@wellntruly
Very much looking forward to the METROPOLIS breakdown! Don’t stress yourself, though, please. 2020 has been stressful enough.
Okay, so, you already know that Wendt has this scar, because a) you have working eyes and b) you call him Scarycheeks. These kinds of scars are kind of on the decline in Germany but they used to be fairly common, and the one point where this specific (kinda ritual!) scarification comes from is:
The German equivalent of frats.
The name for these scars - most of the time they are on the cheek, but I’ve also seen people with almost Glasgow smile-like ones and ones on the back of the head - is “Schmiss”. To indulge the language centre, “schmiss” is usually a verb, past tense of “schmeißen”, to throw. Note how the verb is all non-caps, but the noun has a capital “S”, because we Germans like to show of our nouns.
“Schmeißen” is indeed a close relative of smite, so here we go with why the capital-S-Schmiss has to do with scars at all:
Academic fucking Fencing.
(aka. Mensur, from Latin mensura, measure)
Hooo boy, the whole concept, but first a tiny tangent on the German frat thing.
You know how frats in the US are very greek-things-centric? In Germany it’s Latin instead, so much that when in one of their quaint little assemblies, when the chairman (or, in very, very few cases chairwoman, I can elaborate on that further if you would like me to, but this is already an essay) wants people to shut up, they shout “silencium”, like wow, I’d find that classy if the whole thing wasn’t so extremely fucked up.
Now, Verbindungen (that’s the name for German frats, it basically translates to “connections”, and if you take into account what they can do for a person in the workplace it’s a harsh case of “what it says on the tin) were much more common in German academia in the past, but they still exist. In the town where I went to uni there was a whole street with these beautiful turn-of-the-century (or sometimes a bit older) mansions, and sometimes you’d even see those guys in their full regalia - usually only on the first of May on the market square or in that specific frat row, because the almost civil war atmosphere between the radical left and the Verbindungen was intense.
Which brings me to the “Well, Wendt is so obviously a Nazi, it’s hilarious” part, because while not all Verbindungen are on the far right, all of them are conservative and some of them are known to hold feasts on Hitler’s fucking birthday, leaving the head of the table unoccupied, and that’s just one example, and wow, there’s just such a fuckton to unpack there, and I’m willing to talk about it for hours, just ask.
So, let’s recap, there are mansions full of conservative/right-wing, toxically masculine guys with a penchant for Latin phrases (it’s all so fucking dark academia and I’m still crying bitter tears that that concept wasn’t a tumblr thing when I was still in uni), and they have fucking rooms for fencing, the Paukboden, which translates to “learning room”, kind of, I’ll do a whole post on their lingo, just say a word. And while fencing is cool, academic fencing is a clusterfuck of magnificent Ausmaß (extent).
There’s got to be an insult. There has to be a demand for Satisfaktion (satisfaction, obvs). Except for when they do it to prove to their bros how manly they are, but that’s too much for this already long post. They don’t wear helmets, only weird goggles with nose guards, and a collar, and fucking chainmail. They have Sekundanten (seconds, stand-ins), two Paukärzte (medical attention, Arzt means doctor or physician) and a bunch of other people, all of which are of course men. There’s protocol. And, and that’s what brings us back to the Schmiss: dodging is seen as unmanly and makes for instant defeat. And because everything except for the head is armored, you get these in the face.
FUN.
YES.
Back in the day (TM) some Verbinder (frat boys, it’s funny because “verbinden” doesn’t only mean to connect but also to dress a wound) even put stuff in those wounds to make the scar more prominent, although I don’t know if they still do that, because other than back in the day (TM) it’s not as much of a status symbol and more like a stigma (at least outside their circles) because it shows that you are one of these idiots.
I’ve actually met a girl who was all giddy because one of these guys had his ear salami-ed kind of for her.
I couldn’t make this shit up if I wanted to.
So, Wendt was 100% part of a Verbindung, got drunk, pushed around the Füchse (literally foxes, but actually means pledges), got drunk some more, barfed into the designated vomit-sink (pleasepleaseplease give me a reason to talk about this stuff more, it’s all so WEIRD) and got his face sliced as part of a toxic manly-man dark academia bullshit ritual.
So there.
Thank you for your attention.
