I have always been interested in martial arts, but my parents wanted me to dance classical ballet instead, because “that is more for girls” and they feared that someone could hurt me. After school I could no longer go to the lessons because of the working hours of my internship. I really like dancing, but at this time I’d had enough of performing on stage and was looking for something more “real”. A friend took me to his HEMA training and I decided to stay. I train at “Historisches Schwertfechten Nordhessen e.V.” in Kassel Germany, mainly longsword (Liechtenauer Tradition), but I’m also interested in langes messer, dagger, ringen, sickle, rapier, polearms, sidesword, sabre…Sad that I can’t do everything. At the moment I focus on sickle-interpretations and German longsword. I have also trained Ju Jutsu for 3 years.

Since 2013 I have been an instructor at my club (after a year of being assistant instructor), and since 2011 I’ve worked as the club treasurer. I am still a bit surprised at my election as chairwoman of the German HEMA Federation. There had been talk about founding a German federation for the last 10 years, but it had been difficult to bring people together. Last year I joined a preliminary IFHEMA meeting in Dijon with Heiko Meckbach in order to translate for him. Back in Germany we initiated a founding group with members of different German clubs. The main drivers were Heiko and I. Marcus Hampel and Friederike von dem Bussche were also very active.

The German HEMA Federation DDHF (Deutscher Dachverband Historischer Fechter) was founded on the 21st of June 2014. I was elected president. We have three vice presidents: Friederike von dem Bussche (treasury); Martin Betzenbichler (sport and development), Thore Wilkens (education). Predrag Nikolic is youth representative. Roman Schwiertz, Alexander Klenner, Thorsten Kästel will act as ombudsmen.  Roland Fuhrmann is our international ambassador and representative at IFHEMA. Alessa Pinnow, Marcus Hampel, and Thomas Rehm are auditors. Christian Bott represents high performance athletes and Heiko Meckbach is responsible for gender equality. It is an unusual decision to give this position to a man, but I know him well and am sure that he will do his best. The men need to be heard, too ! 😉

As president, I see my main functions as mediating between different opinions, and planning for the future. We want to support HEMA groups in Germany, and assist them with founding procedures. Our aims are to improve education, to give advice and to represent HEMA as a sport, but also as a matter of research. One of the next important goals is to develop a standard education for instructors in their function as sport coaches and as interpreters of historical resources. A long term goal is to get officially recognised by the German national sports federation. For this we will need to represent 10,000 individuals. As mentioned: it’s a long term goal!

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