By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The 1952 Olympics were held in Helsinki. Germany was allowed to reenter, having been banned from the London Games. Ilona Elek, now forty-five—three years older than Helene—seemed on her way to a third gold when she was defeated 3-4 by the eventual winner, an Italian. Helene followed the Games keenly and wrote to her old fencing friends for gossip and details of the championships. Following a series of operations, she thought that she had beaten her breast cancer, but the disease had metastasized into her spine and the end came quickly. She died on October 10, 1953, two months short of her forty-third birthday and less than a year and a half after her marriage. Throughout these years she never spoke publicly about the 1936 Games, and even close friends have only insubstantial memories of occasional expressions of regret.‖

  What would have happened had Helene Mayer refused to allow herself to be the “token Jew” and not negotiated with the Nazis? Might she, one individual, actually have been able to change the course of events? As Milly Mogulof formulates the issue, “Had she demurred … the entire Olympic enterprise might have been threatened, leaving the planners in an awkward situation. Would they have scurried about in an unseemly, time-consuming search to find another ‘suitable’ German-Jewish athlete? Faced with a mounting dilemma, the United States as a major player and other Western democracies might have bowed out of the Games.” That is pitching it high; but it is just possible.

  What of Helene’s own decision? How much were her actions motivated by fear of reprisals against her family? The evidence suggests very little, although it was undoubtedly a factor. Her dogged adherence to Germanness and her ambitions as a fencer seem greater elements. She was probably the greatest woman foilist ever; but she was the wrong person for the times and for the exceptional choices she was forced to make.

  In 1968, in the run-up to West Germany hosting the Olympic Games, its post office issued a series of special Olympic stamps. These portrayed, among others, Pierre de Coubertin and also Carl Diem, the sports educator who had planned much of the 1936 Games. Only one woman athlete was honored with a stamp: Helene Mayer, “Blond Hee.”

  * In 2004, Müller-Preis, frail but full of vigor at ninety-two, put in an unexpected appearance at the World Veteran Championships in Krems, just outside Vienna. Even before her record-breaking career was over, she had forged another as a professor at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, introducing a technique for breathing and movement that allowed the voice to float freely. After admonishing me for incorrect breathing (“It will shorten your life, young man!”), she turned to discussing Mayer. “She never beat me, you know,” she said proudly (though inaccurate—a forgivable exaggeration: see this page). “In the years following Amsterdam, she got quite a bit heavier, and I would wait for her attack, when there would be a moment when her body subsided into her lunge, then I’d riposte under her sword arm. It was her one weakness.”

  † Something of the Nazi ambition to come out on top at the Berlin Games can be seen in Bergmann’s story of her roommate at several athletic meets: “She never used to undress in front of me and I’m sure she never got in the shower at all. I remember thinking she was weird.” The girl, Dora Ratjen, was a fellow high jumper in more than one sense. After the war she reemerged as Hermann Ratjen, a waiter in Bremen; the athlete had been told to masquerade as a woman in order to win medals for Germany.

  ‡ It is worth putting these three into the context of other champions, past and future. No woman before them achieved what they did; but since then there have been some fine champions. The Soviet Union produced a crop of notable foilists in the 1960s and 1970s, including Valentina Sidorova and Elena Belova; Germany has two three-time champions in Cornelia Hanisch and Anna Fechtel. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the Hungarian Ildiko Rejto, world champion in 1963 and Olympic champion in 1964, who was born both paralyzed and profoundly deaf. (Her early years were spent in a wheelchair until, aged fourteen, one day she stood and could soon walk.) None, though, so dominated their opponents as Elek or Mayer did, while Preiss’s eighteen-year span at world-champion level speaks for itself.

  When Rejto finally married, it was too late to bear children. Her husband’s brother, however, had a family of five, and his wife was expecting a sixth. Rejto suggested to her husband that he ask his brother if they could adopt the new child. His brother agreed, and the newborn son was handed over. Shortly after, Rejto complained to her husband that it was not good for a child to be brought up on its own, without siblings. Again her brother- and sister-in-law were approached, and again they complied. Rejto and her husband are now part of a happy family of four.

