Schachnovelle German Edition eBook Stefan Zweig
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Stefan Zweigs berühmte Erzählung über erzwungenes Schachgenie und seine Grenzen.
Schachnovelle German Edition eBook Stefan Zweig
There are two things that really annoyed me:(1) The Foreword (from the editor) gives out too much details about the plot. Once you have read it the reading experience of the Schachnovelle itself is spoiled.
(2) There are a number of typos (in particular with umlauts and punctuation marks), some wrong hyphenations, and at least one out of context line. It is clear that prior to printing there has been no thorough proof reading.
It's a shame.
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Schachnovelle German Edition eBook Stefan Zweig Reviews
I didn't esteem this acclaimed novella when I first read it on assignment in a German Lit class at Harvard in 1962. Perhaps the class met too early in the morning, or perhaps I didn't respond to its polished conventionality, its old-fashioned artifice in that era of exaggerated literary experimentalism. Otherwise I can't explain why I dismissed it so heedlessly. Not only is it splendidly composed -- flawless in fact except for one odd glitch in the 'timing' of the narrative -- but also it should have spoken plainly and powerfully to my own milieu. I'll try to make amends, to give credit where credit is certainly due and overdue.
Die Schachnovelle tells of an improvised chess match between two passengers on a ship. One is the 'world champion' Mirko Czentovic, a surly, illiterate peasant with Apsberger-like monomaniacal genius at the game. The other is Dr. B, a Jewish Austrian royalist, who had been interrogated by the Gestapo following the Anschluss in 1938 and who has now been 'granted' exile. The primary first-person narrator is McConner, an engineer with a bent for psycholanalysis who happens to remember salient details about the career of Czentovic and who therefore hopes to probe the phenomenon of his special ability. Most of the story, however, comes second-hand from Dr. B, who confides the shocking truth of his own 'chess-madness' to McConner on deck over several hours. It's the same technique of using a 'displaced narrator' that Joseph Conrad employed so brilliantly in many of his novels; whether Zweig was consciously indebted to Conrad I can't say, but this is the second example of such Conradian structure that I've noted in Zweig's writing, the other being his short novella Der Amoklaufer. Zweig uses his narrative 'Chinese boxes' with fine precision and aplomb.
Dr. B's story is the core of the book. It has been perceived, rightly, as an indictment of the inhumanity of Nazism and of the methods of 'mind control' and torture employed by the 'servants' of the Third Reich. Dr. B is suspected of having information about the finances of the Catholic monasteries of Austria, by whom he was employed. He is imprisoned, but not in a rude concentration camp. Instead he is locked in an almost bare room, deprived of all external stimuli, all variety, all communication for months on end. His only relief from this regimen of sensory deprivation comes in the form of manipulative, unpredictable interrogation. By chance, Dr. B manages to steal a small book from the clothing of an interrogator. It's a manual of 150 masterful chess matches. Dr. B thwarts his tormenters and risks his own sanity by devoting every fiber of his mind to frenetic monomaniacal mental chess.
Sensory deprivation and other methods of mind control were NOT a monopoly of the Nazis, however, as I could already have verified in 1962. BF Skinner and other behaviorists were prominent at Harvard and most other American universities back then. There was a 'sensory deprivation' lab in use at Harvard, about which a certain amount of salacious gossip circulated, concerning unauthorized off-hours experiments in sensory overstimulation of the heterosexual sort. There were also the notorious experiments with mind-altering drugs conducted by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. But those shenanigans were benign, merely naive efforts at spiritual and aesthetic enlightenment. The real experiments were 'top secret', though secrecy was oddly porous among intellectuals back then, the projects managed by the USA's "Office of Scientific Intelligence" and funded by the CIA. The general code designation for such projects was MK-ULTRA. Most of the facts that have since become public about MK-ULTRA were revealed through Congressional investigations in 1975-1977 and through cases later taken up by the Supreme Court. There are books about it. You'll find a 'fair and balanced' article about MK-ULTRA on Wikipedia. I'm not making anything up. And I'm reasonably sure that even worse 'secrets' were more successfully concealed, which will never come to light.
