By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  Folly never thinks it has enough, even when it obtains what it desires.

  —CICERO, Tusculanae Disputationes (ON THE EMOTIONS), 44 B.C.

  I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass,

  And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg

  I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk,

  Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad.

  —CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, 1592

  TAUBERBISCHOFSHEIM IS A TOWN OF JUST 12,000 INHABITANTS, set between the Main and Tauber Rivers in the northeast of Baden-Württemberg. The area is known as “Badisch Sibirien,” a nod to its anonymity and isolation. Surrounded by hills, forests, vineyards, and farmland, before the 1970s the town had little economic or political significance, and few, even in Germany, knew of its existence. It was there that in 1936 the wife of a local barber, Herr Beck, gave birth to their thirteenth child. He was christened Emil, and grew up ungainly, short, and overweight. By 1953 he was apprenticed to his father.

  Of Emil’s twelve brothers and sisters, six died in childhood. Emil himself displayed boundless energy and surprising strength but looked the antithesis of an athlete. Yet that is what he longed to be. One day in his teens he saw a government training film extolling fencing. The following day he went back to see it again: he had been bitten. After the Second World War Germans had been banned from fencing internationally because of the sport’s connection to Nazism. Germany was readmitted in 1949 and had been competing for only four years when to general astonishment Emil decided that he wanted to become a fencing coach. The nearest club was eleven miles away, a hilly trip through rolling vineyards to the town of Bad Mergentheim. The only way he could make the journey was by bike, an arduous trip even for a fit athlete. But Emil was determined. Every spare evening, he bolted from his father’s shop, grabbed his ragged fencing suit (made from flour sacks stitched together by his sister), and cycled off. He started practicing foil but soon changed to épée, coaching himself along the way; he never received an épée lesson in his life.

  Time magazine would later write that Emil had “always been the wildest Beck, so uncontrollable in kindergarten he had been thrown out after five days, so wild at home his older brothers would leash him to a tree with the goats.” The same independence of spirit informed his assessment of the new world he had entered. “Why does a man need to hold a foil with his fingers?” Time has Beck asking. “Because the French did? Pah. Your fingers get tired that way; why not use the palm of the hand? And why thrust the blade only from here? Because the Hungarians and the Italians did? My God, if it will bring you a hit, why not jab the thing at them from behind your back?” Or, one could add, over your shoulder or crouching down close to the ground. The electric box, Beck pointed out, gives no points for style, does not react to soulful looks or angry tirades, but does light up for hits that land on the back, under the arm, or in crevices in the groin; or that are flicked over like fiberglass fishing rods with a whip-cracking wrist action. Two particular classic doctrines he discarded: no longer was it necessary, he declared, to lead with the arm—one could lead with the feet instead. And feints need not be targeted on an opponent; they could be directed anywhere, so long as they had the desired effect. The point was to seize the initiative, then ensure that one landed on target. To put across his new vision Beck knew he had to start a club of his own. He continued to work in his father’s shop from 8 A.M. to 6 P.M., but then it was off to train in the boiler room behind the town grammar school—the only venue he could find.

  Soon he was scouring libraries, pestering coaches in other cities, a maverick unbound by any law. He used foil technique to teach épée, telling his charges that they must look for the “dead point”—the “tote Punkt”—in their opponent. Find his weakness, then exploit it—by whatever means. Beck’s students began to enter local competitions; on one early occasion the celebrated club at Heidelberg thrashed his team 15–1, “holding up their noses so high they gathered rain,” as he would growl years later. But within two years his team was back, to emerge victorious.

