Chess novella
The Schachnovelle is a novella by Stefan Zweig that he wrote between 1938 and 1941 while in exile in Brazil . It is his last and at the same time best known work.
The first edition appeared on December 7, 1942 in Buenos Aires in a limited edition of 300 copies. In Europe, the work was published in December 1943 by Gottfried Bermann Fischer in the Exilverlag in Stockholm . The first translation into English appeared in New York in 1944 . In Germany, the book has become a constant bestseller since the paperback edition was published in 1974 . Well over 1.2 million copies have now been sold.
The book is widely used as school reading and is still valued by some literary scholars to this day, although it was not as well received in academic German studies as it was by the general public. In 2012 the German scholar Rüdiger Görner described the novella as a "stroke of luck for mature storytelling".
At the center of the plot is the confrontation of the psychological abysses that a Gestapo prisoner experienced with the superficial world of wealthy travelers in the framework plot . The game of chess initially only plays the role of a mere entertainment or a lucrative sport and only takes on the role of the prisoner Dr. B., who studied chess extensively during his imprisonment, explains its deeper meaning.
content
The framework narration takes place on board a passenger steamer from New York to Buenos Aires . The first-person narrator , an Austrian émigré , learns from an acquaintance that the reigning world chess champion Mirko Czentovic is on board and tries to make personal contact with the reserved and reserved offspring of a simple Danube boatman family.
Czentovic was raised as an orphan by a pastor. But even after years of educational efforts, the child remained a slow and uneducated country boy with no apparent talent until he confidently won a chess game that came about by chance against a friend of the pastor. At this moment Czentovic's extraordinary talent for chess shows.
With that begins Czentovic's rise. At the age of twenty he finally achieved the world title and travels the world as a paid tournament player. The fact that a simple boy without intellectual talent dupes the entire chess world, but on the other hand also plays against amateurs out of pursuit of profit , brings him the resentment of the chess guild.
There is also a wealthy civil engineer named McConnor aboard the ship. When the latter found out about the presence of the world chess champion, he decided to compete victoriously against him. Czentovic declares that he is ready to play a game of chess against payment of a fee, but wants to play not only against McConnor, but against everyone present. The world chess champion effortlessly wins the first game and the ambitious oil millionaire demands revenge. McConnor's second defeat, which is already foreseeable, is averted by the spontaneous intervention of a stranger who is Dr. B. names and is obviously a much better player than McConnor - at least Czentovic behaves as if an opponent was only now there. The game ends in a draw . However, Dr. B. unwilling to play another game, which arouses the interest of the first-person narrator.
He then seeks the conversation and Dr. B. tells his life story: In Austria in the 1930s, i.e. in the Austro-Fascist corporate state , he was the asset manager of the Austrian nobility and clergy . After the Wehrmacht invaded Austria in 1938, the National Socialists became interested in him because they wanted to appropriate the monastery's property. In order to obtain details of the whereabouts of the assets he manages, they banned Dr. B. in solitary confinement in a hotel room for months and denied him any form of distraction. After two weeks of complete isolation, interrogation began. Due to total mental deprivation , Dr. B's state of mind. In order not to fall into madness and possibly betray those who knew about it, he finally stole a felt book from the pocket of a coat that was hanging in the waiting room of the interrogation room. To his disappointment, however, it was not - as hoped - stimulating literature, but a collection of famous chess games. In order to pursue a spiritual activity anyway, Dr. B., who had only played chess during his high school years, to replay the games in his isolation and to learn by heart, which he succeeded completely after a few months. Then he began to play new games against himself, for which purpose he created two independent spiritual instances and as a result finally suffered a split in personality . The fact that the inferior "I" - he describes his two personalities as "I Black" and "I White" - immediately and vehemently demanded revenge after a game, led to Dr. B. to a condition he describes as "chess poisoning". Going into a delusional state, he attacked his cell attendant and smashed a window, severely injuring his hand. In the hospital, the well-meaning attending doctor diagnosed him as being insane , which Dr. B's return to solitary confinement.
Dr. B. then learns from the first-person narrator that his opponent is the world chess champion Czentovic and allows himself to be persuaded into a game out of curiosity - he has not played a game against a real opponent since he was in high school. In order to avoid chess poisoning again, he stipulates that he only play one game, which, to everyone's amazement, he wins confidently. However, it makes him nervous how much time his opponent, the world champion, allows for each move.
After his defeat, Czentovic offers another game, whereupon Dr. B. is received immediately. While the master is now intentionally playing extremely slowly, Dr. B. apparently the chess poisoning again: he lapses into typical behavior of solitary confinement, walks haphazardly back and forth, feels a burning thirst and rudely rules his opponent. While it is Czentovic's turn, Dr. B's restless mind off to other games, until the real game situation and the games in his head mix, so that he finally has to realize, confused, that his strategy no longer corresponds at all with the situation on the board. The first-person narrator around Dr. Knowing B's mental situation reminds him vividly of his illness and the resolution of only wanting to play one game. Dr. B. understands the hint, apologizes to those present, ends the game and explains that he will never play chess again.
