CHESS AND FREEDOM1

Bernd-Peter Lange
[email protected]

Abstract. The tension between the game of chess as strictly regulated

by rules and the idea of freedom can be traced in three radidal examples
separated by media and different periods of the twentieth century. The
first emphatic employment of the concept of freedom is in the title of a
chess journal issued by the Communist opposition of the central
German working-class chess organization at the end of the Weimar
Republic. In the journal Frei Schach! the radical subsection of “Red
Sports Unity” asserts its claim for supremacy, demanding revolutionary
goals in the class struggle. But this journalistic appeal to freedom was
countered by the use of the same concept by the moderate alternative
central chess organisation, and soon even by the National Socialists
suppressing both working-class organisations. In the cultural scene after
the second world war there was a distant, strangely depoliticized echo
of freedom in chess. In the Austrian avantgarde dramatist Wolfgang
Bauer`s version of Ibsen`s modernist revision of classical drama in the
play Ghosts there is a farcical use of everyday objects as a replacement of
chess elements. They function as a postmodern parody of the
conventional structures of a conversation play. Compared to such
highly idiosyncratic ludic transformation of chess games, today`s
digitalized chess in which the computer is the final arbiter makes the
game more accessible to the masses. The surface democratic appeal in
which average players can turn into critics of the chess elite is
accompanied by the complete subjection to digitalisation on a late
capitalist agenda. However, this does not completely deprive the
traditional game of chess of its promise of playful enjoyment for an
increasing number of people on a global scale.

Keywords: Freedom, Liberty, Class struggle, Avantgarde, Digitization

©2024 Bernd-Peter Lange. This is an open access article licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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62 CHESS AND FREEDOM

Introduction
What does chess, a culturally privileged but largely apolitical pastime,
have to do with freedom? The strict set of rules of the game traditionally
limits freedoms both in the sense of freedom from arbitrary authority and
liberty within a social framework. In many European languages there is a
similar semantic split, though not in German.1 Historically, the elitist
exclusivity characterizing the game of chess marked its social position. It
ranged from aristocratic dominance in the game to gradual middle-class
participation in it and eventually also its limited appropriation by the
working-class movement. The game´s barrier from universal access also had
roots in the relative hermeticism of its documentation, be it in the notation
of games, in endgame studies or problem compositions. All these can only
be deciphered by initiates. But there are also boundaries from the inside, for
the players. Albert Einstein noted in his foreword to Jacques Hannak`s
biography of the chess world champion Emanuel Lasker that the game
“holds players in its bonds, captivates the mind and in a certain way shapes
them, so that the inner freedom and impartiality of even the strongest suffers
as a result”.2
Despite such reservations, a cultural analysis can highlight points of
intersection between the game of chess and the claim to freedom. Three
important scenarios of modernity will illustrate such an emphatic claim.
Their succession is mirrored in the linguistic progression from German
“Frei Schach” through the hybrid “Free Schach” into the globalized English
“Free Chess”. The first of those sceneries was the media coverage of the
game during the crisis of the German workers' chess movement before 1930.
Then, in chronological progression, the literary employment of the chess
motif in a play by the avant-garde dramatist of the cultural evolution after
1968, in Wolfgang Bauer's version of Ibsen's play Ghosts. Finally, such claim
to freedom goes with the completely digitalized version of the game of chess
in the present boom of its unlimited global accessibility. Today, the number
of countries represented in chess Olympiads often exceeds Olympiads
organized by the International Olympic Committee.
The reference to freedom is a common feature of these three obviously
heterogeneous reference points of chess. For long periods of its history, chess

1 Cf. Slavoj Žižek: Freedom. A Disease without a Cure. London: Bloomsbury 2023, 16-18.
2 Albert Einstein: „Geleitwort“, in J. Hannak: Emanuel Lasker. Biographie eines
Schachweltmeisters. Berlin-Frohnau: Engelhardt 1952, 3.

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 Bernd-Peter Lange 63

was by no means associated with any kind of concept of freedom. In this

relationship mediated by rationality, it stood in contrast to freedom as a core
postulate of the French Revolution. Its pioneers of the Enlightenment, the
philosophers around the French Encyclopédie around Diderot and Rousseau,
were regulars at the Café de la Régence, the Paris centre of chess.

Revolution thwarted: Frei Schach!