  Beck needed pupils. So far he had been content to recruit customers in his father’s shop. Now he persuaded children in the village to drop by his club, where he would flip five balls into the air to see which child caught what. Those who snared at least two he kept. He became their substitute father, fretting over their schooling, arranging jobs, doing favors. “You must train. You have no choice,” he would bark at eleven-year-old Matthias Behr. Then he would give the boy an admonitory smack across the cheek and trundle away with what became his trademark rolling gait. “I’m not a winner at heart,” Behr told me. “You have to be a special man to get a gold medal. At vital moments I don’t feel it’s that important to win.” Yet Beck took Behr to Olympic gold in 1976 and three silvers, as well as steering him back to fencing after the nightmare bout in Rome in 1982 that ended in the death of Vladimir Smirnov. Beck knew, to the point of obsession, that to be very good at something is not natural. Certain formal disciplines—mathematics, say, or music—may produce naturals, but training for a sport is like training for war. “Fencing is fighting,” he would say, “if you don’t fight, you’re not fencing.” His pupils had to be disciplined so that they could discover in themselves qualities they never dreamed that they possessed.

  But training was only one part of this brave new world. Beck would be not just teacher and manager but also fund-raiser and organizer, and he crisscrossed West Germany in pursuit of equipment, transport, and money to take his club beyond that tiny boiler room. Daimler-Benz, DuPont, Sony, and Adidas all helped out, as did banks and bakery chains, brewers of beer and distillers of schnapps—fifty-two sponsors in all, splashing their names and jingles across the town.

  By 1971 Beck’s own center had arisen among the apple trees on the outskirts of Tauberbischofsheim. This did not guarantee success. Beck was put in charge of the Olympic team at Munich, but it collapsed, failing to win a single medal before its home crowd. There was an outcry, and Beck nearly quit; but he decided to press on, only with renewed energy. The amateurism of the young barber had long since gone. In its place was the Beck ideology. “To complete his lessons you have to be a machine,” sighed Matthias Gey, who would take the world foil championship in 1987, having been taught by Beck from the age of two and a half. “We do everything so fast and hard, there is barely time to breathe. He works so many hours, he doesn’t understand we have lives outside of fencing.” “I give my lessons unmöglich schnell,” boasted Beck; “Impossibly fast.”

  Beck had little interest in turning out standard models. “I don’t force fencers to perform the same way, I adapt what each person can do. That’s why Tauber fencers tend to look different. Most coaches try to push their technique onto athletes; I investigate what will be good for each person.” True to this philosophy, Beck’s one technical book on fencing, Tauberbischofsheimer Fechtlektionem, shows him teaching two of his most famous pupils, Matthias Behr and Alex Pusch, to hit around the back of the head, while running forward, or in en garde positions very different from the accepted classic stance.1

  “Who else but Beck, after sending his athletes through weightlifting and gymnastic sessions, three-mile jogs and fast-paced lessons, would hold a tournament each night, breaking down the fencers into pools of twelve or fifteen and assigning to each one a number of victories he must achieve?” asked Time. “Who else but Beck would tell the fencer who fails to reach that number that he is an invisible man: sorry, you never came that night, you must redo the session. Too many invisible nights and Herr Beck withholds the monthly stipend the government pays West German athletes—hey, boys, nobody rides a Mercedes for free.” It was Darwinism in fencing form: only the fittest would survive. Fencers gave the Tauber Center a special nickname: “TBC” (tuberculosis). Among the non-Germans it was believed that Beck created codes for his fencers, seemingly innocent words he would shout from the side of the piste, illegally instructing them to change tactics
in midfight.

  Emil Beck—nicknamed “Piggy” by his pupils—was by 1972 Germany’s head coach, director of the center he had created at Tauberbischofsheim, and Olympic team manager. For the son of the local barber, it was a meteoric success story. (illustration credit 20.1)

  The magnetism and willpower of the man they privately called “Schweinchen” (“Piggy”) were formidable. “He’d lay down his life for one of his fencers,” reflected Volker Fischer, a four-time gold medalist, fondly. Elmar Bormann, épée world champion in 1983, asserted, “When Emil Beck says, ‘Sit down,’ we don’t look behind us to see whether there is a chair.” Work, work, work, train, train, train. “Man was born to work,” says Beck. “Without work, he could not exist. I work fourteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Vacations? They are an invention of modern times. Man doesn’t need a holiday.”

