Herbert Grasemann

Herbert Grasemann (born December 21, 1917 in Graudenz ; † June 21, 1983 in Berlin ) was a German chess composer and chess writer . Occasionally he published works under the pseudonym Arne Mangs , which is an anagram of his last name.

Life

Grasemann's father came from Berlin. He had been a professional soldier, but had long since left active service. During the First World War he was reactivated as a trainer in Graudenz. His wife followed him there in 1917, since the food supply in Berlin was very poor at the time, but after Herbert Grasemann's birth she returned to Berlin in the summer of 1918.

Herbert Grasemann first attended a private school, then the Askanische Gymnasium , where he graduated from high school in 1936. He then began training as an industrial clerk , which he completed in 1939.

Diverse interests

In his free time, football and music played a decisive role. The young Herbert Grasemann has played soccer for the BFC Germania 1888 club since 1927 and was one of the Berlin city juniors four times. He practiced this sport until 1953 despite being seriously injured in the war. Grasemann also received piano lessons for a total of ten years.

In 1933 Grasemann composed his first chess problem , inspired by the chess problem appendix to the Reclam booklet Schach by Jacques Mieses . In the hope of publication, he sent the Dreizüger to Josef Benzinger, who supplied problematic sections in various newspapers and magazines with material. In 1935 the play was actually published (free of charge), namely in the chess corner of the anti-Semitic satirical magazine Die Brennessel . As Grasemann later recalled in an autobiographical series in the Deutsche Schachblättern , he was not very enthusiastic: no fee and a place of publication that is dubious in several respects, not only because of the paper itself, but also because of the low quality of the chess column in his eyes. He then turned away from problem chess and turned to music.

In war

In the autumn of 1939 Grasemann was drafted into the Wehrmacht immediately . In July 1941 he was a tank driver on the Eastern Front and was seriously injured in the war near Minsk : he lost his left arm. Grasemann was able to escape from the tank and wandered around for four weeks with a festering stump of his arm. He spent the following year and a half in various hospitals until he was released as disabled . Grasemann began again to compose three- and four-move chess problems in the hospital.

After his return to Berlin, Grasemann married Luise Schmidt from Bernau in 1943 and began studying law at Humboldt University . In 1944 the marriage resulted in a son. Grasemann now sent some of his new chess compositions to Josef Halumbirek , the supervisor of the chess problem section in the Deutsche Schachzeitung , to which he had subscribed since January 1939. Halumbirek replied in a long letter; He attested Grasemann's talent, but thought the compositions were not yet ready for publication and recommended that he first study the history and theory of chess composition.

Life from chess

Kurt Richter announced the first major composition tournament of the post-war period in the magazine Horizont , an American-licensed bi-monthly newspaper for the “young generation”, directed by Günther Birkenfeld and with contributions from Elisabeth Langgässer and Wolfdietrich Schnurre , among others . The price report was published in April 1947, and the submissions by the hitherto completely unknown Grasemann were surprisingly successful: He won first prize and an honorable mention for another composition.

In response to this success, Berthold Koch , the chief editor of the biweekly specialist journal Schach-Expreß (which was later renamed Schach and which still exists today), offered Grasemann a job at this publisher, which was mainly responsible for the support the problem category included. Grasemann also managed to get a paid job as a chess coach at the East Berlin chess club Rotation Berlin , in whose first team he played party chess : he held weekly training evenings , each time supplemented by a half-hour lesson on problem chess . These two activities allowed him to give up the unpopular law degree in 1948 and to devote himself entirely to problem chess - albeit with considerable financial restrictions, since the money was barely enough for a family of three.

Grasemann now lived with his wife and child in a small apartment in the West Berlin district of Wedding , published chess compositions and earned his living from working for the sports publishing house and chess training in East Berlin. In addition, there were soon other, partly voluntary, partly paid tasks: In 1950 Grasemann took over the problem section of the West Berlin German Chess Newspaper from his mentor Halumbirek . He began to give lectures on the subject of problem chess in the House of German-Soviet Friendship in East Berlin, organized two problem chess competitions between Baden and Berlin in 1953 and 1954 , completed lecture tours through the GDR and finally led a major event for the 1960 Chess Olympiad in Leipzig. In addition, he participated in the founding of the commission for problems and studies in the German Chess Association of the GDR (where he was not allowed to be a member because of his residence in West Berlin), represented the GDR several times at congresses of the international FIDE commission for chess composition and provided two collections of chess problems together, which were published as books by Sportverlag in 1955 and 1959.