  § In The Nazi Olympics Richard Mandell makes an intriguing comment: “In their match early in the finals the young Hungarian perceived her opponent’s weakness. By means of irritating affectations, she succeeded in making Mayer nervous.”10

  ‖ I was part of the British team at the Munich Games in 1972 when the Arab terrorist assault on the Olympic Village ended in a shoot-out in which eleven Israeli athletes, a West German policeman, and five terrorists were killed. There was much talk in the world’s press about calling off the Games as a mark of respect for the murdered Israelis. I remember writing to the London Times, arguing that sportsmen were neither stupid nor coldhearted but that it was right for the Games to continue. I still believe it. Eighteen years later, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics. Again (letter-writing to newspapers being an occupational disease for certain kinds of Englishmen) The Times printed a letter I sent them arguing that such a boycott was inappropriate: if selected, I intended to go. As the year went on, however, I met friends from Eastern Europe, and without exception they said they hoped Western athletes would stand up to the Soviets and not take part. In the end the weight of the moral argument was too much: weeks before we were due to fly out, I elected not to go. But I well remember the agonized to-ing and fro-ing I went through trying to make up my mind, over issues far less onerous than Mayer’s.

  To become a champion is not so very difficult. What is extremely difficult is to remain one.

  —ALDO NADI, On Fencing

  Champions aren’t made in gyms, champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have last-minute stamina, they have to be a little faster, and they have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.

  —Muhammad Ali

  AT THE SYDNEY GAMES IN 2000 THE OFFICIAL FENCING PROGRAM asked, “Which nation will be first in history to win 100 Olympic medals—France or Italy?” These two started the Olympics with 99 and 95 medals respectively, tallies far outstripping their nearest competitors. France reached its century first, when Hugues Obry won the individual silver in the épée, and by the end of the Games had gathered another 5, for a total of 105 (36 gold, 37 silver, 32 bronze), and Italy had just reached three figures (40–35–25); but the rivalry had begun long before the advent of the modern Olympics and showed itself most intensely at foil.

  With Paris setting the agenda, fencing in France has always managed to remain remarkably homogeneous. In 1877, the Ministry of War published Manuel d’escrime, a handbook that provided the foundation for its successor, the Règlement d’escrime of 1908, which became the bible of French fencing. In Italy there was no such unity: competing schools bitterly disputed rules and techniques.*

  Sometime in the early 1870s, the new Italian government, having recently unified the country and keen to reestablish its place among the great nations of the world, decided as part of this policy to codify its fencing practices. In 1882, the Neapolitan-Sicilian masters persuaded the Ministry of War to hold a competition for the best fencing treatise. The winning entry would then be adopted, as had been its counterpart in France, for use throughout the army—an oblique tactic for breaking northern control over military fencing. The southern faction believed their northern and more cosmopolitan rivals to be contaminated by foreign inf
luence and saw themselves as custodians of a “pure” system of Italian swordplay. The northern master they singled out for particular criticism was Giuseppe Radaelli, whose influential manual struck at fencing’s historically defensive character by encouraging counterattacks rather than parries.

  Ten works were shortlisted, including Radaelli’s. The judges began their deliberations on November 15, 1883, the final choice falling between Radaelli and a Neapolitan, Masaniello Parise, whose grandfather and father were fencing masters (his grandfather Raffaele had insisted that his bride-to-be learn to fence before their wedding could take place and made sure their five sons learned too). While the commission deliberated, Parise’s supporters vigorously attacked Radaelli, claiming that he advocated cuts from the elbow, that his pupils hit too heavily, and that his system encouraged counterattacks rather than parries—influenced by Radaelli’s notorious saying “The parry does not exist.”

