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The Cult of the Duel 
Giving Satisfaction at the University of Vienna and in the Joint Army, 
1867-1914 
 
 
Sophie Hammond 
University of Southern California 
 
 
Abstract  
In the Habsburg Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dueling was a 
crucial way for university-educated men, as well as Joint Army officers, to assert the value 
of their own honor. It was a terrible insult when, in 1896, German-nationalist university 
dueling fraternities (Burschenschaften) in Germany and Austria passed the Waidhofen 
Resolution, officially declaring Jewish men unable to give satisfaction in a duel and 
therefore incapable of possessing honor. This article argues that the passage of the 
Waidhofen Resolution was not an isolated incident of bigotry but an evolution of the 
German-nationalism of the Burschenschaften as they increasingly valued an exclusionary 
definition of what it meant to be “racially German,” and that the Burschenschaften’s 
definition of honor fought against the more inclusive (and pragmatically self-serving) 
definition of honor espoused by the army. 
 
 
Article 
Introduction 
“A half-dozen duels,” wrote Theodor Herzl in 1893 to the Society for Defense against 
Antisemitism, “would very much raise the social position of the Jews.”1 In his diary, Herzl 
fantasized about what those duels might entail. He, alone and unaided, would bravely 
challenge one of the three most influential leaders of Austrian antisemitism. Perhaps he 
would die a martyr in the duel, his death proof of Jewish honor. Or, if that failed, when 
brought to trial for murder (and illegal dueling), Herzl, in an impassioned speech, would 
“[compel] the court…to respect his nobility,” and, by implication, to understand the horror 
of antisemitism.2  
 
But Herzl’s fantasy required that one of these great antisemites would agree to duel him in 
the first place—something antisemites were increasingly unlikely to do. Three years after 
Herzl planned to use the duel to defeat antisemitism, Burschenschaften—Pan-Germanic 
dueling fraternities based at universities throughout Austria and Germany, all part of the 
same organization—passed the Waidhofen Resolution. The Resolution banned Jewish 
students from joining Burschenschaften and forbade Burschenschaft members from dueling 

 
1 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 160.  
2 Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna, 160. 



 
 

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Jewish men, claiming they were unable to give satisfaction.3 Individual Burschenschaften 
had declared members of Zionist dueling fraternities to be unable to give satisfaction even 
before the Resolution, but this uniform, international, bureaucratic stance against Jewish 
students was new and hotly contested even among Burschenschaft members.4 
 
The cultural importance of dueling rested on the idea that a man could possess an inner 
honor so valuable that, if he was insulted, he should take up a sword to defend that honor. 
Public recognition for private offenses was his right. But it was thought that only an elite 
group of men had such priceless honor; only those men were able to give satisfaction. By 
announcing that Jewish students were unable to give satisfaction, the Resolution 
proclaimed that all Jews, on the sole basis on being Jews, lacked the honor which other 
Burschenschaft members naturally possessed. It was a piece of gross, institutionalized 
antisemitism.   
 
This new stance of the Burschenschaften on university students’ honor—a stance decided 
by Pan-Germanists in Austria and Germany—directly opposed the stance taken by the 
multiethnic Habsburg Empire’s Joint Army. According to the army, every single male 
university student in the Empire could duel, no matter his religion or ethnicity—as long as 
he had completed his year of training to become a reserve officer. Gymnasium graduates 
had only one year of compulsory military service, at the end of which they would be 
recognized for life as an officer in the Joint Army. Men not lucky enough to have received 
such an education spent three years as common soldiers.5 Rather than naming religion and 
ethnicity as the basis for honor as the Burschenschaften did, the Joint Army—which enlisted 
men from throughout a very diverse empire—made army rank the determining factor for 
honor. Officers, whether reserve or career, possessed sufficient honor to have to duel to 
protect it. Their status as officers gave Gymnasium graduates like Theodor Herzl the right 
and obligation to demand satisfaction for insults in duels. It was a shrewd move on the part 
of the army. The ability to give satisfaction added a touch of mystique to the Empire’s 
reserve and career officers, elevating their reputation, and it also (in theory) created a 
lifelong loyalty to the Empire and to the Kaiser in the university-educated reserve officers. 
 