Personality characteristics
Mirko Czentovic : The reigning world chess champion. He appears as a primitive, half- illiterate “robot” who almost automatically masters the cold logic of chess, plays with a kind of mechanical precision and has not lost a game in months. He is the son of a poor south Slavic Danube shipper. After the death of his father, he was taken in by a pastor at the age of twelve. Despite all his efforts, the pastor does not succeed in raising and educating Mirko: He is described as a “lazy, dull, broad-foreheaded child” whose brain works only sluggishly. Although he does all the housework that is imposed on him, he does so with "total indifference". Only when he discovered his talent for chess did his fate turn: the poor and dumb ship's son became a highly successful professional chess player. The first-person narrator meets him for the first time on the ship and describes him as arrogant, dismissive and primarily interested in money.
McConnor : A Scottish civil engineer who got rich from drilling oil in California. He is portrayed by the first-person narrator as a ruthless violent person: "Mister McConnor belongs to that kind of self-obsessed successful person who even in the most insignificant game perceives defeat as a reduction in their personality awareness [...], he is used to ruthlessly asserting himself in life ". When he demands revenge, he gives the “impression of a boxer about to strike”. He acts and lives according to the motto: “I pay for the music, so I also decide what is played.” Mirko Czentovic plays a game of chess against him for a fee. McConnor knows little about chess himself, but with the help of Dr. B. a draw.
Dr. B .: He is the exact opposite of Mirko Czentovic: cultivated, intelligent, eloquent. Dr. B. proves to be an open-minded interlocutor towards the first-person narrator and begins, without direct prompting, a long report about his past, especially his imprisonment: During his lengthy solitary confinement he learned all the subtleties of chess in order to maintain his intellectual resilience and not that To decay to madness. However, the continued artificial situation of the game against himself led to a nervous breakdown which he later suffered again under similar stress. It turns out that although he was able to save himself from insanity and imprisonment with the help of his intellect, he has become a prisoner of his rescue method ( manic chess playing).
Dr. B. trained the art of blind chess so much during his solitary confinement that he had problems playing with a board and pieces. In contrast, Czentovic's gaze is always fixed on the board in order to be able to understand the game.
Representation of the game of chess
Stefan Zweig himself was not a good chess player and had no close contact with the chess scene. The writer Ernst Feder wrote in his memories of the time together with Zweig in exile in Brazil: "I am a weak player, but his knowledge of the art was so little that it cost me the trouble to let him win a game occasionally." Although an opening variant, the Sicilian opening , is mentioned in the novella, its strategy and tactics are not explained in detail.
At the beginning of the novella, Czentovic's childhood and career are told. He is portrayed as one-sided . What is unusual is that Czentovic is not able to play blind chess, which other world chess champions can do.
The game of chess
( Alekhine - Bogoljubow, 1922 )
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The consulting part of Czentovic against the amateurs, during which Dr. B. intervenes for the first time, reminds Dr. B. to the game of Alexander Alekhine against Efim Bogoljubow at the tournament in Bad Pistyan in 1922. Zweig was probably known from the book Die hypermoderne Schachpartie by Savielly Tartakower , who is mentioned in the chess novella as a "proven old master of chess". The book was in Zweig's estate and from there came into the Petrópolis City Library .
In this position, Dr. B. from the tempting move c2 – c1D, through which Black apparently wins a piece, but would remain at a disadvantage after Ba3xc1 Nd3xc1 d6 – d7. Instead, he recommends Bogolyubov's move Kg8 – h7 in the real game, after which there was a draw a few moves later .
Edits
The film Schachnovelle , based on the book and directed by Gerd Oswald , premiered in 1960. Curd Jürgens (Dr. B.) and Mario Adorf (Mirko Czentovic) were the main actors . Chess master Rudolf Teschner provided advice on the game of chess .
There are audio book versions by Curd Jürgens, Michael Heltau , Reiner Unglaub and Christoph Maria Herbst . Helmut Peschina created a dramatization of the novella . The Spanish composer Cristóbal Halffter composed an opera based on the chess novella for the Kiel Opera House in 2012 . The libretto written by Wolfgang Haendleler. The opera premiered on May 18, 2013 in Kiel .
The artist Elke Rehder has dealt with the novella several times in her work in color woodcuts and graphic portfolios.
In the novel The Chess Players of Buenos Aires by Ariel Magnus (2018), Czentovic is introduced as a fictional person to the plot of the 1939 Chess Olympiad .
Representation of torture
As the literary scholar Hannes Fricke has established, Zweig described methods of torture in the Schachnovelle that were not yet systematically applied in his time. It was only through the American psychiatrist Albert Biderman that they were used in the CIA after the Korean War . Fricke attributed Zweig's descriptions to a double trauma : What Zweig did with the character Dr. B. describe, he experienced himself. As evidence, Fricke cites a passage from Zweig's memoir:
"If I add up how many forms I have filled out in these years, declarations for every trip, [...] how many hours I stood in anteroom of consulates and authorities, how many officials I have sat in front of, [...] how many searches If I have participated in borders and interviews, then I will only feel how much of human dignity has been lost in this century [...]. "
At the same time, Fricke explains the popularity of the chess novella in post-war Germany with the message of the Jewish author Zweig and the main character Dr. B. not to remember the trauma of the Nazi past because that would be too painful.
expenditure
- Chess novella . With an afterword by Siegfried Unseld , Suhrkamp (= Library Suhrkamp, Volume 1348), Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 978-3-518-22348-2 .