  In the end, Parise won, his victory prompting the government to establish the Scuola Magistrale, an academy of the sword for masters in Rome, with the thirty-four-year-old Neapolitan as its dean. Parise quickly dispatched cadres of masters to all parts of Europe and the Levant to study every type of fencing, and incorporated the best of their reports into his blueprint for how the discipline should be taught. He would remain dean until his death at the age of sixty-one, and in that time oversaw the training of some of Italy’s greatest masters: Italo Santelli (graduated 1889), Arturo Gazzera (1893), and Francesco Tagliabo (1897)—the last two of whom would later coach Helene Mayer. But it was the earliest graduate of them all, Agesilao Greco (1887), who with his brother and nephew would have the most profound effect on Italian swordplay.

  Agesilao’s father was a Sicilian nobleman who had fought for Garibaldi—and indeed every romantic cause that he could find. He was badly wounded in one of the battles for independence against Austria and tossed into a mass grave. Left for dead, he remained there for an entire night before fighting his way out. This will to survival he passed down to his two sons, Agesilao and Aurelio, and to their cousin Enzo.

  Aurelio had wanted to be a painter, but his father dictated otherwise, and the chastened fifteen-year-old entered an international foil tournament at Bergamo: in a field of 180, he took first prize for fencing style as well as winning the competition itself. In 1902, in a competition for professionals in Turin attracting 300 contestants, he won the foil without receiving a single hit—one of the exceptional achievements in fencing history. His successes grew until in 1922 he capped his career in a public contest in all three weapons against the champion of Rome, winning 20–8 at saber, 20–2 at foil, and 20–0 at épée. Thereafter he devoted himself to teaching, becoming a leading manager, administrator, and master, and ultimately creating the Italian Federation of Fencing. He and Agesilao between them wrote seven books, covering all three weapons.

  Enzo was less strong than his uncles as a competitive fencer, but became one of the great fight arrangers, working on such films as Cleopatra, Ben Hur, El Cid, William Tell, and Visconti’s The Innocent and with actors such as Charlton Heston, Errol Flynn, Richard Burton, and Claudia Cardinale. He would quote a famous fencing epigram, “Every sword is like a small bird. Hold it too tightly and it will suffocate. Too lightly, and it will fly away.” The line would eventually be given to the fencing master in Scaramouche. Even Visconti gave Enzo a free hand over fight scenes, except when he suggested that a duel scene between two women in a Gina Lollobrigida vehicle be fought with the actresses stripped to the waist.

  In 1922 Aurelio Greco took on the Italian champion Candido Sassone in what journalists dubbed “the duel of the century,” and which was even filmed. It lasted six months, over seven different venues, and ended with Sassone’s defeat. The whole argument arose from a difference of opinion about fencing theory. (illustration credit 16.1)

  In the 1880s, matches and competitions—nearly all fought in the open air—were formal, academic affairs, where the scoring of hits was based on the classicism of the performance and whether the touch in question would have delivered a mortal wound, not simply on whether a hit had arrived.† This of course left wide room for interpretation, depending on the particular school of the fencer and jury. A French jury would favor a Frenchman, an Italian jury one of its own; after one team event in 1895 an Italian judge claimed that the Italian fencers had won by 540 hits to 36. As a result, matches frequently degenerated, with challenges being issued whenever a fencer felt that his reputation had been impugned. Regular duelists despised sporting matches.

  Nonetheless, Agesilao Greco was regularly called on for more legitimate tests of his mettle. On June 17, 1889, he led a four-man team in one of the first encounters between the Scuola Magistrale and leading French masters. The contest was held in the banquet hall of the Grand Hotel in Paris, but even so the French found themselves at a disadvantage, confronted with a system based chiefly on dueling technique, and lost heavily. Le Figaro observed, “Above all, the purpose of fencing to Italian fencers is combat; and they seek to attain their goal with all the resources they have available; their aim is to hit and not be hit.… We, instead, admire, above all, aesthetic bouts.”2

  Greco’s fencing may not have been aesthetic, but it was effective. In the same paper the noted teacher Arsène Vigeant acclaimed him as “a young master with a great future, gifted with marvelous power and originality in tactical approach,” while Il Secolo of Milan described Greco as “the hero of the evening.” Evénement, however, took a different view, declaring that “The Roman masters have not yet abandoned theatrical postures.” The “useless movement and contortions, and the continuous beating of the adversary’s blade, which they search for systematically in monotonous fashion.… After Saturday’s competition opinions were mixed: some amateur foilsmen admired the Italian fencers, but the majority, while recognizing great qualities in the Italians, nevertheless saw their fencing as trickery.” This became the standard criticism of the Greco school: it was theatrical and relied on deception rather than technique—Neapolitans were always trying to trick you.‡

