This interview first appeared in Blue Steel (Vol. 1, #3 Summer 1997) under the title "Point In Case: How a German expat puts US fencing history on the map."

He's a lean, lanky 6'4", with high cheekbones, and eyes that couldn't quite make up their mind if they're green or gray. There's an occasional touch of Terminator in his hard Teutonic consonants, and when he smiles, the scar over his left cheeckbone turns into a deep cleft. A parallel series of straight lines marks his left temple, disappearing with a dash into the valiant last stand of a wavy brown hairline.

Chris Amberger is unapologetic if asked about these scars -- souvenirs he collected in 7 sharp Schläger duels he fought as a member of two German dueling fraternities in the mid-1980s.

But then, he has little to be apologetic about. At age 33, this father of two manages a multi-millon dollar division of Agora Inc., the second largest newsletter publisher in the States. He has written and published two books, been mentioned in Worth magazine and in newspapers ranging from the Baltimore Sun to the Montreal La Presse.

Fencers and sword enthusiasts, however, probably know Amberger best from his work on the historical aspects of fencing. A self-described "potential perennial student" who attended Berlin, Göttingen, and Aberdeen universities and who holds a Master's degree in philosophy from St. John's College Graduate Institute in Annapolis, Amberger was a frequent contributor to international fencing magazines before he launched his quarterly journal Hammerterz Forum in 1994.

He still laughs about how he got started. "Unfortunately, fencing mags care more about printing ranking schedules than my sizzling articles on fencing history. Military history magazines don't give a damn about swordplay at all. I had just received my third rejection for my appreciation (or lack thereof) of Patton's system. The editor called it 'outrageous'. So I said the heck with it and published it myself."

Amberger still does most of the work himself, from researching, writing, and editing, to stuffing envelopes and doing the books. Today, he has over 250 subscribers in 7 countries in North America, Europe, and Australia) -- almost all of them fencers with a keen interest in the history and literature of the sword. Last spring, he featured prominently alongside Sydney Anglo and Ewart Oakeshott on the Discovery Channel's Deadly Duels, now out on home video.

His latest book, a second enlarged edition of The Secret History of the Sword: Adventures in Ancient Martial Arts (Baltimore: Hammerterz Verlag; $29.95, softcover) just hit the market with a six-month delay. But it has been worth waiting for.

Movie critics would call it a "romp". But Amberger's approach to rewriting fencing history really is a ruthless search-and-destroy mission that takes the reader on a quest for the truth that starts in obscure Caucasian mythology, crosses the Greco-Roman past, and then blows through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and modern period with the force of a two-handed Doppelsöldner broadsword. Along the way, he unhorses Patton's 1913 saber system, unearthes Renaissance fencing tricks in obtuse Greek passages dating from AD150, and discovers an undescribed baton fencing system that predates the accepted timeline for purely agonistic (read: sport-like) fencing systems by a century.

Amberger's research into the fine points of fencing history began in 1992. "I was fencing saber at Salle Pallasz [in Baltimore] and kept reading that cavalry didn't use their sabers to cut below the waist because of some innate obsession with horseflesh. Yet Coach Oles' [of Salle Pallasz and Johns Hopkins University fencing] library contained a reprint of Henry Angelo's 18th century cavalry sword practice, with plates showing leg cuts and parries, as well as a half-dozen techniques how to injure the opponent's horse and guard your own."

After poring over a few hundred books and articles, he not only proved modern fencing mythology wrong on this point, but also spun off a few dozen other research projects that one by one deconstructed accepted history.

"Like all historiography, fencing history is a matter of identification," Amberger explains. "Fencers have an innate aversion to agreeing with one another. This goes for individual writers, individual schools within a system, or different systems. If you look at Schläger fencing, for example, you'll notice that the negative opinion reflected about it in modern fencing literature is really a matter of ignorance. Most writers are sports fencers who couldn't tell a Schläger from a nosehair clipper, let alone judge the technical and strategic fine points of a good Schläger match. Old social prejudice, dregs of Nazi propaganda, and plain old limited horizons in this case determine the image they transmit to posterity, not factual or even personal knowledge. And this pattern becomes visible throughout fencing history, no matter if you look at the attitudes of the old English masters of defence toward the Mediterranean rapier schools, the salon fencer's opinions about the 18th century pugilists and gladiators, down to the general notions of thrust fencing's superiority over cut fencing."

Small surprize that there are few systems that escape without being sliced, diced, analyzed, and put into proper place in Amberger's Secret History. But while he does not avoid strong opinion as long as it is his own, his scholarly tactics are proving his case by turning his subject's own weapons against it. The scope of research is impressive. (The select bibliography of sources quoted in the 250+ scholarly footnotes alone includes more than 100 titles.)

But despite the evident erudition, Amberger's style remains highly readable, entertaining even. "Writing means communicating, letting your reader in on ideas," says Amberger, who categorically rejects academic jargon and structure. "Academia does to writing what formaldehyde does to living tissue."

Which may answer the question why his approach to re-writing history not only appeals to fencers, historians, sword buffs, and martial artists of all persuasions, but also to people with little or no idea of the marvellous world of fencing who are looking for a good read. And a damn good read it is.

The Secret History of the Sword: Adventures in Ancient Martial Arts, Vol. 3 ($29.95) is available from Hammerterz Verlag, P.O. Box 13448, Baltimore, MD 21203.