Gideon Stahlberg's opinion about Nimzowitsch
A photo from the giving away of the
prizes after the Chess Olympics in Leipzig 1960.
From the left: A representative of the arrangers, S. Buskenström, K. Sköld
(captain), M. Johansson,
Z. Nilsson, E. Lundin, G. Ståhlberg.
The Swedish Grandmaster Gideon Ståhlberg/Stahlberg (1908-67) was one of
Sweden's strongest players ever.
His best year was 1947, and in the tournament Buenos Aires/La Plata he scored
88% in strong competition. He was
awarded the title of Grandmaster in 1950. (This was before the inflation in
titles had started.) By the time of the
1960 Olympics his star had declined but he was still able to resist other top
players at the first board.
"The three Musketeers"
Stahlberg,
Stoltz, and Lundin ("the three Swedish musketeers") made their names
as world players at the team
championships at Folkstone 1933 and the Olympic Games in
Warsaw 1935 where Sweden took the second
place after USA, whose team had Reuben Fine at the first board. In 1939 the
Olympic Games were held in
Buenos Aires, and the war broke out while the tournament was still going on.
Most of the players managed
to get home, but Stahlberg was invited to stay, and he would probably have
stayed for ever if, in 1948, he
had not been summoned back by the Swedish Chess Federation.
Editor of Chess Books
But Gideon Stahlberg was also one of
those rare masters who are kind enough to let us share their experiences
by writing books and articles. Some of his titles were
I kamp med världseliten (In Battle against the World Elite, 1948, 1958);
Schack och schackmästare (Chess
and Chess Masters, 1937,1959);
Strövtåg i schackvärlden (Excursions in the World of Chess).
He also published a book about Bobby Fischer together with Jostein Westberg
(1962), and several works
about opening theory, one of which was a volume in Spanish about the Queen's
Gambit, written during his stay
in Argentina. In
addition Stahlberg was the editor of several tournament books, such as Saltsjöbaden
1948,
Stockholm 1952, Zürich 1953, and Göteborg 1955. He also contributed to several
newspapers and was for
a period the editor of "Tidskrift för Schack". Gideon Stahlberg was
honoured with the task of acting as judge
in the World Championship matches Botvinnik-Bronstein 1951 and Botvinnik-Smyslov
1954, from which
matches he also edited two books.
Meeting with Nimzowitsch
Because of the difference in age
between Nimzowitsch and Stahlberg their careers coincided just for a short
period of time, and only in the years 1933-34 did they meet each other in chess
events. Stahlberg describes
in his book "I kamp med världseliten" (Örebro 1958) his first
acquantaince, at the age of 12, with Rubinstein,
Réti, Spielmann, Nimzowitsch, and Tarrasch, together with other top players of
the time. This was at the
tournament in Gothenburg 1920. At the time the word "sponsoring" was
not in use, but the event was sponsored
by Mr. Erik Olsson, the manager of Pripp & Lyckholm, a well-known
brewery in Gothenburg. Olsson, together
with the other great Swedish chess patron, Ludvig Collijn, saw the need to set
Swedish chess moving after the
war, and he expecially took Nimzowitsch under his wing, realizing that this
player, obviously a nervous wreck,
was one of the many victims of the bad times.
The first meeting between Nimzowitsch
and Stahlberg in a tournament took place at Copenhagen 1933, and in
1934 they played a match that was won by Stahlberg by 5-3. Then they met at
Stockholm 1934, Zürich 1934,
and finally Copenhagen 1934, which was to be Nimzowitsch's last event.
Ambiguous Judgements
However, Stahlberg had formed an
opinion about Nimzowitsch long before they played each other in an event.
In a volume of "Tidskrift för Schack" (January 1931), he
publishes, under the headline "From Bygone Days",
the game Tarrasch-Pillsbury, Wien 1898. Tarrasch wins after strong play, and
Stahlberg writes: "Tarrasch in
his heyday was not the stubborn dogmatist that the hypermoderns have tried to
make him." .... "Against a
Tarrasch of 1898 Niemzowitsch would no doubt have had difficulty in proving his
theses about "narrow but
solid positions, blockade, etc." (Note the spelling of the name.)