  In 1903 Agesilao fenced the great French champion Lucien Mérignac in Buenos Aires before an audience of over four thousand. The following year, again in Buenos Aires, he fought a draw against another powerful Parisian, Alphonse Kirchoffer. The Frenchman was short and awkward, and his unclassical style so upset Greco that he twice protested to the jury about his opponent’s roughhouse tactics; by the bout’s end opinion was divided on who had landed the most hits. Following the match a report appeared in La Nación lauding Kirchoffer. Greco was incensed and accused his opponent of deliberately attacking low. Kirchoffer denied the charge and departed for Montevideo. Greco claimed that the Frenchman had fled the country to avoid a rematch. When Kirchoffer refused to fight again, the Sicilian challenged him to a duel; but on this occasion nothing materialized. Seven years later, learning that Kirchoffer’s entire right foot and part of his left had had to be amputated, he immediately volunteered for the benefit gala. The event drew an audience of eight thousand, including the prime minister of France, Aristide Briand, and was a showpiece for the best fencers of Italy and France. The Italian side included a seventeen-year-old Livornese: Nedo Nadi.

  Agesilao Greco was always looking for an excuse to duel. He was in a café in Naples when another customer started throwing snail shells at two girls seated nearby. By the third shell Agesilao had issued a challenge in defense of the girls’ honor: the resultant duel lasted nearly four hours. (illustration credit 16.2)

  THUS WE COME TO THE THIRD GREAT ITALIAN FENCING FAMILY: Nedo, his father, Beppe, and his younger brother, Aldo. Their story encompasses the reflowering of fencing in the north of Italy; the transition from professional fencing as the highest form of swordplay to international championships, where amateurs reigned supreme; and the extraordinary Nadi family itself, with Nedo and Aldo ranking among the half-dozen greatest fencers the sport has seen.

  It is hard to say why the northern school flourished
after the Scuola Magistrale had been created in Rome, or why Livorno should have become so important. The city had been built by the Medici as a free port for international trade and consequently became a staging post for immigrants, where fencing masters could prosper. By the end of the nineteenth century few noble families remained, and a thriving mercantile class had taken their place. Luigi Barbasetti says in his classic book on foil fencing, La Scherma di Spada, that for all the enthusiasm for the sport in Naples, Sicily, and Rome the standard was higher in Livorno because northerners had, as he puts it, a more calculating disposition.4

  Nedo, Beppe, and Aldo Nadi in Livorno, 1933. “Nedo will defeat everybody,” predicted Beppe, “and when he tires of being number one he will pass the title on to Aldo.” He was not far wrong. (illustration credit 16.3)

  Whatever accounted for Livorno’s success, Beppe Nadi was its most famous master. His father was chief of the fire department, and Beppe drifted into the same line of work. His father was also a coach at the Academy of Via Ernesto Rossi, where Beppe himself was soon fencing. In 1892 he started his own club, Circolo Fides Livorno—“Circolo” because it suggested a more friendly environment than the more usual “salle,” and “Fides” from the city motto, which proclaimed its citizens’ loyalty to the Medicis. The fencing room was minuscule, and students were called upon to pay just one lira a month. Although the city had maintained a central generator since 1888, there was no electricity: members had to practice by candlelight. The neighborhood was filled with such establishments as “The House of Appointments” or, as it was officially known, “The House of Tolerance.” Four years later Nadi moved to a more salubrious area with electric light—though still only a single room to fence in plus a couple of showerless locker rooms. At first he did not allow women to join the club; when various young actresses came to fence, he gave them lessons in secret. They would change in his small master’s closet, which was separated from the main changing room by a single door. Students used to peek at them through holes in the door as they undressed—“It had more holes in it than a Gruyère cheese,” one recalled.