This article explores what dueling culture in the Burschenschaften at the University of 
Vienna and among officers in the Joint Army reveals about ideals of honor in Austria in the 
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is especially interested in comparing the 
two institutions in terms of to whom they granted honor. While both had narrow 
definitions of honor, the Joint Army accorded honor to any male citizen who was a reserve 
or career officer, while the Burschenschaften’s privileging of Christian Austro-Germans 
created a system where just a narrow sliver of the population was properly able to give 
satisfaction. After 1896, only the Joint Army granted Jewish men the necessary honor to 
duel. The official exclusion of Jewish men from Austrian Burschenschaften also came at a 

 
3 Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, “The Burschenschaft and German Political Culture, 1890-1914,” Central European 
History 42, no. 3 (2009): 402.  
4 Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker, Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890-
1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 42 and 403.  
5 Arthur Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, trans. Catherine Hutter (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc, 
1970), 82. 



 
 

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time when antisemitism in German-speaking lands became ever more grounded in an idea 
of racial difference.6 This article argues that the passage of the Waidhofen Resolution was 
not an isolated incident of bigotry but an evolution of the German-nationalism of Austrian 
Burschenschaften as they increasingly mythologized what it meant to be “racially German”, 
and that the Burschenschaften’s definition of honor fought against the more inclusive (and 
pragmatically self-serving) definition of honor espoused by the army.  

 
Historiography 
The history of Burschenschaften in Germany has been explored by a few historians, 
including Lisa Zwicker and Kevin McAleer. This scholarship has been helpful for this 
particular study, especially when it tangentially refers to Austrian Burschenschaften, since 
similarly detailed English-language scholarship on Austrian Burschenschaften is lacking.  
This article is careful, though, to distinguish information about German Burschenschaften 
from information about Austrian Burschenschaften. Burschenschaften became slightly more 
conservative in Austria, since unlike German students, Austrian students had no 
aristocratic, apolitical alternative fraternity system like the corps.  
 
Burschenschaften came into existence at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in the lands that 
became Germany. As student organizations, they were a reaction against the aristocratic 
dueling corps, whose members were usually wealthy and titled. Promoting the honor of all 
“virtuous men,” no matter their class or creed, the Burschenschaften existed within a strong 
tradition of German nationalism and Protestantism.7 Long before there was a unified 
German state, there were Burschenschaft members clamoring for a Großdeutschland. In 
Austria, where Burschenschaften were founded after 1848, Burschenschaften Pan-
Germanism came to imply rebellion against the Catholic Habsburg Empire, and often 
against its multiethnicity.  
 
Every single member of the Austrian Burschenschaften, which were so publicly antisemitic, 
was also a reserve officer in the Joint Army. If he was not a reserve officer at the time he 
entered university, he became one within only a few years. In the existing secondary 
scholarship, there is no acknowledgement of the tension these competing identities caused 
other than in the 1915 “Guide for Reserve Officers” quoted by István Deák, specifically in 
the anecdote of the Burschenschaft member stripped of his army rank for failing to duel his 
Jewish fellow officer. Yet in his autobiography, Arthur Schnitzler, a well-known Viennese 
writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, explains as a matter of course 
that for many antisemitic students, it was a constant struggle to make “officer honor” agree 
with “student behavior.”8 There were strong ideological clashes between Burschenschaft 
members’ race-based, Pan-Germanic definition of honor and the Joint Army’s rank-based, 
multiethnic definition of honor. 
 
The Burschenschaft Member 

 
6 Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of 
Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23, no. 1 (1978): 39. 
7 Zwicker, Dueling Students, 32. 
8 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 129. 



 
 

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Antisemitism had been a part of the ideology of many Burschenschaften, Austrian and 
German, long before 1896. Ever since the establishment of Burschenschaften, debates had 
raged over whether Jewish men should be admitted, and many Jewish members found only 
an uneasy welcome among their new brothers. As a student, Theodor Herzl joined 
Burschenschaft Albia at the University of Vienna because of his strong belief in Pan-
Germanism. But he resigned in protest in 1883 after the Burschenschaft rallied behind a 
member who led a student ceremony in commemoration of the composer Richard 
Wagner’s death, a ceremony so antisemitic that the police intervened.9 Herzl expected an 
apology and to be begged to rejoin his Burschenschaft; instead, his Burschenschaft shrugged 
and let him go. For supporters of an ideology that hoped to unite all German-speaking 
peoples, Pan-Germanists often had specific ideas about how Germanic manhood should 
look and behave.  
 
