Franz Gutmayer

Franz Gutmayer (born December 18, 1857 - † May 13, 1937 in Vienna ) was an Austrian chess writer .

Career

Franz Gutmayer never received a championship title as a chess player, although he wrote a book called The Path to Championship . His chess books were widespread in the first half of the 20th century because they suggested to casual players that you could get them to play brilliant games with little learning effort. In his books he particularly emphasized the importance of chess tactics and often compared them with military tactics . Nowadays he invented strange names for the tactical motifs, but these did not prevail in the further development of chess theory. His idol as a chess player was the American Paul Morphy . On the other hand, he criticized the "cowardly" game of the professional chess players of his time. His particular hatred was directed at Jewish chess players, whom he described with anti-Semitic tirades as “dirty chess Jews” and “lice plagues”, who were to blame for the “bad style of today” he fought, as a “reward-worthy, unscrupulous race of chess chessmen”, “a Race of hirelings, who lack any ambition of the artist ”, and to whom he contrasted his vision of a“ bold and powerful race of superior players ”.

In his work Die neue Ideen im Schach (1922), Richard Réti sharply criticized Gutmayer's theses. Also Siegbert Tarrasch , the Gutmayer often led as a typical example of "Jewish Chess" answered the criticism, rejected the Gutmayer as arrogance and meanness.

Works (selection)

• The way to mastery. (1898, 4th edition 1923)
• The birth of the super-farmer (self-published, 1st edition 1916)
• The secrets of the art of combination. (1914, 3rd edition 1922)
• Riddles and riches of the opening. (1915)
• The little general, optics in chess. (1917)
• My system, the dialectic of the art of chess. (1920)
• The finished chess practitioner. (1921)

literature

• Edmund Bruns: The "anti-Semitism on the chessboard". In: ders., The game of chess as a phenomenon in the cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries. LIT-Verlag, Münster [u. a.] 2003 (= series of scholarship holders of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. 20, ISBN 3-8258-6546-0 ), pp. 77–83.

Web links

• Literature by and about Franz Gutmayer in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} compare. Klaus Gaisenkersting, Martin Krauss: Arian opening - theory of cowardly Jewish chess. In: Jungle World. No. 36, August 28, 2002.