Allstar Death Mask

[Monkeyboy]

Read an accoun of modern mensur fechten:
http://www.mail-archive.com/futurewo.../msg00267.html

Good read...thanks. OK nobody show this website to your moms OK?

[shlepzig]

Years ago, there was an article in American Fencing about Shlagers and the Mensuren and all that. It was quite interesting and covered most of the questions anyone would have except where to sign up.

Thank goodness too, at that time I might have...

Shlep. - older - yes, wiser - maybe

[Dar Tanyon]

I am pretty sure that "Death Mask" is for Kendo. Those vertical bars would catch a foil tip in an off target thrust and spin your head off.

Here is the mask for saber. Heck, even this one looks scary.
https://www.allstar.de/modules.php?o....php&pID=52836

[SäbelFechter]

It's not a kendo mask. They look different and have horizontal bars that are much closer together on them. As others have said, I suspect it is a practice mask for the Mensur. It says it's for student fencing right in the description. Also, from what I've read, they practice with blunt weapons and the bars on this mask would keep it from getting dented by the heavy Schlager blade.

[Dar Tanyon]

I think you're right.........

[damianip]

There is no issue about the point catching since the schlager is not a point weapon.

If anyone is interested in the specifics of the mensur, check out Chris Amberger's book: it's an excellent read. He's fought a few himself (crazy fellow!!!).

Mr Amberger posts here occasionally, so maybe he can chime in.

Paolo

[JAySE SUiCiDE]

i was going to say that it was for sabre, and the bars are actually attached to the padding that you can put on/take off, and would maybe offer more protection from head cuts..but, i know now that thats wrong.

yeah..and it would definately be against the rules in competition, as the bars would catch the point of any weapon.

~Jes

[Elemental]

Awesome. I feel the impulse buy urge coming on.

"Must... get... scary... mask.... "

[mhoneth]

Secrets of the German Broadsword
An Introduction into the Culture of the Schlager

A last tug at the straps of the neckbrace, compressing veins and arteries and windpipe for a painfully gagging second until the pulse re-establishes against the pressure, angrily hammering as if it wanted to break through both flesh and brace. You rise. The weight of the mail shirt weighs on you like lead. The crunch of the steel goggles digs into your nasal bones, breaking the skin despite the soggy black rubber padding that exudes, as you imagine, the disturbing miasma of old blood...

In a sudden rush of commotion, you are pushed and positioned in the face of your opponent. Close. Too close. Closer than you'd be comfortable having someone standing in front of you with a Martini glass in his hand. Let alone a sharp piece of steel. You know why you're here. Why he is here. Your second clumsily rams his blade into your chest, pushes you backwards, off balance, to establish the proper distance...three feet of metal, sternum to sternum. The ambient noise ebbs and fades, leaving you marooned inside your own pulse...

Wait a minute. Something doesn't add up. Let's recap: You're standing there, all by yourself, holding a Schlager with a 3-foot blade, the last eight inches of which are ground to disconcerting sharpness. Your opponent rises up in front of you... 3 feet away. And you're supposed to hit him somewhere about the head.

How do you hit something... someone... with the business end of a yard-long blade if your target is only 3 feet away from you?

This is the quintessential problem that the system of Schlager fencing is built around-at least the 20th-century variety of the Mensur that is still practised widely in Germany, Austria, and parts of Switzerland. After all, add up the length of your arm and the length of your blade, and you realize that at full extension, the cutting edge of your weapon is doing its shtick a full yard behind your opponent's back.

Playing the system
To figure out why exactly the 20th-century Schlager system has been built around the artificial scenario of two armored men facing off in what amounts to a permanent corps-a-corps, you have to take a step back and examine what exactly the game is about, and how the Mensur fits into a larger, psycho-historical context..

In my The Secret History of the Sword, I classify the Mensur (and by inference, its associated system) as Comment combat. In fact, the very term is derived from the Germanized French word "Comment", meaning "set of rules", which is these days exclusively applied to the rules regulating a Mensur.

Any kind of Comment combat implies voluntary or indirectly coerced consent. This is a given. Consent is the prerequisite for two men picking up antiquated arms and subordinating their will and volition to the regulative authority of the Comment.

Combative activity usually takes place between two individuals or detailed groups of individuals. It occurs with premeditation, with equality of risk and foreknowledge of the consequences.

Comment scenarios contain the possibility that the physical outcome of the fight could be assumed to have been achieved by the intentional absence of one of the combatants.