Burschenschaften routinely demanded such unquestioning conformity and loyalty from 
their members. In their first year, the pledges, or “young foxes,” of most Burschenschaften 
were expected to meet with each other daily, immediately call each other by the informal 
“Du,” and submit to general hazing—all of which forged quick and strong emotional bonds 
between the men.10 Burschenschaften relied on regular pageantry to showcase the strength 
of their presence in the student body. In Vienna, Saturdays were an opportunity for the 
Burschenschaften to promenade down the city streets and in the university’s courtyard in a 
Farbenbummel [parade of colors], showing off the caps and sashes adorned with the colors 
and insignia of their Burschenschaft—and sometimes showing off their willingness to 
fight.11  
 
Brawls often broke out on these promenades, usually between Burschenschaften and 
Jewish and Catholic student organizations. Burschenschaften were frequently anti-Catholic 
in addition to being frequently antisemitic.12 Taking their cue from the older 
Burschenschaften in Protestant-majority Germany, Burschenschaft members in Catholic-
majority Austria looked down on members of Catholic student organizations, even though 
many Austrian Burschenschaft members were themselves at least nominally Catholic. The 
overwhelming dedication of these Burschenschaft members to their Burschenschaften is 
further demonstrated by the fact that the Pope had made dueling an excommunicable 
offense in 1867, and in 1890 even the Mensur was confirmed to count as a duel.13 (The 
Mensur was a strictly-regulated student duel arranged between Burschenschaften which 
took place simply to show off Burschenschaft members’ skill with a sword, not to avenge 
any insults.) It was a not uncommon cruelty in Austria to challenge pious Catholic reserve 
officers to a duel and force them to choose between their honor and their faith.14 And yet 

 
9 Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna, 151. 
10 Ernst Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 66. 
Zwicker, Dueling Students, 50. 
11 John Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” Central European History 17, no. 4 
(1984): 300. 
12 John Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” 300. 
13 Zwicker, Dueling Students, 45. 
14 Kevin McAleer, Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siécle Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1994), 154. 



 
 

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duels were so important to Catholic Burschenschaft members that they were worth defying 
the head of the Catholic Church. Duels meant the permanent, public, constantly visible 
confirmation of a man’s bravery and honor—because they led to scars, called Schmissen. 
Burschenschaft members never armored their faces when they dueled, and most happily 
collected a few prominent facial scars. Schmissen were so desired that some men who were 
not members of a Burschenschaft sliced open their cheeks with razors and let the cuts 
scar.15 As crucial as receiving the wounds in the first place was receiving the wounds 
without flinching. Routinely, pledges were ejected from Burschenschaften for failing to 
show the required stoicism (and therefore, honor) in their first duel.16  
 
Duels were, in fact, illegal at this time in Austria (though that certainly did not stop them 
from occurring). The only permissible duel was the Mensur. But students did challenge 
each other to illegal duels for reasons of personal insult, and quite often. There was a 
hierarchy to these insults. Impolite behavior (like shining a light in someone’s eyes) 
demanded only the less dangerous “light swords.”17 Verbal insults were more offensive and 
required heavy swords. Heavy swords were also needed for the most offensive type of 
insult of all: physical threats—blows or slaps, whether real or mimed—constituted a 
deeply mortifying “violation of another’s physical integrity.”18 
 
In the eyes of Burschenschaft members at least, to fight by these rules and to fulfil all the 
many duties of a Burschenschaft member was to prove one’s eliteness. This eliteness went 
beyond class (though Burschenschaft members came from families wealthy enough to 
support a university education and a Burschenschaft’s extra fees) and became about the 
soul. Burschenschaft members congratulated themselves on having untarnished honor, on 
being true men. 
 
Male Jewish students, at least until the antisemitic Waidhofen Resolution was passed, were 
often enthusiastic participants in Burschenschaft life. They found the duel to be especially 
critical as a way to insist upon their honor. Peter Gay writes, “A Schmiss on the face of a 
Jewish student had a particular poignancy: the scar was a symptom of defense, a proof of 
bravery, an assertion of equal status and manly self-respect.”19 But it could be difficult to 
earn one. Even among the Burschenschaften at the University of Vienna that admitted 
Jewish students in the years before the Waidhofen Resolution, most were happy to edge 
their Jewish members out. Theodor Herzl’s Burschenschaft Albia was in the 1880s 
“relatively more moderate than most of its rival saber rattlers” with “two other Jews and 
several converts on its active rolls, as well a fair number of Jewish alumni.”20 However, the 
Albia official record was extremely self-conscious about the religious make-up of the 
Burschenschaft. The record-keeper wrote, presumably after Herzl’s resignation, that Herzl 

 
15 McAleer, Dueling, 147. 
16 Zwicker, Dueling Students, 41. 
17 Zwicker, Dueling Students, 42. 
18 McAleer, Dueling, 47. 
19 Lisa Fethergill Zwicker, “Performing Masculinity: Jewish Students and the Honor Code at German 
Universities,” in Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History, eds. Benjamin Maria Baader, Sharon 
Gillerman, and Paul Frederick Lerner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 130-131. 
20 Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile, 66 and 67. 



