Michael Negele's chess tours I

Visit to Meerbusch (Lasker meeting)

On July 9th Michael came to Meerbusch (located on the lower Rhine near Düsseldorf) for a short meeting with Jürgen Fleck and yours truly in order to discuss some details of the Lasker book project. The revisions of the two former chapters on Lasker's studies (by J. Fleck) and problems (by myself) had already been done and their English translations will be integrated in one chapter "Lasker’s compositions". The pilot phase for our layout man will start in the middle of 2016 when the translations are available.

Vacation in Triberg and Lasker meeting in Zurich (19-07-2015)

In the second half of July Michael Negele was on holiday in Germany's Black Forest, Triberg - as every chess aficionado knows - was the adopted home town of Efim Bogoljubow after WW I. It was also an opportunity for Michael to make a trip to Zurich to meet there once again Richard Forster, the co-editor of the Lasker volumes, and Joachim Rosenthal, professor of mathematics at the University of Zurich who had contributed the chapter on "Lasker the Mathematician". The latter has agreed to provide an English version of his chapter for the new Lasker edition.

Further photos of Bogoljubow's grave in our column Chess Graves.

Prague Chess Train 2015, 9 to 13 October

Prague - Dresden - Wrocław - Bratislava - Vienna - Prague were the stops of last year's chess train; Michael Negele was for the first time among the participants who constituted a new peak of 120 chess people. The Swede Lasse Karlsson came off as winner of the "tournament on wheels", while the Filipino Julio Sadorra and Raj Tischbierek finished second and third respectively. The event is well documented by a series of articles on praguechess.cz, so I will give here only a selection of photos with short captions. (For German speaking readers we also refer to Raj Tischbierek's contribution Der tschechische Schachzug in SCHACH 11/2015, p.56.)

- we still link the posters of the 2011 + 2012 and the 2013 + 2014 trains.

- enlarged detail

Some more photographs in this gallery!

Symposium "Schach (in) der DDR" in Dresden, 16-17 October and World Chess Championship for Disabled

The symposium was held on the occasion of "25 years of unification of the two German chess federations" (after the fall of the Berlin wall).

In Dresden Michael Negele had to cope with a bad mishap: Already during the flight he had noticed that he couldn't open the powerpoint presentation anymore that he had prepared with much effort for the symposium. So he had to improvise his lecture completely which he could manage quite satisfactorily. We regret to have no photo of Michael giving his somehow "reduced" speech, but at least we can offer now his complete presentation (as PDF) - Schach blüht aus den Ruinen. Wiederbelebung des organisierten Schachs in der Bundesrepublik bis 1955 (8.8 MB) [Chess prospers from the ruins. Revitalization of organized chess in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1955].

A retrospect of the symposium with more photos has been published on the DSB web site (in German only): Part 1/2 and Part 2/2.

The 2nd World Chess Championship for Disabled was held from 17th to 25th October in the Dresden Wyndham Garden Hotel (63 participants, 7 rounds).  You will find a full coverage of the event with reports, games and photos on www.worldchess-disabled.com/en/.

Visit to Kórnik, 18-20 October

Subsequent to the Dresden symposium Herbert Bastian and Michael Negele went to Kórnik Castle where the outstanding collection of Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa is housed in the Biblioteka Kórnicka PAN. And the new curator of the library, Monika Małecka kindly backed the German guests in their research work, naturally - given the lack of time - only a few focal points could be worked on; for the evaluation of von der Lasa's  documents and letters would certainly require a research work of many months.
A more detailed report of the visit (in German) has been published on www.schachbund.de/news/....

Moreover this visit was an opportunity to renew the relations between Polish and German chess historians and to intensify generally contacts between chess players and historians. In the evening of 19th October a meeting with representatives of the Polish Chess Federation (PCF) took place which had been arranged at short notice. On the Polish side were present

• Piotr Murdzia, Secretary-General of the PCF, IM and world class problem solver
• Włodzimierz Schmidt, vice president for sports of the PCF, the first Polish grandmaster
• Janusz Woda (from Poznań), former president of the PCF
• Tomasz Lissowski, our member from Warsaw, well-known chess historian and author

Main subject-matter of the discussion were all the anniversaries in the coming years -

90 years of Polish Chess Federation in 2016
140 years of German Chess Federation in 2017
- and in 2018:
200th birthday of Tassilo v. Heydebrand u.d. Lasa (*17-10-1818)
200th birthday of Adolf Anderssen (*06-07-1818)
150th birthday of Emanuel Lasker (*24-12-1868)
150th birthday of Richard Teichmann (*24-12-1868)
130th anniversary of the death of Johannes Hermann Zukertort (†20-06-1888)

and a lot of proposals were made for joint actions of the two federations on these occasions, among them a 3rd von der Lasa Conference in Kórnik in 2018. Let's hope that most co-operations and events contemplated in the above circle will come true. I will mention here only three desirable book projects:

• Translation of the book War Chess by Paveł Dudziński into English or German (we still link a recent interview with the author on ChessBrains.pl [in Polish])
• New edition of the Zukertort biography by Cezary W. Domański and Tomasz Lissowski
• Publication of the documentation of the 2nd von der Lasa Conference 2007

(possibly with the collected games of von der Lasa [legacy Nathan Divinsky] as well as v.d.L.'s travel diary)

We are looking forward to most interesting chess years!

Photographs © Dr. Michael Negele, Wuppertal

Will be continued.