  Soon the ignominy of 1972 was replaced by glory. At the 1976 Olympics, nine fencers from Beck’s academy won eleven individual or team medals, including five golds. In 1984, eleven of his fencers won twelve medals, seven of them gold. There were nearly thirty other first-class fencing clubs in West Germany, yet in 1988 thirteen of the country’s team of twenty were Beck’s pupils.

  Such success brought further opportunities. Beck began to harbor political ambitions. He got to know Chancellor Helmut Kohl sufficiently well to slap him on the back and call him by the informal du. Anything seemed possible. Then in 1985 Beck suffered a stroke and was hospitalized. Even then, he would slip out of his ward to work secretly all night. He was soon back full-time.

  The center at Tauber continued to expand. Even at the beginning it had a cafeteria, weight room, physiotherapy department, and photographers’ lab. Today it boasts a soccer field, basketball and tennis courts, a sauna, a massage room, a weapon repair shop, a computerized Cybex, and a pulsimeter to monitor the condition of each fencer; full facilities for disabled fencers, an isokinetic center, a twenty-meter “warm pool” for stretching and underwater massage, a “fango” room for mud treatment, and fourteen bedrooms, purpose-built with extra space to accommodate fencing bags. The medical department is twelve strong, with facilities for operations and doctors who base their practice within the club, with patients from the town happy to have such state-of-the-art treatment. The center, with its staff of 100, is attended by more than 600 fencers who travel in, 150 to 300 each day, from the two dozen clubs around Tauber. There are forty-five full-length pistes and now a gym equipped for “wireless fencing,” in anticipation of the time when electric cables are phased out. There is a boarding school, a fleet of twelve cars and four Mercedes buses, and thirty more Mercedes cars either loaned for free or leased cheaply to fencers, according to achievement. What twenty years ago was a grassy field has become an apartment block with flats for twenty-two, again custom-built to accommodate disabled residents—a 12 million DM project paid for half by the club, half by federal and local governments. In the last ten years, nearly $20 million has been sunk into the site. Even a golf course is planned.

  In October 2000 I made the two-hour journey from Frankfurt to Tauber, to keep an appointment to see Beck. In the parking lot stood his personal Mercedes, number plate TBB E1. It was like visiting a space-age village. Every facility was in use or in preparation for use. Onetime champions did duty as coaches and general tutors. Beck was demonstrably proud of his center. “Our aim is to cater for everyone, from children of three through to Olympic champions, and to do all the educational things, not just the sports stuff. And one of the successes here is that it’s not all for the wealthy—we can look after the poor and underprivileged.” He cited three of his champions, all products of one-parent families. Later he handed me a book extolling his achievements.2 Beck’s fencers have won 147 gold medals in world, European, and Olympic championships, senior and junior.

  “It’s like a carousel ride,” said Beck. “Once you get on, you must ride it to the end. My life is one long storm. My enemies are waiting for me to fail. They try to pull me down, but they only push me higher.” When he judged that there was insufficient talent among home-born Germans to meet his ambitions, he effectively moved into the transfer market. Foreign nationals—Romanians, Russians, Cubans—were brought to Tauberbischofsheim: thus the triumphant German team in 1992 included a onetime East German, Uwe Prosske; Robert Felsiak, a Polish immigrant of just three years’ standing; and Vladimir Reznitchenko, who had won a bronze for the Soviets in 1988. A Russian from Estonia, he had gained his German citizenship just in time to be eligible for the world championships. It was all still legal—just.