 
 

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was “unpopular with both his fellow tribesmen as well as with the far more numerous 
pure-blooded Germans.”21 As Jews became increasingly defined as racially other, Jewish 
students, however secular, became a threat to those who valued the “pure-blooded 
German[ness]” of their Burschenschaft. 

 
The Joint Army Officer 
The great majority of men in the Habsburg Empire, and an even greater majority of women, 
did not attend university. Attending university was in and of itself a conferral of social 
privilege, among other benefits allowing men to spend only one year in the military, 
anytime from when they left the Gymnasium until they reached their legal majority at 
twenty-five.22 These university-educated reserve officers could quickly become career 
officers by retraining at a shortcut school. But men without university educations who 
wanted to attain the rank of officer had to spend years working their way up through a 
brutal system that demanded from them a very specific code of behavior. 
 
Boys mainly trained to become officers during adolescence at military academies or at the 
less prestigious cadet schools. Reforms in military law in the Habsburg Empire in 1868 
relaxed the intensity of the academies, which had been full of religious instruction, corporal 
punishment, and restrictions on students’ movement and reading material.23 Even with 
this new greater freedom, academies and cadet schools were rigorous and harsh, giving 
their students a technical and physical education as elaborate as the classical education of 
the Gymnasium. The boys came from all over the Habsburg Empire, and, as future officers, 
they were meant to shed their own personal nationalistic affiliations in favor of a sense of 
duty to the entire Empire.24 The methods for achieving this could be psychologically 
painful. István Deák writes, “In the first year, a student was forbidden to speak his mother 
tongue, and some students were forced to relearn their native languages later in courses 
offered by the school.”25 While German was prized as the “universal language of command 
and service,”26 officers were certainly not encouraged to value Pan-Germanism. Rather, 
they swore personal fealty to the Kaiser.27 Career officers were raised in a hierarchical, 
claustrophobic environment, where their entire education was designed to create deep 
loyalty to the Empire as a whole, rather than to their own specific region of it. The Military 
Academy at Wiener Neustadt’s famous motto was “Treu bis in den Tod!” (Loyal until 
death!).28  
 
Officers had to remain especially loyal when their regiment was sent to Vienna for five 
years, as every regiment was. For officers, these years in Vienna were meant to be a time of 

 
21 Pawel, The Labyrinth of Exile, 67. 
22 Arthur Schnitzler, The Road into the Open, trans. Roger Byers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 
1992), 86. 
23 István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 88.  
24 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 184. 
25 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 83. 
26 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 28. 
27 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 4. 
28 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 84. 



 
 

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fun and luxury, full of balls, operas, and sex. It was also a time of strict and exacting 
etiquette rules meant to uphold the honor of the officer corps. An officer’s pay was abysmal 
before the Compromise of 1867, when many nearly starved in order to afford the upkeep 
required for their uniform.29 But even when their pay was raised to higher than a 
university-educated civil servant’s, the army’s “psychological pressure to ‘enjoy life’” in the 
Empire’s most expensive city plunged many officers deep into debt.30 The Emperor 
sometimes personally bailed out “deserving officers,” but the army’s military funds and 
other money-lending operations imposed strict penalties on the officers who borrowed 
from them, as many officers did.31 For these men, most of them raised in isolated 
academies and cadet schools where “no one had prepared them for the real world,” as one 
officer complained, it was socially imperative that they take out ruinous loans to be able to 
afford signs of culture and affluence like sending their daughters to fashionable schools.32 
They were representatives of the Emperor and had to behave as such. Their rules of 
conduct were rigid and aristocratic: “Officers were forbidden to eat in a low-class 
restaurant, to ride an omnibus (at least until the twentieth century), to travel third-class, or 
to carry the smallest of packages (unless it appeared to contain chocolate or candies).”33  
 
