Abstract

Underneath the historiographical disagreements about military honor and dueling in Imperial Germany there lurks a consensus that most duelists simply internalized the dictates of honor. This article troubles that presumption by attending to the Prussian-German military honor code’s mixed messages and impossible demands, which I interpret through Slavoj Žižek’s concept of a fantasmatic specter. After analyzing a variety of military texts, I illustrate the value of a psychoanalytic approach via a case study and re-examination of Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1894/95).

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