suggest that the fraternities might have been natural homes for Hitlerjungen once the Nazis took power. In fact, although some fraternity members did become Nazis, the opposite was the case. From the Fascist perspective, just as Mussolini saw the Mafia as a highly integrated organization that represented a threat and sought to destroy it, so the National Socialists saw the fraternities as rivals that had to be broken down.

  Hitler became chancellor at the end of January 1933. By July one of his senior officials declared that any fraternity member who had time to be quarrelsome was obviously not fulfilling National Socialist goals. This “suggestion” was received differently by individual fraternities. In Kiel, the local student leader issued a decree suspending all fencing fraternities for a period of at least two terms. Elsewhere the pronouncement was ignored. The Nazis, or rather their main mass movement, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), tried to set up rival fraternity houses. In August it was proclaimed that all incidents involving questions of honor—in other words, that might lead to a duel—should be reported to the authorities. The students would not back down, and an uneasy standoff began.

  That summer, wearing fraternity colors was forbidden. In Freiburg, during the winter term of 1935–36, members of the Hitler Youth adopted the habit of tearing off fraternity members’ tricolor bands whenever they saw them. Corps members responded by lining their bands with razor blades. Eventually, however, the uncompromising stance of the fraternities brought about their overthrow: each was so intent on preserving its individual independence that bit by bit the student arm of the Nazi Party gained more power, and by mid-September 1935 the majority of fencing fraternities had been disbanded.

  The Nazis’ own student fencing corps, the Kameradschaften, were not a popular alternative, and by July 1936 it looked as if they might founder completely. In November a new head of the organization was appointed, Dr. Gustav Adolf Scheel, who had been a member of a dueling fraternity at Tübingen. In order to induce the old fraternities to fold themselves into the Nazi student organizations, Scheel announced a new code of honor requiring all NSDStB members to fence a Mensur if challenged. The NSDStB forbade dueling, so for a while nothing happened. Then, in April 1937, another leading Nazi wrote an article saying that any serious German student should adopt the laws and customs of his university community—in other words, that he should duel when required to do so.

  That spring, Hitler let it be known that any self-respecting German should be willing to fight for his honor. Before long, instruction in fencing was made mandatory for NSDStB members. At the same time the Wehrmacht, the SA, and the SS all accepted that their members should “give satisfaction at arms,” and soon enough all had thriving fencing clubs. “For all members of the NSDStB and its Kameradschaften, offended honor can only be redressed by force of arms,” proclaimed Scheel. “Any other concept of arms will no longer have any currency among German students.” Suddenly, all German students were required to fence. It was quite a turnaround, even though only light sabers were to be used, not foils or épées and certainly not Schläger.

  Confusion abounded, because the NSDStB itself still forbade the Mensur. Further, all students were required to belong to a Party-affiliated organization, none of which allowed dueling. So in theory Mensur fencing was mandatory, only no one was permitted to do it. In several centers dueling continued, in strict secrecy; but secrecy had always been part of the Mensur’s history—and of its appeal.

  When war broke out, many universities closed down. By the time they reopened, the composition of the student bodies had changed; only the German zest for swordplay, despite its illegality, did not die away. In 1941 a group of officers at the University of Bonn clubbed together and approached the head of their local Kameradschaft for permission to conduct Mensuren. In Münster, the Ambulance Medics fenced in elaborate secrecy—under the protection of several local officials, including the chief of police. The University of Freiburg, home to a particularly enthusiastic group of duelists, hosted some five hundred Mensuren up until 1944, when investigations by the NSDStB forced it to close down. Even then, the duelists were so well organized that a hunting cabin in the Black Forest was provided for recuperation: anyone caught with fresh wounds would ipso facto have been in contravention of NSDStB regulations. Fighting a Mensur became an explicit act of defiance. Sensing that the governing powers could not stamp out dueling, students revived other traditional practices, including local fencing organizations—all illicit and carried out under the noses of the Nazis. As R. G. S. Weber wrote, “Although not in the proportions of the plot against Hitler on 20 July 1944, the actions of the corps were none the less actions of resistance against the totalitarian regime with which they fundamentally disagreed.”21

  A number of corps alumni were prominent in the German Resistance. Of those executed in the July plot, seven, including its nominal leader, Adam von Trott zu Solz, were ex-Mensur fencers. One of the conspirators, who managed to survive the war, noted that meetings of corps alumni in Berlin during the war served as a means of exchanging antiregime information. The alumni network was also used to enlist support for the Resistance. Fraternity brothers, even if they could not help directly, could be trusted to keep secrets.

  With the collapse of the Third Reich, the Allied military governments temporarily banned most German organizations, including student fraternities. Various Nazi laws were rescinded, and the Mensur was reduced to the status of assault with a deadly weapon, punishable by imprisonment. Until June 10, 1950, the Schläger was deemed by the occupying forces to be an offensive weapon, whose mere possession was a punishable offense. Slowly, however, the fraternities crept back, so that by 1951 there were sixty-three corps in Germany, fifty-nine practicing the Mensur.

  At a special conference on May 19, 1951, it was ruled that any Korpsier not already qualified would be required to fence at least one Mensur or be released from membership. Mensur fencing was still officially forbidden in Germany, but in January 1953 the Federal High Court of Justice acquitted several students charged with lethal assault on the grounds that the protective equipment worn and strict procedural regulations involved meant that the Mensur could not be judged an assault with a deadly weapon under the law. Similar judgments in 1960 and 1962 placed the Mensur beyond further legal action. A correspondent for Encounter, writing in the mid-1950s, reported that several corps had been re-formed: until 1954 the rectors of Bonn University had opposed their reintroduction, but there was now no law against them, “only one under which one party may denounce another for inflicting bodily harm, and this of course no corps dueller would do.”22 So it has remained up to the present day.

  ABOUT FIFTEEN HUNDRED TO TWO THOU
SAND MENSUREN ARE STILL fought every year in Germany, Austria, and some of the Swiss cantons. In the summer of 2000 a friend of mine, a Polish sabreur, visited Berlin and dined one night with the city’s mayor, who told him that he was delighted that he had effectively outlawed so barbaric a practice. The next evening my friend attended the local fencing club, of which a fellow Pole is now the resident master, and photographed several Mensuren. The pictures he later showed me are full of beaming young Teuton faces, streaming with blood.‡

  Later that year I made a special journey to Solingen to visit a local swordsmith named Wolf Peter Unshelm, who makes Mensur swords by hand in a small house in a beautiful valley on the outskirts of the town. There are four small workrooms, with a lathe made in 1888 and a mask-making machine, part of which has Mr. Unshelm’s ancient car jack holding the masks in position. One of the restrictions imposed on Germany after the war was a ban on the manufacture of weapons. When in 1956 the ban was lifted, Wolf Peter began a three-year apprenticeship. For the last twenty-five years he has run his own business, making about two hundred Schläger a year and about sixty Mensur swords, as well as weapons for ceremonial and ornamental use. Then there are the masks and the special gauntlets, stacked in a corner in one of the tiny workrooms.