The expansion of the concept of freedom since the Enlightenment soon
turned into a discursive commonplace. In chess matches, the greeting “Frei
Schach!” was a friendly social code in a playful competition. As in other
sports, the phrase was also associated with the emancipation from social
exclusion through the working-class sports movement which had been
developing since industrialization. But even in club chess, “free chess
associations” could accompany the breakaway from hegemonic
organizations such as the German Chess Federation founded in 1877, or of
middle-class clubs on a local level. In the workers' chess movement, “Free
Chess!” became not only a routine in team matches, but also a fighting term
in the conflict between two competing sections of the German Workers'
Chess Association at the end of the Weimar Republic. The minority faction
of the workers' chess movement linked to the German Communist Party
published a magazine called “Frei Schach!” from 1928 to 1932. It was the
organ of “Red Sports Unity”.3 Its emphasis became a signal of the social
class struggle, from which the social democratic leadership of the Workers'
Chess Association had gradually distanced itself. Here there were links to
the freedom discourse of the international left, a bone of contention between
pro- and anti-Bolshevism, and soon also between Stalinists and their
Socialist and other opponents.4
The first issue of the new working-class chess magazine Frei Schach! in
November 1928 carries a double battle cry. On its first page, under the
journal´s heading, the chess greeting was transformed into a programmatic
appeal in two directions. It was directed both against the conservative
middle-class chess clubs and the spreading of professional players, but also,

3 Joachim Petzoldt: „Die Arbeiterschachbewegung in Deutschland“, in: Beiträge zur

Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 32 (1990), 458-471.
4 Sergey Voronkov: Masterpieces and Dramas of the Soviet Championships. I: 1920-1927. Moscow:

Elk and Ruby 2020, 168-171; Andrew Soltis: Soviet Chess 1917-1991. Jefferson (N.C.):
McFarland 2000, 45f.

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within the internal controversy of the German Workers' Chess Association,

against its social democratic leadership. It was accused with the Stalinist
slogan of “Social Fascism”. The article blames it for reneging for failing to
follow its original revolutionary goals: “'Frei Schach!' as a greeting, 'Frei
Schach!' to fight! Until we are given the central magazine under the old,
unchangeable proletarian class struggle slogan.”5 This attack on the
German Workers' Chess magazine, the Deutsche Arbeiter-Schachzeitung
founded in 1909 and published by the national leadership, was the starting
point for the beginning rivalry between two chess publications of the
German workers' chess movement.
Frei Schach! was published from 1928 to 1932 by the radical Greater
Berlin section of the Workers' Chess Association. Most Berlin clubs had
been excluded from its Chemnitz-based organization. The renaming of Frei
Schach! to Workers' Chess in April 1932, in line with the unity slogans of the
“Fighting Group for Proletarian Sports Unity”, could no longer remove the
fatal split in German workers' chess. It is also noteworthy that the greeting
referring to freedom was also used by the opposing side in the Workers'
Chess Association. An article in the last annual issue of 1928 in Frei Schach!
refers to the attempt by the SPD-oriented leadership of the Workers' Chess
Federation to attract members in the radical Berlin section for a new local
foundation: “Through systematic subversive work in the Berlin Workers'
Chess Club, the 'loyalists' are trying to bring new members to their ‘Free
Workers’ Chess Association Greater Berlin'.”6 The social democratic
Workers' Newspaper had shortly before formulated a political justification
for this new foundation of a cartel by the Worker´s Chess Association
leadership: “Should we run after a cartel which follows the instructions of
the Communist Party headquarters and is run by comrades who have been
systematically undermining any unanimity and unity?”7
There had been a similar conflict immediately after the revolution of
1918, when a “Free Gymnastics Association of Greater Berlin” opposed the
large, communist-oriented workers' sports club Fichte as an alternative,
reformist workers' sports club. In organized chess, this opposition was
revived in 1930 with the foundation of a “Freie Arbeiter-Schach-
Vereinigung Groß-Berlin” (Free Working-class Chess Association of

5 Frei Schach! Organ der Groß-Berliner Arbeiter-Schachvereine, 1, Nov. 1928, 1.

6 Frei Schach! 2, Dec. 1928, 19.
7 K. Frank: „Spaltung in Berlin“, in: Arbeiterzeitung Nov. 928, 349.

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 Bernd-Peter Lange 65

Greater Berlin).8 It combined non-Communist working-class chess clubs.

