Rudolf Spielmann: chess hero and Nazi victim
In my column Prelude to Armageddon, I dwelt on the abundance of Jewish chess masters from the second half of the 19th century, which continued well into the 20th century. Famous names proliferate, imbued with the rich cultural heritage of the Central European Jewish environment. Their names include: Johannes Zukertort, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, Siegbert Tarrasch, Jacques Mieses, Akiba Rubinstein, Aron Nimzowitsch and the prime topic of this week’s column, Rudolf Spielmann.
The last six of these played chess actively well into the 1930s — a time when the German language, not to mention German politics, was entering an intense period of flux. For example, foreign words, so-called “Fremdwörter”, were phased out by the Nazis. Thus “Telefon” (telephone) was replaced by “Fernsprecher”, and the easily comprehensible “Kandidatenturnier”, or qualification tournament, gave way to the more clumsy, if purely Teutonic, “Anwärtertreffen”.
As words began to translate into actions, the German chess writer and official Max Blümich was entrusted by the Nazis with revising the celebrated chess primer, Kleines Lehrbuch des Schachs. This concise chess manual had been co-authored by the aforementioned Jacques Mieses: an ingenious but erratic player, yet a most lucid and reliable author, whose writings had nurtured generations of pre-Nazi German chess enthusiasts. Irritatingly for the Gauleiters of grammar, spelling and the written word in general, Mieses was Jewish.
Blümich’s solution was brutal. He simply eliminated the original author’s name from the book, and for good measure, in the editions of 1941 and 1943, Blümich went on to cancel the names of such Jewish chess Titans as Dr Siegbert Tarrasch, the famed Praeceptor Germaniae, and even Dr Emanuel Lasker himself, the World Chess Champion from 1894–1921.
Mieses himself was fortunate. For many years a resident of Leipzig, Mieses escaped to England, where he continued to create the ingenious tactical masterpieces which had made his name on the battlefields of European chess.
And what of his colleagues? Lasker too spotted the danger and also fled, first to Moscow, then to New York, where he survived for a while in genteel poverty, before dying at the age of 72.
Nimzowitsch, having had the courage to forcibly eject a uniformed SS officer from the press room of the 1934 World Championship, died in the Hareskov Sanatorium, Copenhagen, 1935, most probably of cancer.
Then there is the story of the mighty Akiba Rubinstein. Rubinstein had once trained to become an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, but succumbed instead to the lure of chess, emerging as victor of numerous elite tournaments and vanquisher also, in individual games, of Lasker, Capablanca and Alekhine, all in classic masterpieces of the art of chess. As the 1930s dawned, Rubinstein’s once magisterial mind began to cloud. He withdrew from chess to a care home, where he silently and patiently awaited the arrival of the Gestapo.
When the myrmidons of the Third Reich did finally appear, they found that the genius of chess had descended into a hermetic carapace, a vacant victim of a syndrome first described by Alexander Pope: a man lost in the “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”. Whether impelled by compassion, or confronted with the utter pointlessness of hauling off a prisoner whose mind was no longer capable of comprehending his fate, the Geheime Staatspolizei retreated, leaving their intended sacrifice in peace. Rubinstein lived until 1961, when he passed away in tranquillity at the age of 80.
Most poignant of all, perhaps, that chessboard chevalier, sans peur et sans reproche, Rudolf Spielmann, fled to Sweden to avoid the concentration camps. There in 1942 he perished, friendless and depressed, in a Stockholm garret. He had numbered Capablanca, Alekhine and Euwe amongst his victims — between them, the three World Champions who held the World Title from 1921 to 1946. In fact, Spielmann was one of very few grandmasters to have an even score against Capablanca, almost unbeatable in his prime.
A new book details Spielmann’s magnificent career and proves a worthy companion volume to his own masterpiece, The Art of Sacrifice in Chess. A Chess Biography of Rudolf Spielmann by Russian International Master Grigory Bogdanovich, also author of biographies of Bogoljubow and Winawer in the same outstanding Elk and Ruby series, is a must for any chess aficionado. Amazing games, all deeply annotated.
If I have any criticism it is that the book lacks match and tournament tables of Spielmann’s greatest triumphs, such as his 1932 match victory against two times world title challenger Bogoljubow and his shattering first prize at Semmering 1926, ahead of every star in the prevailing chess firmament, apart from the somewhat elusive champions, Lasker and Capablanca. Also, beware an index failure (game 191) which accidentally reverses the colours of Spielmann’s classic defeat of Capablanca at Carlsbad 1929.
