whiteshark: before the story/history gets lost:
When you're a chessplayer, people will often tell you that they know chessplayers, too.
A Dutch friend, whose father was born a German, once told me he had, in 1965, looked up <his father's brother> who still lived in Germany. The two brothers had been <born in 1911 and 1913>; their mother had died in childbirth of the youngest and not much later, their father had fallen in the First World War.
The boys had been raised by their very wealthy grandparents in a castle-like house, with a coach house, servants, a beautiful garden giving on a river. But it had also been a Prussian upbringing; they had to stand when they had dinner.
Both brothers, as was the custom in their world, completed Gymnasium a as well as ß. The youngest, my friend's father, had gone to Holland before the Second World War, and had become a successful businessman here. My friend did not know much about his uncle who had remained in Germany—<only that he had studied various subjects at University without obtaining a degree; that he owned a small mettalurgic factory the running of which he left to a manager; that he had been married to a ballet dancer with whom he had a son, and that he was supposed to be 'quite a chess player.'>
When my friend looked up this uncle in 1965 in <Wuppertal>, he found a bitter and lonely man in his middle fifties, living in a small one-room appartment, the sink full of empty food cans from which he apparently ate directly. On a little orange crate there was a chessboard, and all around on the floor there were piles of chess books and chess magazines. Of their conversation, my friend only recalls his uncle's grumbling about the stupid newspapers who called a stray whale which had been spotted in the Rhine, a 'white beluga' - when the word beluga already meant 'white whale.'
My friend never met his uncle again, and, around ten years later, heard he had died.
One of the worldwide legion of nameless chess addicts, I thought, who play their bad games in chess café's, and whom you will see in the demonstration halls at chess tournaments, asking stupid questions.
Then, leafing in a booklet about chess in Germany in the early postwar years, I suddenly saw his name. As <'Meister X'> no less, which is, for the sake of reverence, how I will call him. <Just before and after the war, Uncle X had played in tournaments against the likes of Erich Eliskases and Wolfgang Unzicker, had won games against Friedrich Saemisch and threefold German champion Georg Kieninger, had had results of around 50 % in a few minor national masters tournaments. In the first postwar championship of Germany, Weidenau 1947, he had been 11th of 20, with 9½ out of 19.>
He had not been 'quite a chess player', as ignorant family members will phrase it, but a real one, a 'master', somebody who had been willing to sacrifice ordinary life for the chess dream. He just lacked the talent.
ibid /(with minor adjustments by me)
Kibitzing