The competing chess associations in German workers' chess over the course
of the 1920s drew on the same rhetoric. Both originally claimed their
connection to the proletarian class struggle. In both cases, this was
problematic. More obviously in the case of the revolutionary opposition to
the social-democrat central organisation. In the case of the Communist
“Red Sports” movement, the employment of the social fascist polemics of
the German Communist with its authoritarian discipline also motivated the
Greater Berlin group around the magazine Frei Schach! In contrast, the
reformist Socialist majority of the Workers' Chess Association was heavily
dependent on the conservative bourgeois bloc that helped make Hitler an
option, especially in the Communist majority areas of Berlin`s working-class
districts. Similarly, in the “Frei Heil!” greeting used by radical rightist
popular sports groups the Social-democrat party newspaper Vorwärts saw an
ominous premonition of ties between Nazi and Communist politics.9
The National Socialist terror of suppression, persecution and murder
soon brought a violent end to both working-class factions in chess and their
sympathizers. For Walter Benjamin, the chess games with Hannah Arendt
in exile in Paris and in the Lourdes detention camp were a residual episode
of leisure on his flight from the fascists. For his brother Georg Benjamin, the
chess set he produced of bread in the cell of the Brandenburg Nazi prison
was a reminder of his success in a correspondence chess tournament
organized by Frei Schach! 10 The fight for the word “Freiheit” was also
undermined by its appropriation by the National Socialists as their own
slogan. Niklas Frank, the youngest son of Hans Frank, the Governor
General in occupied Poland, one of the most important promoters of chess
in Nazi cultural politics, remembers: “My father and the other Nazis always
spoke of freedom. But they meant something completely different,
something terrible for freedom.”11

8 Vorwärts Oct, 1930.

9 Vorwärts Aug. 1930.
10 Bernd-Peter Lange: “Zeitvertreib und Widerstand. Walter und Georg Benjamins

Schach“, in: Karen Aydin et al (eds.) Games of Empires. Berlin: LIT 2018, 305-328.
11 Pers. Communication Niklas Frank, Jan. 2024.

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Taking liberties: Free Schach

In the working-class sports movement during the restoration of
capitalism in the German western zones after the 1945 liberation, the old
greetings and political paroles quoting freedom were no longer used. The
social greeting in workers' sports: “Frei Sport!” were revived in the GDR in
physical education classes in schools, in team training and in youth sports
Olympics. In a highly idiosyncratic and singular way, the concept of free
chess reappeared in the cultural movement in the German-speaking area
after 1968. It found a literary reflection in the adaptation of Ibsen's drama
Ghosts by the radical playwright Wolfgang Bauer.
The motif of the game of chess does not reflect any particular interest in
chess on the part of the author from the Graz literary scene after 1960. Long
before writing the play Ghosts, at the point in his career that his biographer
Antonic calls his “Beat and pop era”, Bauer was helped by the influence of
his friend Gunter Falk, who held a doctorate in sociology with a thesis on
“game systems and gaming attitudes”, to overcome his aversion to chess.12
However, this was mainly due to the construction of an absurd real-life
variant of the game of chess with another friend, Georg Janoska, which they
called “Free Schach”. Bauer staged it at some real locations. This included
a meeting at Vienna when one player swallowed a cake of soap as a move
in a chess game, and the writer Bauer took off his glasses as a sign of
resignation.13 “Free Schach” in this way quickly gained a legendary local
reputation.
Bauer described the creation of this game at an artist party in 1962:

Perhaps Georg [Janoska] made the first move to offer me a game

that was for me a game that was abstract and total, a game that,
under the guise of combat, had only one common goal: to emerge
at the end as a work of art of a game, as a game beyond games.14

When Bauer tried out his “Free Schach” with friends on some occasions,
it served as an analogy to avant-garde free jazz. A critic translated Bauer's
style as “Free Schach is played like jazz.” This served an aesthetic purpose
that severed itself from all traditional class variants of organized chess, from

12 Thomas Antonic: Wolfgang Bauer. Werk – Leben – Nachlass – Wirkung. Klagenfurt: Ritter,

114.
13 Pers. Communication Ernst Strouhal, June 2024.
14 Antonic: Wolfgang Bauer, 115.

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 Bernd-Peter Lange 67

the workers' chess and from traditional club chess forced into the Greater
German Chess Association, with which the Nazis had been yoking German
and, later, Austrian Chess. This playful, pre-political anarchism is evident
in the very first scene of the play Ghosts premiered in 1976.
The chaotic dialogue between Bauer´s two hippy-esque central
characters Fred and Robert (an unsuccessful writer and a sociologist)
initially thematizes the realms of gender relations, alcoholism and property
quarrels. It offers a parody of the structure of a conversation play in the
regional Graz dialect. Early in the play, a chess phrase breaks into their
dialogue and is immediately accepted as the beginning of a fake chess
game:

ROBERT: Check! (He puts a beer bottle further forward)

FRED: Okay, let's play a game... a `free Schach15

The following stage directions explain the special nature of this

alternative game:

They play a game of ‘free chess’. The physical rituals are the same
as in a conventional game of chess. Anything that is within reach
serves as a piece, and the whole table serves as the playing surface.
There are no rules, anything is possible. Fred stares at the table.
After thinking for a while, he carefully pushes an ashtray to the
left edge of the table.

