In Literature
American traveller Mark Twain devoted several chapters of A Tramp Abroad (1880) to Heidelberg students' fencing.
In Three Men on the Bummel (1900), Jerome K. Jerome devoted a chapter to German student life, and describes the "The German Mensur" in detail. While much of the book has a tone of admiration for the German people, he expressed extreme disapproval for this tradition.
In George MacDonald Fraser's Royal Flash (1970), the protagonist Flashman is scarred with a Schläger as part of his disguise as a Danish prince.
Mensur is featured in Heinrich Mann's novel Man of Straw (Der Untertan).
Mensur scars are repeatedly noted and described as a sign of beauty and manliness by German characters in Katherine Anne Porter's novel Ship of Fools.
Mensur scars are mentioned in passing in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers when two German recruits are asked at the beginning of boot camp where they got their scars. The drill sergeant even uses the term Korpsbruder (as spelled in modern German). E. C. Gordon, the hero of Heinlein's Glory Road, mentions his desire for a degree from Heidelberg and the dueling scars to go with it.
The opening scene of "The Mystery of the Spanish Chest," in season three of Agatha Christie's Poirot, features two men fighting in the mensur style. The episode's dialogue implies that the fencers are English, rather than German, and that one fencer has challenged the other to a duel over a woman.
Read more about this topic: Academic Fencing
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)