Wilhelm Maßmann (chess collector)

Wilhelm Maßmann

Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Maßmann (born July 6, 1895 in Preetz ; † December 17, 1974 in Kiel ) was a German chess collector and chess composer .

Life

Maßmann was the son of a master mason. After the First World War he studied law, later settled down as a lawyer and received his doctorate in 1929. jur. Even after the Second World War he worked as a lawyer in Kiel.

Chess composition

Since his youth, Maßmann has been interested in chess, which he learned from his father as a boy. He only participated in local tournaments two or three times, and his inclination was chess composition. His special love was miniatures , tasks with a maximum of seven stones. In this field he achieved the most important achievements. His first chess miniatures were made between 1914 and 1916, a total of 646 of him are known.

Wilhelm Maßmann

At the beginning of the thirties he published, among other things, in the Kieler Neuesten Nachrichten under the pseudonym “Kl. Kleinschmied ”a number of two-move vehicles. In literary terms, Maßmann has also distinguished himself with widely acclaimed essays and translations on chess composition. In 1925 he translated the famous White book on Sam Loyd .

Wilhelm Maßmann
Neue Leipziger Zeitung 1936, 1st prize

	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

Checkmate in four moves

Solution:

1. Nd3 – e1! f2 – f1D + Now the queen is used as a distance block .
2. Ne1 – f3 + Kh4 – h3
3. Re5 – h5 + Kh3 – g2
4. Rh5 – h2 mate.
In the secondary variants, the goal is achieved by means of forced action :

2.… Qf1xf3 + 3. Kf4xf3 Kh4 – h3 4. Re5 – h5 mate.

1.… f2xe1 ~ 2. Re5xe1 Kh4 – h5 3. Re1 – e6 Kh5 – h4 4. Re6 – h6 mate.

2.… Kh4 – h3 3. Re1 – e2 Kh3 – h4 4. Re2 – h2 mate.

Miniature collection

Maßmann's collection of miniatures was one of the most comprehensive collections of exercises at the time. The “original” Maßmann collection went back to Wilhelm Maßmann's father, Peter Asmus Maßmann († 1936), who left his son a systematically organized collection of over 9,000 miniatures. In the early 1960s, the collection of miniatures was transferred to index cards. When Wilhelm Maßmann died, it comprised around 18,000 tasks since the beginning of chess composition. The chess player and composer Bodo von Dehn was involved in building up this collection, and after his death, Kay Soltsien.

The collection consists of several card index boxes, is owned by the Schleswig-Holstein State Library and can be viewed in Kiel. Its content has largely been transferred to the files of the miniature collections of the late Erfurt resident Klaus-Peter Zuncke and the Dossenheim resident Wolfgang Alexander Bruder.

The Maßmann library

Wilhelm Maßmann's chess library of around 1,500 volumes was transferred to the Schleswig-Holstein State Library in 1974 on the basis of Maßmann's will. Encouraged by the publication of the catalog of the Maßmann library edited by Horst Lüders in 1982 , the Lübeck bank clerk Gerd Meyer ordered his own, broader chess library to also be transferred to this library after his death, which happened in 1994. This means that the Schleswig-Holstein State Library is in possession of the largest publicly owned chess book collection in Germany.

Works

• Alain Campbell White : Sam Loyd and his chess puzzles . Authorized translation by Wilhelm Maßmann. Schachverlag Hans Hedewig's Nachf. Curt Ronniger, Leipzig, 1926.
• Franz Palatz , Wilhelm Maßmann, Werner Speckmann , Karl Fabel : Cabaret 120 chess miniatures . A. Lapáček in Prague, 1943
• Franz Palatz, Wilhelm Maßmann, Werner Speckmann, Karl Fabel: Cabaret in the chess problem . Walter Rau Verlag, Düsseldorf 1967, 2nd edition (Südwestschach series, volume 7)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hartmut Laue and Horst Lüders: Wilhelm Maßmann and his collections. In: Horst Lüders: Maßmann Chess Library . Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein State Library, 1995, pp. VII-VIII
2. ↑ Horst Lüders: The Chess Library Massmann, Schleswig-Holstein State Library, Kiel 1982
3. ^ Horst Lüders Memorial Page

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Massmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Schleswig-Holstein State Library Maßmann Collection with a link to the catalog
• Ralf Jürgen Binnewirtz: Collectors and Collections. Part I: Problems
• Compositions by Wilhelm Maßmann (chess collector) on the Schwalbe's PDB server