The sense that Joint Army officers should be not only defenders of their own honor but also 
of the Emperor’s led to the onerous obligation of Ehrennotwehr [the urgent necessity to 
defend one’s honor]. If an officer heard a civilian, in front of one or more other people, 
insult him, the officer corps, the military, or the Emperor and the only way to stop the 
insult was to use physical force, the officer was supposed to attack the civilian with his 
sword and, if need be, his service revolver.34 As might be expected, an officer exercising the 
Ehrennotwehr was a legal nightmare and almost always resulted in anger from the public. 
The Ehrennotwehr required the officer to decide on the spot that there was no other option 
to avenge the insulted party—and also required him to challenge the civilian to a duel 
rather than simply attacking him if the civilian was able to give satisfaction. However, 
officers could be punished if they challenged a civilian to a duel if that civilian was unable 
to give satisfaction, because in that case they had failed to properly exercise 
Ehrennotwehr.35 (The entire process also assumed that only a male civilian would think to 
insult any of these groups.) After unification, newspapers increasingly argued that officers 
should never be in a public place out of uniform or without their sword, so that everyone in 
the surrounding area would know to avoid insulting any group in front of the officer which 
would trigger the need for the Ehrennotwehr to be exercised. Officers were also advised to 
flee any social gathering where they sensed the possible need to exercise the 
Ehrennotwehr.36 In contrast to the moral minefield of the Ehrennotwehr, a duel between 
officers was seen as ennobling. Though the army’s criminal code forbade it, the army 

 
29 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 117-118. 
30 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 120-121. 
31 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 124. 
32 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 124. 
33 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 125. 
34 Deák, Beyond Nationalism 128-129. 
35 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 129. 
36 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 129. 



 
 

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expected its officers to duel and routinely looked the other way when it came to punishing 
them for it.37   
 
Jewish men saw great social benefits from this practice of dueling in the army, which gave 
even reserve officers the right to demand satisfaction through a duel. There was a high 
number of Jewish university students in the Empire, and by 1900, over 18.3% of the 
reserve officer corps was Jewish.38 A 1915 “Guide for Reserve Officers” warned readers 
that a refusal to duel a Jewish fellow officer could result in a humiliating loss of military 
rank. It described an incident where, insulted by a Jewish man and challenged to a duel, a 
Burschenschaft student (and reserve officer) refused to fight. He was stripped of his rank 
because, the guide states, he violated “the army’s notion of honor.”39 But in contrast to the 
number of Jewish reserve officers, the number of Jewish career officers was few. Deák 
assumes this was the case both because the officer’s lifestyle was “completely alien to 
Jewish tradition” and because of individual antisemites blocking the paths of interested 
Jewish men. 40 In 1901, the Viennese newspaper Dr. Bloch’s Wochenschrift revealed that 
General Edmund Krieghammer, the new war minister, was “systematically denying study 
stipends to Jewish doctors interested in pursuing a military career,” making it “nearly 
impossible for Jewish reserve medical officers to become career soldiers”.41 No Jewish 
career officer was ever advanced to a rank higher than that of a two-star general at a time 
when the highest rank was that of a five-star general.42 Despite the Empire’s multiethnicity, 
biases against various ethnicities and, likely, religions were rampant when admitting 
students to the elite military academies.43 Yet even though most Jewish career officers did 
convert, conversion was not required. Furthermore, the highly decorated 
Feldmarshalleutnant Eduard Ritter von Schweitzer kept kosher and even received 
permission from the Emperor to keep kosher when dining with him.44  
 
In exchange for a less bigoted attitude about who was honorable enough to give 
satisfaction, the Joint Army demanded a reverent loyalty from its officers, which they were 
meant to maintain even when they were no longer on active duty. Arthur Schnitzler was 
stripped of his rank as a reserve officer for his novella Lieutenant Gustl, a scathing portrait 
of a sex-obsessed and stupid officer who decided he must commit suicide after receiving a 
small insult from a baker, a man whose low status means Gustl cannot demand satisfaction. 
The insult—which translates as “fathead”—would have been equally offensive to a 
Burschenschaft member, prompting a duel necessitating heavy swords rather than light 
swords.45   
 
A Student, an Officer, and a Jew: A Case Study 

 
37 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 130. 
38 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 133. 
39 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 133-134. 
40 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 176. 
41 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 176. 
42 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 177. 
43 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 188. 
44 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 177. 
45 Zwicker, Dueling Students, 42. 