This absence of rules is soon limited by a practical consensus about its

conventional limits:

FRED: (pours the contents of the ashtray into Robert`s beer

glass) Check!
ROBERT: (takes an empty glass, pours schnaps into it) This
is not a move! (Drinks)
FRED: Okay. (Drinks too) Doesn't count as a move either!

The chess game prefigures the game of personal interactions with a

fragile mosaic of the characters' gender identities. This creates a response to
Ibsen's family drama. The strict rules of the classic chess game are dissolved,

15 Text translated from: Wolfgang Bauer: Ghosts, manuskripte 13 (1973), 41, 55-70.

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as are the stable identities of the characters obsessed with property, sexual
identities and alcohol. The anarchy of the chess game deconstructs what the
text calls Ibsen's “bourgeois game”. It suitably ends with a checkmate.
The dramatic clamour of “Free Schach” in Wolfgang Bauer's parodistic
adaptation of Ibsen's Ghosts reflects a rigorous rejection of Ibsen's place in
the emergence of modern drama. At the beginning of literary modernism,
Ibsen's analytical technique focussing on human inner life, in Ghosts and in
other plays, answered classical tragedy's claim to truth.16 Bauer upends this
modern deconstruction of the tragic with his highly grotesque figure of
freedom in the field of strictly rule-bound chess. His experimental avant-
gardism and farcical unorthodoxy had its impact before the success of other
Graz Group writers such as Gerhard Roth and Peter Handke who soon
moved into literary mainstream modes. This was in a context that made
Bauer an “early burnt-out” case - despite the opinion of Elfriede Jelinek,
who described him as the “most important contemporary writer”.17 His
revolutionary theatre, however facile its aestheticist rejection of the culture
around it may have been, soon shed its scandalous momentum. Soon the
author lost much of his initial international impact, until he “was famous
world-wide only in Graz”, as one critic has it.18

Playing games now: Free Chess

Digitalisation at the present time allows an idea of freedom beyond any
avant-garde alternative movements. However, some scepticism towards the
advocates of the internet as a “realm of freedom”, and of social media as
democratization, is now becoming increasingly prevalent. In chess, the term
“freestyle chess” now often refers to the variant of chess constructed as
“Chess 960”. In this innovation the position of all chess pieces, except the
pawns, on both base lines of the chessboard, is fixed by drawing lots. In this
way, chance sets a limit to the predictability of the game, with otherwise
unchanged rules. This new variant of the game is given the term “Fischer
Random” (after its inventor, the former world chess champion Robert
Fischer). It comes close to the surrealist André Breton's claim that it is not

16 Peter Szondi: Theorie des modernen Dramas. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1964, 29.
17 Cited in Wolfgang Kralicek: „Grazer Aktionismus“, Süddeutsche Zeitung 30th Nov. 2018,
16.
18 Florian Neuner: „Trapp trapp, knarr knarr, quietsch knarr“, ND Die Woche 20th Jan.

2024, 9.

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 Bernd-Peter Lange 69

the chess pieces that need to be changed, but the game itself, which
Montaigne had already regarded as too serious.19
“Free Chess” is now also available on various internet websites free of
charge. Its suitability for social networks is what makes it so popular at
present. In the global advertising market they serve, the adaptability of chess
for financial calculation is a recurrent motif. The term “Free Chess”,
standardized internationally in the key language of English, radicalizes what
in Wolfgang Bauer’s postmodern conversation drama came across as the
hybrid “Free Schach”. In today's Berlin alternative leisure chess scene,
Bauer's familiar connection of “Chess and Jazz” is organized as a popular
event. Such impulses serve to save “something old-fashioned like chess”
from extinction, according to a local newspaper.20 The near-homophonous
combination of jazz and chess retains something of the popular cultural
impulse and nonconformist tendencies of Bauer's theatrical experiment.
The triumph of the lingua franca English in “Free Chess” accompanies a
historical reference in the cultural history of chess to the early periods of
industrialization. Since then, the beginnings of machine development of
artificial intelligence have often coincided with ideas about the rational
calculation of chess games. This was a collateral effect in Charles Babbage's
“Analytical Engine” and for Ada Lovelace, as later for Torres Quevedo,
Konrad Zuse and Alan Turing. Previously, such a connection had already
been cleverly simulated by Baron von Kempelen's famous chess automaton
in 1770 (A popular term in colloquial German for faking is, literally,
“building a Turk”). The ubiquitous implementation of the computer in the
era of neoliberal capitalism has enabled a great expansion in global leisure.
The worldwide spread of those actively or passively involved in the game of
chess is almost limitless and no longer tied to access to highly specialized
expert circles or hegemonic arbiters. Particularly after the Covid-19
pandemia, millions of fans have started following influencers in chess.
The universal access to the cognitive and combinational knowledge
required for the game of chess has led, among other things, to a surface
democratization of the game. What was once a hierarchically limited
competence is now available to everyone at great speed, on the level of
replaying tournament games and of live performance. The Viennese