After the wall was built

After the construction of the Wall in 1961, Grasemann was unable to continue the financially always precarious existence that Grasemann had created for himself in his niche. Since he did not want to move to East Berlin , his professional relationships with problem chess in the GDR were torn from one day to the next. He had to give up the problem section of chess , in 1962 he also quit his work for the German chess newspaper and instead took over the problem section of the German chess sheets in 1962 , which he headed until his death in 1983. Above all, he had no choice but to look for a job outside of chess composition for the first time at the age of 44. After some back and forth, he managed to find a job in the administration of a West Berlin housing association in 1963 . In 1973 he finally became a managing board member of the Mayor Reuter Foundation , which provides cheap living space for trainees, students and other poor people.

The chess writer

During this time, and especially in his retirement since 1979, Grasemann published more and more books on chess composition for a wider audience. The introduction to Schach ohne Partner , published in 1977 as a Humboldt paperback, was particularly successful and had a circulation of 43,000 by 1982 - an unprecedented distribution for the genre of chess composition. The sequel Schach ohne Partner for experts went to press with an initial print run of 13,000, as did The Art of Checkmating . In addition, he continued to oversee the problematic section of the German chess sheets and also wrote texts and discussions about solutions to chess composition for the teletext editorial team at Sender Free Berlin .

After two operations in the spring of 1983, Grasemann suffered a heart attack with pulmonary edema , from which he eventually died.

Chess composition

Grasemann regarded Walther Freiherr von Holzhausen as his teacher in theoretical questions. In his apartment in Wedding he often met other chess composers, such as Hans Vetter , Willy Roscher and Stefan Schneider , who, inspired by these conversations, published his essay on economic economics in 1948 . Later he continued to meet many chess composers, including the later grandmaster Hans-Peter Rehm and the PCCC founder Nenad Petrović .

Grasemann composed numerous tasks, mostly multi-move, but also some in the field of fairy tale chess . He developed the new German multi-migrant problem further. Many of his works have won awards and several have been included in FIDE albums . In the FIDE albums he reached 21.83 points.

In 1957, FIDE appointed him International Chess Composition Judge

After the war, Grasemann organized meetings of problem friends in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz. The Berlin problem round , which took place in the bar , was theoretically productive.

Herbert Grasemann
Hamburger Problemnachrichten, 1950

	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H
8th									8th
7th									7th
6th									6th
5									5
4th									4th
3									3
2									2
1									1
	a	b	c	d	e	f	G	H

Mate in 3 moves

Solution:
1. Bd4 – h8 (threatens Da7 mate and Qd4 + plus mate ) Rf3 – e3 (adjusts the diagonal g1 – a7) 2. Qg1 – g7 (threatens Q7 mate again) Re3 – e7 3. Qg7 – a1 mate

The runner clears the diagonal in its entire length for the queen; in all other fields it would stand in the way of the mating move. This motif is known in specialist circles as Loyd's line clearance (after Samuel Loyd ).

Further compositions by Grasemann can be found in the article Employment Control .

Chess writer

After the Second World War , Grasemann worked full-time as a chess writer. From 1947 to 1961 he built up the section Problems and Studies of the magazine Schach -Expreß , then headed the composition corner of the German Chess Newspaper for a year and from 1962 until the end of his life that of the German Chess Papers . After Grasemann's death, Friedrich Chlubna took over this work.

In addition, he wrote important books on chess composition:

• Problem chess , Berlin 1955
• Problem chess Volume II , Berlin 1959
• Problem jewels , Berlin 1964
• Chess without a partner for beginners , Munich 1977
• Made a Reverends idea of the story , the editor and publisher , Berlin 1981
• Chess without a partner for experts , Munich 1982
• The art of matting , under the pseudonym "Arne Mangs", Munich 1983

Grasemann also wrote a textbook:

• Fun with chess for young people , Humboldt-Verlag (No. 479) 1985

An autobiographical series of articles came to an abrupt end with Grasemann's death:

• The whole life is a problem , under the pseudonym "Arne Mangs", in: Deutsche Schachblätter , 5/1983, pp. 131–132, 6/1983, pp. 158–160, and 8/1983, pp. 217–218 .

Personal

Grasemann was married to Luise Grasemann († 1991 in Berlin at the age of 78) for 40 years until his death.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anders Thulin: CHESS PSEUDONYMS AND SIGNATURES. An Electronic Edition, Malmö, preliminary 2008-06-22 ( Memento from January 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 307 kB)
2. ↑ See Ursula Heukenkamp: Under the emergency roof. Post-war literature in Berlin 1945–1949. Berlin, Erich Schmidt, 1996, pp. 27, 29, 323
3. ↑ International judges for chess composition

literature

• Wolfgang Dittmann, Armin Geister & Dieter Kutzborski: Logical Fantasies. Herbert Grasemann and his chess problems . Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin and New York 1986. ISBN 3-11-010415-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert Grasemann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Compositions by Herbert Grasemann on the PDB server