The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siecle Germany.

It is rare to find a scholarly book that combines, as this one does, a profoundly serious moral perspective with a style that stoops to ridicule the absurd and burlesque aspects of its subject in unsparing detail. Kevin McAleer writes about the modern German duel in a style that is both scabrous and grotesque, making no effort to conceal his vast contempt for the metaphysical pretence and social imposture of the duel's historic defenders and practitioners. Readers may not be sure whether to laugh at men for their quixotic obsessions or grieve for the numerous victims of their masculine rituals. McAleer's account of the duel and its social and cultural influences nearly capsizes on occasion from its excess freight of smart-alecky puns and smirking asides, but, to this reader at least, the message came through loud and clear: men who sent and took up dueling challenges felt themselves inspired by a variety of causes - some noble, some less so - but by taking the duel seriously they contributed to the maintenance of a set of masculine and class ideals that undergirded militarism, an authoritarian monarchy, and the oppression of women.

McAleer locates his study directly within the boundaries of the on-going debate about Germany's "separate" historical path to modernity. He wants to argue that the duel was an aristocratic ritual that proved irresistible to bourgeois arrivistes, who were consequently weaned from the humane and rational values of their class to grovel before the brutal Standesehre of jack-booted Junkers. He thus contests the anti-Sonderweg thesis in general and the recent work of Ute Frevert in particular, who has argued that the duel was a mode of social advance that was perfectly compatible with the ideals of middle-class Bildung.

McAleer contests the notion of the "bourgeois" duel in two ways. He reveals the noble history and provenance of the duel and the advantages that accrued to the social and political power of the aristocracy by maintaining dueling as a custom for regulating relations between gentlemen and for protecting personal and family honor. That the upper classes did so in the face of persistent, if lukewarm, efforts to repress dueling underscored the belief that they and their values were above the law. This point, in itself, does not add much weight to McAleer's argument. No one denies that the duel was aristocratic in origin; efforts to outlaw it had the approval of a succession of German kings; it was formally prohibited in law and duly, if timidly, punished.

However, McAleer also shows in convincing detail that a number of social institutions and processes, not to mention the ritual of dueling itself, promoted ideals of honor that owed more to the values of the Junker elite than to notions of bourgeois self-perfection, and to the masculine ideals of a warrior class over those of men of learning or work. He shows us how aristocrats in the officer corps and the university Corpsstudenten served as mirrors of chivalry for bourgeois reserve officers and the lesser fry of dueling fraternities infatuated with the scarring rituals of the Mensur. He argues convincingly that the German duel was more dangerous than the duel elsewhere because it depended on a noble ethos whose claim to rule reposed on a sacrificial ritual in which a dueler's blood was shed negligently as testimony to his uncommon sensibilities and principles. That so many male members of the non-noble elite found it socially and politically indispensable to be thought capable of "giving satisfaction" strengthens McAleer's argument; satisfaktionsfahig was not simply a warrant of social entitlement, but an acknowledgement that its bearer possessed a quality of masculinity made up of the courage of knights, the loyalty of liegemen, and the temerity of husbands sufficiently gallant to enter the lists in protection of their womenfolk.

McAleer leaves few stones unturned in his exploration of the cultural and social practices of the duel between 1850-1914. Statistics are few and unreliable, but McAleer makes a good case for the frequency and danger of the duel in the upper reaches of the Kaiserreich by examining news reports, memoirs, court records and contemporary literature. He shows how women, who were the causus belli of most serious duels, were defended in this system of gallantry only in their capacity as the possessions and child-bearers of their "noble" consorts, and he provides a thorough account of dueling etiquette and the hardware gentlemen used in their affairs of honor. Certainly a man who felt obliged to risk his life in this premodern rite seems to us moderns a one-dimensional being more apt for caricature or scorn than sympathy, but McAleer, despite his disdain for the duel and duelers, has given us a complex portrait of the reasons why men dueled and shown how the archaic values of German elites were strengthened in the process.

Robert A. Nye Oregon State University