Bochhau and Brummerhau of Meyer's Dussack

Exploring some under-resourced cuts from the "basis of all 1 handed weapons"

This is a slightly old video (published Jan 31, 2023) which I was motivated to create due to a bit of an “easy access interpretation resource” gap. There are very few videos or written guides about these two cuts, with only Adam Franti’s great Meyer Dussack series touching on it, and a 4 year old interpretation by Capital KdF that I wasn’t totally taken with.

Bochhau pressuring my opponent in black, giving me an easy parry-riposte. Contact to reduce mystery!

Resource gaps like this exist in droves for lots of Meyer’s lesser-used weapons (ie. anything that is not longsword), and even if it does exist it might be quite old and done in a simple demonstrative format (like Robert Rutherfoord’s extensive rappier series. Good, but not particularly detailed). With my video I sought to both close a knowledge gap on YouTube and provide a bit of an instructional/interpretive process context to both cuts, using actions and examples within the first 30 seconds, and keeping book text in nice little nooks to emphasize showing, not telling, as much as I could.

Bochhau completely collapsing a bad bogen guard. I was playing the fool a bit in this sparring match, and my opponent exploited it well.

There are still things I would change about some of this video. For example, I really like using the “criteria for success” that you can build out of a Meyer technique text to check boxes through your actions, but I think I dropped the ball on the brummerhau in skipping the “opponent hand driven high” part until a short little example at the end pops up. It’s not a huge miss, but as I was trying to show how the text can be broken down into discrete parts to build interpretations easily, it deviated from what I wanted to achieve.

A brummerhau failing to sneak around a well placed parry, and getting absolutely blasted in return.

I think building a list of these under-represented Meyer techniques, the stuff that is absent from YouTube and other modern resource avenues, could be a fun little database to draw from for projects. How much will fencers be glad to finally get a 5 minute tutorial on applications of the Gefehrhauw, or will it be dozens of hours of videography work just to check a little content box? We'll see, as there are definitely bits of the text I’d love to put on tape.