- Schachnovelle , Fischer Taschenbuch (= FI 1522), Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 978-3-596-21522-5 .
- Chess Novel , dtv. Library of the first editions (= dtv 2688), Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-423-02688-8 (orthographically and grammatically accurate reprint of the first edition, Buenos Aires 1942).
- Chess novella . Annotated edition. Edited by Klemens Renoldner . Reclam Universal Library (No. 18975), Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-018975-7 .
In 2013, Reclam-Verlag Stuttgart published the story for the first time in the version in which Stefan Zweig left it.
A typescript of the story has been donated to the Reed Library of the State University of New York at Fredonia since 2002 .
literature
- Joachim Brügge: Stefan Zweig, CG Jung and the cultural history of the game of chess - from the Indian Tschaturanga to modern alchemy of the 20th century? In: Derselbe (ed.), The book as entrance to the world (= 1st volume in the series of publications by the Stefan Zweig Center Salzburg, edited by Hildemar Holl, Karl Müller, Gerhard Langer and Klemens Renoldner), Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2009 , ISBN 978-3-8260-3983-6 , pp. 97-108.
- Susanna Poldauf and Andreas Saremba (eds.): 65 years of chess novella . Emanuel Lasker Gesellschaft, Berlin 2007. (= Marginalia - marginal notes on the history and culture of the chess game; Volume 1.)
- Reiner Poppe: Stefan Zweig, Schachnovelle: Interpretations and teaching materials. 2nd edition Beyer-Verlag, Hollfeld 1990, ISBN 3-88805-043-X .
- Ingrid Schwamborn: Checkmate in exile in Brazil. The genesis of the "Schachnovelle" . In: Germanic-Romanic monthly . New series Volume 34, Heidelberg 1984, pp. 404-430, ISSN 0016-8904 .
- Bruno Landthaler: The “divine” chess. The chess novella by Stefan Zweig . In: Menora, Yearbook for German-Jewish History 1996 . Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 250-264.
- Bruno Landthaler and Hanna Liss : The conflict of the Balaam. Misdirection in the “Schachnovelle” by Stefan Zweig. In: Zeitschrift für Germanistik , 2/1996, pp. 384–398.
- Hannes Fricke: "To disappear quietly, and in a dignified manner": trauma and hopelessness in Stefan Zweig's "Schachnovelle". In: Journal for Psychotraumatology and Psychological Medicine (ZPPM) , 4th year (2006), Issue 2, pp. 41–55.
- Siegfried Unseld: The game of chess. Stefan Zweig: Chess Novel (1941/42). In: Winfried Freund (Ed.): German Novellas. From the classic to the present. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 1993, pp. 249-263.
- Frank Trommler: Self-rescue through repetition? Stefan Zweig's struggle with isolation. In: Jürgen Felix, Bernd Kiefer, Susanne Marschall, Marcus Stiglegger (eds.): The repetition. Schüren, Marburg 2001, pp. 227-237.
- Mark H. Gelber : Chess Novel. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , pp. 335–339.
- Thomas Söder: Studies on German Literature. Work-immanent interpretations of central texts in German literary history . Lit, Vienna 2008. ISBN 978-3-8258-1414-4 . Pp. 250-276.
Web links
- Stefan Zweig: Chess novella in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Stefan Zweig: Chess novella at amphio.tk
- Editions of Schachnovelle by Stefan Zweig in LibraryThing
- Book Description and Link List
- Johannes Fischer: A symbolic retreat
- 65 years of Schachnovelle - a virtual exhibition Exhibition by the Lasker Society (with Flash Player)
- Alekhine - Bogolyubov; Bad Pistyan, 1922 notation on chessgame.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Klemens Renoldner: Finally to read in the original. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . August 9, 2013, accessed August 11, 2013 .
- ↑ Ernst Feder: Stefan Zweig's last days . In: Hanns Arens (ed.): The great European Stefan Zweig . Kindler, Munich 1956. p. 237.
- ^ Albert Dines: Morte no paraíso . Rio de Janeiro 1981. p. 415.
- ^ Stefan Zweig: Chess Novel . With woodcuts by Elke Rehder. Erber-Bader, Freiburg im Breisgau 2004.
- ↑ Hannes Fricke: "The liquidation of the particular": On Anxiety, the Misuse of Trauma Theory, Bourgeois Coldness, the Absence of Self-reflection of Literary Theory, and "something uncomfortable and dangerous" in Connection with Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle In: Journal of Literary Theory , 7/2013.
- ^ Stefan Zweig Digital , accessed December 6, 2018.