A STORY ABOUT MIND GAMES
This German novella by the late Stephan Zweig is at once riveting and disheartening but readers will be gifting it to all the people they know.
While Stefan Zweig’s CHESS STORY is a novella about the mind games opponents can play during a game of chess, it’s also a brilliant tale about the manipulative mind games governments can play on their people. In 1938, Nazism forced Zweig into exile. This story, sometimes known as THE ROYAL GAME, was his final work before he and his wife committed suicide in their home in Brazil.
In the novella, we’re aboard a great ocean liner bound for Buenos Aires from New York at midnight. While standing on the promenade deck taking in the hubbub, the narrator of CHESS STORY is informed that a special guest happens to be aboard the steamer.
“Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s crisscrossed America from coast to coast playing tournaments and is now off to Argentina for fresh triumphs.”
We soon learn that Mirko Czentovic, a slavic peasant child rescued from his life of poverty and educational starvation, has been raised by a clergyman who finds him dimwitted and almost impossible to educate. By sheer accident, however, one day, the man finds that his adoptive son excels in chess. This rustic champion now begins to be noticed everywhere, from his provincial town in Yugoslavia, to European capitals where his uncanny prowess becomes the topic of conversation.
Mirko, sitting motionless in front of the board for four hours, defeated one player after another without uttering a word or even looking up; finally a simultaneous game was proposed. It took some time to make the ignorant boy understand that in a simultaneous game he would be the only opponent of a range of players. But once Mirko had grasped this, he quickly warmed to the task. He moved slowly from table to table, his heavy shoes squeaking, and in the end won seven of the eight games.”
As he begins to live life in the limelight, Czentovic is interested only in two things in life—chess and the money that it fetches him. Years later (and that’s where this story begins) Czentovic is aboard the passenger ship, just as our narrator himself and an Austrian we know as Dr. B. CHESS STORY pits the chess champion agains Dr. B who, we believe, may be his undoing.
As we learn more about Dr. B, we discover that he is ingenious. He is as uncannily gifted in general learning as Czentovic is stunted. Dr. B is a scion of a venerated and educated family close to the monarchy. He is an investor and lawyer for the Austrian monarchy. During the initial Nazi takeover of Austria during World War II, the Nazi regime attempts to confiscate the wealth of the monarchy and they use psychological abuse on Dr. B in order to locate the whereabouts of the properties and also implicate others who could be hiding it. The psychological abuse Dr. B suffers—while in solitary confinement and during the examination by a board of interrogators—introduces us to the notion of mind games that governments and organizations perpetrate in order to torture people into submission.
CHESS STORY notes how the Nazis sent many people to the gas chambers; yet, the people that they needed, such as Dr. B, were “treated well”. These people were quarantined indefinitely in a room. They were kept waiting in solitary confinement.
For the requisite ‘evidence’ was to be wrested from us by a force more sophisticated than crude beating or physical torture: the most exquisite isolation imaginable. They did nothing—other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing. Locking each of us into a total vacuum, a room hermetically sealed off from the outside world, instead of beating us or exposing us to cold—this was meant to create an internal pressure that would finally force our lips open.
In order to keep sane, the brilliant Dr. B eventually steals a book—which is a 101 about famous chess games. Dr.B learns to visualize the chess board and pieces and also play all the 150 games described in the book by world’s famous chess masters. During those months in solitary confinement, he begins to also challenge himself by inventing games in which he must trick his into creating black and white ego players.
The basic attraction of chess lies solely in the fact that its strategy is worked out differently in two different minds, that in this battle of wits Black does not know White’s schemes and constantly seeks to guess them and frustrate them, while White in turn tries to outstrip and thwart Black’s secret intentions. Now if Black and White together made up one and the same person, the result would be a nonsensical state of affairs in which one and the same mind simultaneously knew and did not know something, in which as White it could simply decide to forget what it had wished and intended to do as Black a moment earlier.
In time, Dr. B works himself into a tizzy, going berserk and ending up in a hospital. As we learn about the ways in which the book on chess becomes a tool with which to sharpen his mind in order to masterfully handle the interrogation by the Nazis, we realize that the book also leads to the manipulation of his mind by his own mind. What happens when we let our mind play games with our own mind? This recursive and dangerous outcome is deployed so skillfully in this narrative about this royal game.
We don’t know exactly how Dr. B’s life ends. Even though he still lives by the time the story closes, it’s as if his life hasn’t been allowed to be executed on his terms. In the preface, the late Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers, wonders about how Dr. B’s life will play out.
Will he eventually deal with his trauma and live, or, like Stefan Zweig, defeated by exile and depression, let his past conquer him and die? We know that Zweig’s world, the liberal culture of Central Europe, was no more; for a writer who could always count on a sizable and admiring audience, this was an ordeal hard to acknowledge and hard to survive.
Dr. B is eventually led away from the chess board by a sensitive character, the narrator himself. While that may actually have saved his life, Dr. B’s potential will never be realized. Did the narrator, in fact, save him? Is that the way his life must be lived out?
I was disturbed and addled by the time I reached the end. Dr. B would never be able to call out the limitations of his opponent. Thus the real had been snuffed by the false. The human mind, that fount of brilliance and creativity, had been pulverized by the games that only an opposing malevolent mind could play—with such stealthy, premeditated and unmatched brilliance.