 
 

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Arthur Schnitzler’s disillusionment with the Joint Army grew slowly. When he served his 
required year in the army in the early 1880s while attending the University of Vienna, he 
enjoyed himself. Though this was more than a decade before the Waidhofen Resolution was 
passed, Schnitzler was an incisive observer of the pressures of honor and antisemitism 
which affected the lives of students at the university and in the army. His autobiography My 
Youth in Vienna provides insight into the way one man, at least, juggled the competing 
identities of student, officer, and Jew. A medical student pursuing his education half-
heartedly, Schnitzler belonged to neither the Burschenschaften nor the Zionist dueling 
fraternities. He was, however, a practiced fencer long before his time in the army. My Youth 
in Vienna criticized his father for his aversion to letting Schnitzler join a variety of popular 
sports during adolescence, but Schnitzler said that “[f]encing was another story. Even my 
father had to admit that a future soldier and reserve officer should know how to handle a 
sword, so, with passing interest and without putting myself out in the slightest, I took a 
course with fencing-master Domaschintzky, a gray-bearded, genial, savage giant.”46 Serving 
in the army was both a way to gain honor and a requirement of citizenship, which was 
granted to Jews in 1867, only about fifteen years before Schnitzler served in the army. To 
train a future officer to handle a sword properly was a critical matter, even to a man like 
Schnitzler’s father who otherwise had little use for sports.  
 
For Schnitzler, joining the army just after passing his third-year exams meant taking on the 
posture of genteelly dissipated, aristocratic loitering an officer was supposed to evidence. 
Some of the more studious future reserve officers hurried back to the university to catch a 
few lectures during breaks, but Schnitzler considered his days in the army less a time for 
learning than for carousing: “[E]ven the hours from twelve to two, which was when my 
more diligent comrades went to hear Späth on obstetrics, I usually spent, with a few others, 
eating my lunch so that nothing could prevent me from wielding my billiard cue at two.”47 
Schnitzler also took on the officer’s stereotypical sexual prowess: “I had scarcely donned 
my uniform—it was as if I or my fate had been waiting for such a banal cue—when I began 
to aim more consciously for what is designated—all too heroically—as ‘conquests.’”48 
Before serving in the army, Schnitzler had had several flirtations with varying levels of 
seriousness, but it was in the army, he implies, when he first began having sex. The ample 
unstructured time and lack of parental supervision allowed him this freedom. Schnitzler 
remembered with amusement the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat, a major in the army, 
who had an affair with his friend and “would enter into intimate relationships only with 
army medical students—one finds specialization in every field”49—evidence, too, of the 
diversity of ethnicity and class in the Joint Army. 
 
Despite the billiards and sexual conquests, Schnitzler’s time in the army did not always go 
smoothly. Antisemitism pervaded this branch of the Habsburg military. Medical students 
serving in the army, many of whom were Jewish, were called, derogatorily, “Moses 

 
46 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 116. 
47 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 127. 
48 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 117. 
49 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 118. 



 
 

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dragoons.”50 Schnitzler writes that not only were there divisions between the Gentiles and 
Jews serving in the army, but his service came during a time of widespread debate over 
whether there were merely religious or also ethnic differences between the groups.51 
Schnitzler dealt with one instance of antisemitism by reporting an assistant doctor who 
wanted to punish Schnitzler and some (ostensibly also Jewish) friends for tardiness with 
several weeks of confinement to barracks. His senior medical officer had the request 
“quash[ed],” much to the assistant doctor’s disgust.52 
 
But Schnitzler was also very aware of antisemitism at the university, and what the duel 
could mean to Jewish students as a weapon against bigotry. Looking back on a conversation 
he had with some of his fellow future reserve officers, he writes:  
 

We were talking about dueling, and all of us, without exactly feeling that we were 
supporters of the tradition as a matter of principle, but more out of the general 
spirit of those student days and especially as inductees and future reserve officers, 
stressed our willingness to give satisfaction if it were demanded. Theodore was the 
only one who declared that under no circumstances would he duel, and in answer to 
our question: why, replied with a smile—because he was a coward. It was not so 
much the unestablished fact of his cowardice that astonished us, as the courage it 
took to confess it, something we weren’t ready to admit at the time, not to him nor 
to ourselves. None of us were brawlers nor were any of us expert duelers, yet there 
wasn’t one among us who would have tried to evade a student duel or any other 
kind of duel, if the prevailing rules of conduct made it unavoidable.53 
 

Even though they were not members of a Burschenschaft, Schnitzler’s friends felt the duel 
was deeply important. The idea of not fighting a duel when challenged—of not “giv[ing] 
satisfaction if it were demanded”—was unthinkable to them. Theodore’s refusal to duel is 
something that he self-deprecatingly calls “coward[ice],” but that Schnitzler, thinking back, 
recognizes as a type of “courage.”  
 
