Get Your Hands On Dueling Engineered By Kevin McAleer Available As Textbook

of the few rigorously academic history books that has an author that keeps the material alive and interesting, It manages to come off as more of a novel then a history book, even though it cites oversources and presents huge amounts of information about the dueling culture of prewar Germany.
Many moons ago as a kid I remember seeing a movie in which two men dressed in their finery stood a few paces from each other and shot according to an elaborate series of rules I knew nothing about.
The scene was from "Barry Lyndon," and considering that it held my attention as a five yearold despite Steven Spielberg perhaps correctly deriding it as like being stuck at the Prado for an afternoon without lunch the duel part of the movie couldn't help but fascinate.


Some of the vestiges of the historic duel culture survive to this day, i, e. Chief Seconds in boxing and Homer Simpson slapping people in the face with a glove, but for the most part the cultures and ideas that motivated men to square off in sometimes lifeanddeath battles with pistols or sabers are

alien to what's left of our sensibilities.


Author Kevin McAleer delivers a solid, intermittently brilliant, occasionally pretentious study of the subject, spending quite a bit of time in Germany, as promised, but hopping around Europe and even sallying over the Atlantic to report on the American cult of masculinity and honor, if only to use it as a counterpoint against the singular nature of the ritualized duel as performed in Germany.


The book does a very good job of showing how conflicting senses of obligation to king, family, country, and female honor all mixed together to create a concept of the duel that, while derided in some corners, still endlessly fascinated those who came to the subject expecting to sneer it's a bit like bullfighting in this way, although taken too far the analogy starts to strain and then snap.
Sources marshaled include everything from contemporary journal accounts, letters, challenges issued "You, sir, have insulted my honor!" as well as classics of Austrian and German literature from the likes of Arthur Schnitzler and Thomas Mann.
The part on the "Mensur," the student duel in which goggled young men deliberately tried to get slashed across the face, was especially illuminating, I remember seeing a movie some years ago "Hans Westmar" in which one of these strange and beautiful stationary slashfests took place, and being confused and intrigued.
Herr McAleer's book' clears up a lot of the confusion, and deepens the curiosity, Recommended. Ample and sometimes gruesome illustrations included, DNF Picked this up after Tarr by Wyndham Lewis and the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann spurred an interest in dueling, If you are genuinely interested the history of such things, find another book,

The author cannot stop inserting his contempt for his subject, His sneering remarks reach a crescendo in the conclusion with the absurd evidencefree claim that theth century German dueling tradition is somehow responsible for the Holocaust because Himmler, who has not appeared anywhere else in the book, had a round table in his house.
Not a joke.

Whig Sophistry par excellence, The question of what it takes "to be a man" comes under scrutiny in this sharp, often playful, cultural critique of the German duelthe deadliest type of oneonone combat in findesi.