  Other German clubs resented Tauber’s power. When a Tauber member fought anyone from the main club in Bonn, the clash was more ferocious than those against foreign competition. Fencers from other countries dreaded taking on the Beck machine; referees felt intimidated. In the Hamburg world championships in 1978, the great French épéeist Philippe Riboud was fencing the last bout of the six-man final against Jablowski of Poland. The score stood at 4–4 as they entered the last minute. If Riboud won here he would be champion, edging out Alex Pusch, the 1976 Olympic champion, who stood tied in second place with two others. As the seconds ticked away Riboud, panting stentoriously (he has only one functioning lung) launched a last desperate attack. The box lit up—the referee gave him the hit—the Frenchman was champion! His teammates threw him delightedly into the air … but Emil Beck, stationed at the side of the piste, noticed that the official clock showed several seconds past closure. No official had called “Time!” as the rules demanded. He made an official protest; for three hours the jury d’appel deliberated, then decided that Riboud had not won after all; a “double defeat” was registered against the two fencers, which meant that four épéeists were tied for first place, with three victories apiece. Most of the audience left in disgust.

  In the fight-off that followed, after a five-hour marathon that ended at midnight, a new champion emerged: Beck’s student, Alex Pusch. It was rumored that the clock had been left running after the final bout to check its accuracy and that the buzzer had certainly sounded a few seconds before the end of time. (This so enraged the senior French official that he grabbed the German timekeeper by the throat.) No one suggested that Beck had instructed the officials to act as they did or had in any way cheated; but of all the coaches I can think of, only one—the Italian Attillo Fini—might have done what Beck did. And he and Beck had an understanding: wherever possible, in a key bout, an Italian would get a German referee, a German an Italian; things worked out so much better that way.

  NEMESIS WAS AT HAND, IN THE FORM OF A TALL YOUNG MAN called Arnd Schmitt. Schmitt was born in Heidenheim in 1965, the second of three sons of a comfortable upper-middle-class family, the father working for Zeiss lenses and the mother as a translator. Schmitt’s father had competed as a show jumper and knew the demands of international sports; he would be a crucial support for his son in the events that followed.

  At first Arnd concentrated on track and field, becoming regional schoolboy champion in the high jump and high hurdles; but Heidenheim, despite its population of some 50,000, had for years been the venue for a huge international épée competition. It was impossible not to be caught up in the excitement each spring as the best fencers in the world converged on his hometown; Arnd and his brother, Ulrich, three years his junior, decided to try their hand. Arnd became national junior foil champion, and also qualified for the world youth team at épée: he was a natural at the sport. However, the reserve in the German foil squad came from Tauber: Beck was soon protesting to the Federation that no fencer should be allowed to compete at more than one weapon. The Federation, under such pressure from their national coach, caved in, and informed Schmitt he would have to make a choice. So he did—épée; the vacant foil place went to Beck’s pupil.

  Schmitt might have turned his back on Beck after such brinkmanship, but he knew Beck admired his talent, and there was a powerful reason for moving to the Tauber Club. German national service was looming, but th
e government allowed selected athletes to opt for a two-year training period at a suitable sports center in place of the normal fifteen months of compulsory service. Tauber was such a center; Arnd made his decision, and jumped. The Federation, alarmed at Beck’s ability to hoover up the country’s young talent, responded by banning Schmitt from competition for three months. It made little difference to the young Heidenheimer: in his first outing following the ban, an épée event in Ulm, he won with ease.

  He joined Tauber in 1984, aged nineteen. A little over a year later, Ulrich, now seventeen, and a bronze medalist at foil in the World Under-20 Championships, joined him. At first, the brothers prospered in the hothouse atmosphere, but not for long.

  Two years ago, I learned the full story of what had happened, visiting both Beck and Schmitt, the latter at the club in Bonn where he now fences, TSV Bayer Leverkusen. A dentist now, when we spoke he was still the reigning world épée champion, having won the title in 1999 in his thirty-fifth year. It was early in the morning, and we sat in the club’s spacious bar, with only cleaners and the occasional club official looking in. Schmitt was at first uneasy, continually fingering the shiny brown briefcase that he had laid on the table between us. Slowly, however, he began to talk about his time under Beck’s rule. He had quickly become disenchanted. “Beck’s not really a coach. People think he’s the most successful master in history, and he has this list of all his champions. But only about ten percent of them has he trained personally. For the rest he was more their manager. And I soon learned what he was like. He’s not an honest man at all, and I hate what he does to people.”