The Mensur as such represents what I classify as subcategory d), Ritualistic Combat. Here's a quick rundown of the main characteristics of this subcategory in view of the Mensur:

Motivation/Intent: To control, or disable the opponent while adhering to a clearly defined, enforced and/or implied code of behavior.
Projected Intent: Opponent's is perceived as threat to one's own bodily integrity.
Conscious awareness of risk and level of consequence: Full or latent awareness of serious injury.
Fear Level: High
Stress Level: High
Objective risk: Severe or light injury
Combative systems: Equally matched, dictated by offensive and defensive weaponry, environment, state of mind; preconditioned by drill and experience. Strong ritualistic element. Specific combative systems are specializations of practice systems.
Taboos: Enforced or implied notion of "fair play", i.e., adherence to set of rules; selected target areas are protected by defensive weaponry
Weapons: offensivbe and defensive arms are intentionally matched
Level of skill: intentionally similar.1
Why, you ask?
Ritualistic comment scenarios, no matter if you look at the ordeal, the wager of battle, or the Mensur, have one element in common. They are instances of institutionalized combat that pitch two or more combatants against each other who may or may not harbor any hostile or even unfriendly feelings toward each other. They are fought not to score a point but to prove a point... to establish a truth, be it of judicial, social, or human nature.

But what exactly is the point of the Mensur?

If you believe the missionaries of the moralistically and politically correct mainstream, the Mensur represents a lamentable and discreditable display of chauvinist and reactionary male elitism. Add the at best latent anti-Germanism that permeates late 19th- and early 20th-century British and American literature, and the open anti-Germanism of the post-WWII German liberal establishment, and you might get the impression that a Mensur is an event just a damp match shy off a cross burning...

Yet the condescension and self-righteousness expressed at or just below the surface in the writings of Kevin McAleer, Ute Frevert, Jerome K. Jerome, and the more recent missives of the German academic Lumpenproletariat provide the key to understanding the purpose of the Mensur as an institution practiced by German-style fraternities.

Free man's choice
The German duelling fraternities could be regarded as prototypes of what Freud described as the Bruderbund in his Totem und Tabu... self-contained, self-regulated, ur-demoratic associations of post-adolescent males that exist within, yet isolated from, the social collective.

It is this very isolation that is at the core of the fraternities' persecution through the various collectivist incarnations of majority mores. No matter if headed by a monarch, by the church, by the Fuhrer, a Comrade General Secretary, or today's Zinfandel collectivists, the existence of free and radically democratic associations of independent-minded individuals eluding the grasp of and regulation by the collective, has represented a major point of annoyance for those in power for the past two centuries.

The purpose of these associations is really a clear-cut case of testosterone... male friendship and brotherhoods-which in many cases turn into lifelong friendships that would correspond to Goethe's term Wahlverwandschaft ("kinship of choice")- aiming at personal ties via shared extreme experiences and cemented by alcohol and blood.

I have pointed out on previous occasion that Sir Richard Burton began his Book of the Sword with the rather generic observation that "the history of the sword is the history of mankind". And I have commented repeatedly that Burton got it only half right: In my opinion, the history of the sword is really the history of the Y-chromosome.

Apart from its symbolism as the emblem of secular power, justice, and nobility, the sword signifies a certain period of transition in male life: If you believe the French historian LeGoff, the demographics of the knights errant correspond closely to those of the rambunctious rapier-wielding students who terrorized peaceful German burghers in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As such, the sword figures prominently in transitional combative rituals.

Holy space
Mark Wiley, in his Filipino Martial Culture, provides a glimpse into the psycho-mechanics of martial male initiation rites:

"The transmission of sacred knowledge in sacred time and space effects physical and psychological changes in the martial arts practitioner. The student at once 'finds' himself while persevering through hard and demanding practice and sparring sessions and by passing through various rites of passage and initiation. The 'real' unveils itself in the applied skills of the student as he perfects them in training and through sparring. As the student progresses in rank along the martial social structure, he becomes oriented to the world in which he lives. (...) He is no longer a layman but a martial arts practitioner on his way to become a mandirigma, a warrior."2
Sacred space and time are concepts whose mechanics appear in the conscious focalization process preceeding a bout. (Aldo Nadi decribed this state of mind as his Inner Fortress... a fortress entered the moment the mask is put on.)

The entering of sacred space is frequently expressed by the ritual donning of special clothing...of headbands, belts, or-in more low-brow modern scenarios-a t-shirt with the logo of the salle or dojo.

The transitional combative ritual of the Mensur can provide a life-long mark of demarkation of holy space on its practitioners, in the form of the duelling scar or SchmiB, which will be part of the bearer for the rest of its life...

[CaptChris]

Hi,

(Prototoast) I hate to point out to everyone... but there is a small button in the top right hand corner which says 'english version'. So you dont need to speak German to read the site.