Schnitzler ends his recounting of this incident by saying, “The question was very topical at 
the time for us young men, especially for the Jews among us, since antisemitism was 
spreading rapidly in student circles.”54 By the time he was at university, Schnitzler 
explains: 
 

[The] Burschenschafte[n] had already started to expel all Jews and Jewish 
descendants, and conflicts during the so-called “promenade” on Saturday mornings, 
and during student carousals, also street fights, were not so rare in those days 
between the antisemitic [Burschenschaften] and the radical-liberal 
Landsmannschaften, formed by those coming from the same native areas, some of 

 
50 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 115. 
51 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 131. 
52 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 131. 
53 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 126-127. 
54 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 127. 



 
 

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which were predominately Jewish. (Dueling corps with a solely Jewish membership 
did not as yet exist in those days.) Provocations between individuals in lecture halls, 
corridors and laboratories were daily occurrences….This was one of the reasons 
why many Jewish students considered it necessary to become exceptionally expert 
and dangerous fencers.55 
 

A few of Schnitzler’s details are inaccurate. There were, in fact, “dueling corps with a solely 
Jewish membership” during his time at university. Schnitzler entered university in 1879 
and was there when the first Zionist dueling fraternity Kadimah was founded in 1882. 
Perhaps he intentionally altered these details—or was unaware of when Kadimah was 
founded, which might also show how small Kadimah’s initial influence was. But this 
passage, however hazy it is on small details, makes it clear that for Schnitzler, the 
university was a literal as well as an ideological battleground. Any encounter with a bigoted 
fellow student could quickly go wrong and provide the pretext for a duel, the only way to 
force a recognition of Jewish equality—or even Jewish superiority. 
 
With pride, Schnitzler writes: 

 
Tired of waiting for the opponent’s effrontery and insults, [Jewish students] quite 
frequently behaved in a provocative fashion, and their superiority in dueling, which 
was becoming an increasing embarrassment, was certainly the main reason for the 
priceless Waidhofen manifesto with which the German-Austrian student body 
declared all Jews once and for all incapable of giving satisfaction. I have no intention 
of omitting the exact words of this decree; it went like this: 
 
Every son of a Jewish mother, every human being in whose veins flows Jewish blood, 
is from the day of his birth without honor and void of all the more refined 
emotions…He is ethically subhuman…It is impossible to insult a Jew; a Jew cannot 
therefore demand satisfaction for any suffered insult. 
 
This decree was not declared official until a few years later but the spirit that 
sponsored it and the sentiments it expressed existed at the time I am describing 
here, at the beginning of the eighties therefore.56  

 
My Youth in Vienna was first published in German in 1968, thirty-seven years after 
Schnitzler’s death. Schnitzler wrote this passage long after the Waidhofen Resolution was 
passed, and his supposedly word-for-word write-up of the Resolution contradicts the 
version which Lisa Zwicker consulted. Her version of the Resolution has an entirely 
different tone to it: the Burschenschaften “now have no Jewish members and do not plan to 
have any in the future.”57 The language of the Resolution she cites is dry, straightforward, 
and bureaucratic; the language of the Resolution Schnitzler cites is vitriolic racist rhetoric. 
Rather than questioning whether Schnitzler dramatized his version of the Resolution, or 

 
55 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 128. 
56 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 128-9. 
57 Zwicker, “The Burschenschaft and German Political Culture,” 402-403. 



