BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

officer. 23 In the New Review of June 1896 Karl Blind accused the German government of
impeding the reform of this “hideous face-slashing” practice. 24 The Free Review in July of the
following year bluntly paraphrased the kaiser’s military code of honor, “‘that the civilian has no
honour to speak of, and that it is the duty of every soldier to kill or maim that contemptible
creature who dares to offend him.’” 25 And while the Mensur rarely ended in a fatality as
compared with duels using sabers or pistols, which was more likely in an encounter between
army officers, the fact that authority figures, such as professors and government officials,
condoned or encouraged the technically illegal practice as a form of institutionalized violence
accentuated a very clear distinction between English and German societies. 26
Old German Passivity and Servility: 1830-48
Dueling and dueling scars among German students and army officers presented a glaring
refutation of modernity, but the apparent toleration of this “warrior code” of conduct posed an
even greater obstacle to hopes for Germany’s development toward an acceptable civilian
parliamentary government. Fear of the consequences of dueling on German society, both from
23 “The Kaiser’s Dueling Edict,” Pall Mall Gazette, 25 March 1890.
24 “The Duelling Craze,” New Review 14 (June 1896): 663.
25 Von Seckendorff, “William the Cad,” Free Review, 343.
26 According to Norbert Elias, The Germans (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), 63-65, 155-58, the nineteenth-century rise of Prussian Germany to a position of power
through a series of military victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1871),
and the incorporation of portions of the German middle class into the establishment through
student fraternities and dueling societies, led to the adoption of an aristocratic “warrior code” in
place of a humanitarian code. The new “aristocracy” of senior civil servants, university
professors and students (i.e., anyone who could engage in a duel) traded the freedom of the
masses for social prestige and a more circumscribed, symbolic freedom from the state’s
“monopoly of violence.”
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