To redress the balance here is the detailed record of Spielmann’s amazing feat at the Semmering tournament of 1926:
Cancel culture may start with single words, but then it spreads virally to literature, opinions, society in general and finally living targets. If tolerance cannot be maintained for opposing or simply inconvenient points of view, then reasoned debate and the life of the intellect become untenable. “Reason requires that a diverse range of ideas be expressed and debated openly, including ones that some people find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. To demonize a writer rather than address the writer’s arguments is a confession that one has no rational response to them.” This sentiment was from the incisive minds of Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, who were protesting against the American Humanist Association’s recent cancellation of Richard Dawkins’ Humanist of the Year Award from 1996.
In the 1930s chess, both tournaments and literature, became an early weathervane, a speluncular canary in the mine, indicating the stirrings of the lethal intolerance to come —an intolerance which, from a frightening multiplicity of instances, we are now in grave peril of repeating. Black and White are not yet controversial terms in chess, but the direction of discourse on climate change, gender multiplicity, whose lives matter, museums, memorials, statues, universities and even the mentions of the “slave products” tea, cotton and sugar in the oeuvre of Jane Austen (a noted abolitionist who in fact raised the issue of slavery in her novel Mansfield Park) threaten to become ever more toxically authoritarian. Chess Grandmaster Rudolf Spielmann, the chess genius cancelled and starved through Nazi prejudice, whose best games I celebrate this week, would doubtless have recognised the warning signs.
I close with a poignant letter he wrote to a supportive friend, while seeking refuge in Sweden. The friend reacted positively, but on his friend’s passing, Spielmann ran out of road.
“What’s sad is that I was not only expelled from Austria, my homeland, but also lost the opportunity to move freely. Almost all countries that have a chess life in them have closed their borders to emigrants and refugees. I can’t enter any of them now with my worthless Austrian passport.
For six months now, I have been sharing suffering with people who have lost their home through no fault of their own and are wandering without receiving absolutely any financial assistance. The only thing that keeps me in this world is the hope that I will eventually find some kind of chess-related job. Would you be able to find something like this for me in Stockholm of somewhere else in Sweden? Not necessarily a permanent job. I could spend some time in Sweden to restore my spirit and my chess abilities and to gain strength for future activities. Perhaps later I will be able to emigrate to England or America. I beg you not to leave me in trouble. I will agree to any conditions, just to be busy with something. The main thing for me is to get out of Hell in the centre of Europe. Anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly noticeable in Prague, which deprives me of any means of livelihood. Our 30-year acquaintance gives me the opportunity to hope that I will get an answer from you, so that I can learn what fate awaits me…”
Spielmann did indeed manage to flee to Sweden with the help of his friend. He hoped to reach England or the USA and eked out money for the overseas passage, by playing exhibition matches, writing chess columns and an autobiography.
However, pro-Nazi members of the Swedish Chess Federation disliked Spielmann because he was Jewish. Memories of a Chess Master was repeatedly delayed. Despairing of its publication, the impoverished Spielmann became withdrawn and depressed.
In August 1942, he locked himself in his Stockholm garret and did not emerge for a week. On August 20, neighbours summoned police to check on him. They entered and found Spielmann dead. The official cause of death was ischemic heart disease, but it is generally accepted that he had followed established chessboard practice in a hopeless position and resigned, by intentionally starving himself to death.
The Swedish epitaph on his tombstone reads: “Rastlös flykting, hårt slagen av ödet” (“A fugitive without rest, struck hard by fate”)
As has become a cliché, the games speak for themselves:
Rudolf Spielmann vs. Alexander Alekhine (1911)
Akiba Rubinstein vs. Rudolf Spielmann (1912)
Alexander Alekhine vs. Rudolf Spielmann (1923)
Max Euwe vs. Rudolf Spielmann (1923)
Rudolf Spielmann vs. Aron Nimzowitsch (1926)
Jose Raul Capablanca vs. Rudolf Spielmann (1928)
Rudolf Spielmann vs. Jose Raul Capablanca (1929)
Rudolf Spielmann vs. Efim Bogoljubov (1932)
Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from Blackwell’s . His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.