At least forty-four universities, including Harvard and Stanford, received project funds related to MK-ULTRA. The projects involved diverse efforts at mind control, extreme interrogation, memory erasure, and hypnotic suggestion. Sounds like "The Manchurian Candidate"? The specific interrogation techniques to be studied included the use of sensory deprivation, sensory bombardment, electric shock, hypnosis, physical torture, humiliation, sexual abuse, and a panoply of drugs including dangerous 'truth' serums and hallucinogens like LSD. Some of the studies involved the recruitment of volunteers, even paid volunteers, but many of the subjects were denied what we now call the right to informed consent. Many were unwitting victims of extremely irresponsible and unethical practices. The goals of the whole shameful process were clandestine; often the academic researchers who received 'grants' for their work were unaware of the sources of the money as well as of the intended uses of their conclusions. But among them there were unquestionably some who "knew"! One example was Harvard professor Henry Murray, who had previously served as a psychological researcher with the OSS during World War II; Murray's most notorious research subject, in retrospect, was Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who entered Harvard at age 16 in 1959 and immediately began participating in Murray's projects.
The background of MK-ULTRA, by the way, is significant; it had grown out of several covert American programs, following the Nuremberg Trials, to recruit former Nazi scientists with prior experience in extreme interrogation and behavior modification ... precisely the people who interrogated Dr. B in Stefan Zweig's Chess-Novel!
At least one death occurred during a MK-ULTRA experiment, the suicide of Frank Olson in 1953. Another well-known human guinea pig was author Ken Kesey, who discovered LSD as a volunteer in a study at the VA hospital in Menlo Park CA while he was a student at Stanford. One could find a dark pleasure in the irony that the CIA and its minions had a seminal role in the genesis of the hip counter-culture that has so persistently bedeviled their right wing fanaticism.
Poor Stefan Zweig had altogether too clear a vision of the villainy we humans are capable of. His indictment of the police state and its methods should not be perceived as limited to Hitler's Germany. The frightful and criminal torment to which Dr. B was subjected in this 'fiction' survived the end of the Third Reich and became the government-supported curriculum of American higher education in my generation. MK-ULTRA was as vile in its fundamental values as anything the followers of Hitler or Stalin imagined. Stefan Zweig couldn't bear his own vision of the future; though safe in exile in Brazil, he committed suicide in 1942. Schachnovelle may have been his last work.
There are several English translations of Schachnovelle available. Other reviewers seem to favor the 2006 translation by Joel Rotenberg.
On the ship from New York to Buenos Aires, our narrator spots Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. Czentovic started out as a poor boy and is still illiterature. He prefers to keep to himself and never having learnt about any other greatness than his own, he is arrogant. When a few passengers, along with the narrator, approach him to play a game of chess with them, he agrees to play for a price. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger, Dr. B, steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. The passengers try to persuade Dr. B to play with Czentovic one on one, but he immediately refuses. When the narrator asks Dr. B, how he he became such a skilled chess player, Dr. B narrates his story.
As a a monarchist hiding valuable assets of the nobility, Dr. B had been tortured by the Nazis, who kept him in total isolation. He had come across a book of chess games, which he had then read and memorized; it had been his only way to keep himself from going insane. After memorizing and absorbing every move mentioned in the game and being left with nothing to do, Dr. B had begun to play against himself, splitting himself into the two players White and Black. He had reached an emotional breakdown because of the psychological conflict, and had only returned back to his sanity, after being rescued. Chess is more a game of the mind than anything else and the crux of the story lies in the final game between Mirko Czentovic and Dr. B., a showdown between an illiterate stoic and a learned neurotic.
The way the book deals with its themes of torture, incarceration, defeat, war, politics and in extreme detail Nazism is at once horrific, depressing and amazingly true to life. The way Zweig writes about what goes on in someone's head, the way he can translate the hopelessness and helplessness into words is fabulous. I like Zweig's austere writing style and the pace of the book. It's a short but impactful novella, and one that I think everyone ought to read.
My husband is the German student, so I can't rate .
I bought this to practice reading German after intensive course.
There are two things that really annoyed me
(1) The Foreword (from the editor) gives out too much details about the plot. Once you have read it the reading experience of the Schachnovelle itself is spoiled.
(2) There are a number of typos (in particular with umlauts and punctuation marks), some wrong hyphenations, and at least one out of context line. It is clear that prior to printing there has been no thorough proof reading.
It's a shame.
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