Historical Martial Arts and Self-defense

Self-defense is a big thing in martial arts, because it sells better than ever. Everywhere self-proclaimed self-defense experts emerge. Hardly a martial arts school that does not advertise - up to a 21-year-old, who after a few years of practice, sells an online course. It is a sad mirror of the Angst that is found in …

A Fechtmeister for 50 Pfennige

In the year 1890 you could become a „Fechtmeister“ if you bring 20 members to the “Deutsche Generalfechtschule” in Baden-Baden. If you open 10 own “Fechtschulen” or bring in 200 members you would earn the title “Oberfechtmeister”. You will get a fine certificate for the price of 50 Pfennige. No certification, no test, no examination …

Functional Specification of Liechtenauer’s Strikes

The following is a not so serious idea to apply the method of systems engineering and software development. There the functional specification is the documentation that describes the requested behavior of an engineering system. Using that method we can define what the user wants from a system and how it should be functionally implemented. Document objectives …

1721 How to identify a false fencing master

Georg Paul Hönn was a very popular author in the 17th and 18th century his books on people cheating had been published several times. The first edition is from 1721 the one the image here is from is published in 1753. He was lawyer and popular writer, born 12 June 1662 in Nuremberg as the son …

Mr. Talhoffer speaking?

I was and I am someone always fond of an exchange of written words since childhood. Being a virtual active person is nothing new for me. If you would put my real name in quotation marks in google you will find more than 200.000 entries that will mostly link to me. It has a history. …

διάλογος – Solo Practice

Q: Master Talhoffer, is it true that long solo exercises akin to those of karate-do simply have no value whatsoever. A: No. Q: But our art cannot be learned without partners, however hard you try! A: Sure, you can learn anything without a partner or teacher whatsoever. Q: But I thought that solo exercises that can only be of …

TALHOFFERING – do it NOW!

This was a funny event I did with my Hans Talhoffer FB account in July 2011.  I was just bored a bit at my bicycle ride to the office and this idea came to my mind. I created the following text and invited 1100 people to this event. It took only 4 hours until more …

Hans Talhoffer is not dead, he is only sleeping!

Today Facebook has deleted or disabled my account of Hans Talhoffer as an "Inauthentic account". It is against the rules of FB to impersonate someone. You must provide your real first name and last name. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited. So I knew that this would happen. Facebook is not interested on the data of nonexisting …