 
 

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whether there were many versions of the Resolution with different wording publicized in 
different outlets, or whether the Waidhofen Resolution was simply very long and varied in 
style, with the limited evidence available, it is most useful to explore how deeply the 
Waidhofen Resolution affected a man who never joined a Burschenschaft or even fought a 
duel at university. Schnitzler, decades later, was still intensely, personally furious with the 
Resolution. The Waidhofen Resolution passed after his time at university, but its 
antisemitism reflects his own experience with student duels and the Jewish students who 
trained intensely to gain their “superiority in dueling,” only to have their accomplishments, 
as he felt, stripped from them by Austro-German students unable to put up with being 
bested by Jewish students. Even if the Burschenschaften were the ones who created and 
enforced the Resolution, Schnitzler thought that the entire “German-Austrian student 
body” was, at least ideologically, also behind the Resolution. If accurate, this paints a very 
bleak portrait of student antisemitism at the University of Vienna. Not only does 
Schnitzler’s Resolution strip Jewish men of their honor, it strips them of their humanity. His 
version of the Resolution accuses them of being “void of all the more refined emotions,” 
“ethically subhuman,” and “impossible to insult”—and then Schnitzler goes on to say that 
this Resolution reflects the feelings of all the (Christian) Austro-German students. 
 
In the face of deeply entrenched antisemitism, the officer status of the Jewish students who 
had been through military training allowed them to push back against the Waidhofen 
Resolution. “[W]hen actual insults had been exchanged and especially when officer honor 
could not be made to agree with student behavior,” Schnitzler admitted, it was not always 
possible “to apply the Waidhofen principles as strictly as their followers would have 
liked.”58 To refuse to duel a fellow officer, no matter his religion, would after all result in a 
stripping of one’s military rank if the incident was reported.59 Though it did so for its own 
reasons, the Joint Army stood behind its Jewish reserve officers, giving many Jewish 
university students a means of forcing other students to acknowledge them as equals. 
 
Conclusion 
The duel created a physical expression for the fraught issues of who was seen in Austrian 
society as equally honorable to whom. Its proponents elevated the duel to something more 
than a sport, a sacred ritual where honor was defended and courage forged, and these same 
proponents created a system by which very few people were viewed as having honor. In 
the army, a certain rank was required to possess honor, whether that rank had been won 
through years of military training or gifted as a consequence of a certain education. In the 
Burschenschaften, possessing honor required having a certain education, a certain 
ethnicity, and a certain sex. (Women might possess honor, but their honor was tied to a 
reputation which they could not, so the thinking went, defend for themselves.60) The 1880s 
and 1890s were a time when antisemitism was wielded in Vienna as a political weapon by 
demagogues like Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger. The Waidhofen Resolution was as 
much an expression of the era’s political trends as of mere personal bigotry, but the 

 
58 Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna, 129. 
59 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 133-4. 
60 McAleer, Dueling, 159. 



 
 

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Resolution had to fight against the more open definition of honor espoused by the Joint 
Army. 
 
In June 1914, on the eve of World War I, the Waidhofen Resolution was revoked.61 In 1917, 
duels were again banned in the armed forces62, but this time the ruling was enforced more 
harshly. During wartime, a near majority of students at the University were women from 
Austria and Jewish refugees of both sexes from Galicia.63 Many leftists at the university 
thought that the war meant the end of an era of for the Burschenschaften’s self-styled Pan-
Germanic student aristocracy. But by June 1918, there were again antisemitic speakers at 
the Farbenbummeln.64 By 1932, the Burschenschaften had officially allied with the National 
Socialists.65 Arno J. Mayer wrote that “[i]t would take two World Wars and the 
Holocaust…to finally dislodge and exorcise the feudal and aristocratic presumption from 
Europe’s civil and political societies.”66 But even after society at large turned away from the 
duel, the Burschenschaften clung to their ideal of an exclusive, easily-injured honor. The 
Mensur still exists in its original form today. 
 
Even during the height of dueling’s popularity, there were people who agitated against it. 
Vienna had an Anti-Dueling League founded in 1902 that was made up of a thousand 
members, including influential aristocrats, and organizations as disparate as the Catholic 
Church, the Freemasons, and the Social Democrats decried the duel as an institution.67 But 
again and again, across political affiliations, men who had the training or education to 
socially qualify as worthy of gaining satisfaction took to the sword or pistol. Especially after 
the passage of the Waidhofen Resolution, the need to publicly prove their honor must have 
been especially strong for men struggling to negotiate the complexities of being both 
Jewish and Austrian. Sometimes grabbing a weapon and stepping onto the field of honor 
must have seemed the only way to meaningfully fight back.  

 
61 Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” 302. 
62 Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” 308. 
63 Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” 306. 
64 Haag, “Students at the University of Vienna in the First World War,” 309. 
65 Zwicker, “The Burschenschaft and German Political Culture,” 390. 
66 Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Verso Books, 1981), 
329. 
67 Deák, Beyond Nationalism, 132. 