And in the same volume of
"TfS" Stahlberg also gives comments on the game Nimzowitsch-Ahues,
Frankfurt am
Main, 1931. After a complicated sacrifice Nimzowitsch wins by elegant
combinations, and Stahlberg summons up:
"A typical Niemzowitsch-game! In
my opinion, N. is not a brilliant strategist, but a shrewed and experienced
tactician. Unlike Spielmann he does not like the fight in the open battlefield,
but he knows how to weaken and
exhaust his opponent by 'guerilla warfare', and when after that he strikes, it
is with great precision. His combinations
are, like in this game, not so much the result of a logically built-up attack
play, but a sly using of flaws in the enemy's
warfare."
(It is funny to note that Nimzowitsch
and Stahlberg had one thing in common, a liking for the use of military terms
in their language when annotating chess games.)
Had Stahlberg read "Mein System"?
However, Stahlberg's judgement of 1931
does not do justice to Nimzowitsch. Nowhere in "My System" does
Nimzowitsch recommend "narrow but solid positions". On the contrary he
always points out that you should try
to achieve mobility, and he even talks about "the Pawn's lust for
expansion". Another thesis is that an immovable
centre tends to become a weakness, an opinion that can hardly be said to favour
narrow positions. It is true that
in his book "Die Praxis meines Systems" (1928) he has a short section
with the title "Das kleine aber feste Zentrum",
but such a centre is according to Nimzowitsch no end in itself, but a minimum
prerequisite to the start of flank
operations.
It is a bit astonishing that Stahlberg
apparently was not correctly informed of Nimzowitsch's texts, and we may
find an explanation of this flaw in an extract from "I kamp med världseliten"
(1958), where he says, apropos of
the dispute Tarrasch-Nimzowitsch: "In the 1920ies he expressed his own
opinions in the booklet "Mein System",
and the considerably more comprehensive "Die Praxis meines Systems".
This is a strange statement which indicates
that Stahlberg did not know that "Mein System" was originally
published in five separate "Lieferungen" which together
contain more text than "Die Praxis meines Systems". It was only in
1958 that "Mein System" was published in one
volume, although an English
translation came out in 1929, written in descriptive notation.
On the other hand it is of course
possible that Nimzowitsch had expressed a different view of "cramped
positions"
in other contexts, for instance in his many lectures or in personal
conversations, although there is no documentation left.
Good personal relations
Elsewhere, for instance in the account
of the match in 1934, Stahlberg writes that he had very good relations with
Nimzowitsch on a personal level, and that they showed each other a high mutual
respect. And despite of this fact
he chooses in his article in TfS 1931 a game by Tarrasch to find fault with
Nimzowitsch. Under such circumstances
we must assume that the general tendency in the chess world of the time was to
have negative feelings against
Nimzowitsch, a result of both his personality and his ideas. Gideon Stahlberg
was a person whose opinion mattered,
and although he was only 23 in 1931 when he gave his opinion on Nimzowitsch, he
was already the leading chess
player in Sweden, and in addition an all-round person with an insight into
current affairs, so it is reasonable to believe
that his view of the matter was representative of the chess world in general. We
might add that to whatever extent his
opinion on Nimzowitsch suffered from insufficient knowledge, he shared this lack
of information with the rest of the
chess world.
Eventually Stahlberg modified his
opinion about Nimzowitsch's ideas (also the spelling of the name), and in the
1959 edition of his book "Schack och schackmästare" he writes:
"Time proved Nimzowitsch right". It is however
unclear which "time" Stahlberg means. If Nimzowitsch had anything to
prove he certainly had fulfilled that duty by
winning Karlsbad 1929. Or did the chess world need the time from 1931 to 1959 to
realize that time had proved
Nimzowitsch right?
Stahlberg says that Nimzowitsch was
"an uneasy soul, with an almost pathological suspiciousness, and a
nervousness
that sometimes, in the heat of the battle, could provoke embarrassing conflicts.
But he also adds:
"Few
masters, if any, have loved the game of chess as Nimzowitsch did."
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