19 André Breton: “Profanation“, quoted in English transl. in Larry List (ed.): The Imagery of
Chess Revisited. New York: George Braziller 2005, 75.
20 Carola Tunk: „Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten“, Berliner Zeitung 26th Feb., 2024, 12.

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cultural analyst Ernst Strouhal has lucidly described the change in chess-
community`s mindsets due to technological progress:

Through computer analyses of tournament games during live

broadcasts, grandmasters are now viewed like fish in an
aquarium. The question is no longer what the best move is and
what plans the grandmasters are pursuing, but whether they will
see the best move we already know. This appears on the screen in
a fraction of a second, and when we see it, it often seems logical,
even obvious to us.

This results in a deceptive liberation from personal limitations: “The

onlooker emancipates himself; the know-it-all turns into an expert with a
view of the screen, who now actually knows better with technical support.”21
The game of chess structurally facilitates liberation from the traditional
individual barriers to access. When the sociologist Steffen Mau, in his study
on the quantification of the social in the current phase of neoliberal
capitalism, shows how digitization is affecting different areas of fundamental
capitalization, many of the phenomena he describes can be found in today's
chess culture.22 The “practices of measuring, evaluating and comparing” he
sees as “quantifying forms of social ranking” are just as characteristic of
chess as the universalization of competitive behavior in tournaments and
duels. A new addition is the self-monitoring of the players, which is based
on evaluation figures on the ELO scale. In its practical impact on the game,
this corresponds to the “singularity for all” described by Andreas Reckwitz
as a defining feature. It tends to promote a renewed “regime of inequalities”,
replacing older forms of hierarchy in chess through tournament success and
gender-related, graded championship titles.
One of the consequences of the digital globalization of chess is a loss of
a charismatic aura for the top players. The former world chess champion
Magnus Carlsen, who voluntarily retired from that title despite continuing
to dominate the classic game, now prefers more entertaining forms of play
with tighter time limits. None of his predecessors could ever have risked this
without sinking into public nemesis. The victory of the chess computer Deep

21 Ernst Strouhal: „Der digitale Karneval. Schach in der postindustriellen Gesellschaft“,

KARL 2 /2022), 33.
22 Steffen Mau: Das metrische Wir. Über die Quantifizierung des Sozialen. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2017,

14-18.

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 Bernd-Peter Lange 71

Blue over world champion Kasparov in 1997 contributed to this loss of

charisma. The prevalence of quantification leads to a new, all-encompassing
hierarchy in which individual performance is measured against the
computer scale set as a benchmark.
In the marketable quantification as a characteristic of the culture of
neoliberal capitalism, the concept of freedom is split within itself. Slavoj
Žižek has formulated its critical side in a radically totalizing way by ignoring
the individuals in the game culture. In his view, the contradiction between
freedom and its opposite is paradoxically eliminated.

In capitalist slavery we simply feel free, while in true liberation we

voluntarily accept slavery as a service to a cause and not just to
ourselves. In today's cynical functioning of capitalism, I know very
well what I am doing and will continue to do, the liberating aspect
of my knowledge is suspended… In capitalism I am precisely
enslaved when I “feel free”. This feeling equals exactly the form
of my slavery.23

But it is this ambivalence in the meaning of freedom that energizes the

growing number of academically educated people in the expanding service
industries.
The political-economic form of Žižek`s criticism of global networks,
however realistic it may be, because of its totalizing perspective is not
immediately on a par with the social practice of playing chess. It draws on
the Marxist tradition of separating everything that claims an autonomous
identity from a “central contradiction”. However, a nostalgic reference back
to the non-commercial roots of digital development is a precarious antidote
to the hegemonic sway of corporate business over it.24 Žižek`s position has
an equivalent in Janis Joplin's pop-cultural line: “Freedom is another word
for nothing left to lose.”
In the field of chess, such pessimism is contrasted by individual self-
empowerment through the globalized game. The game`s intellectual and
aesthetic attractions increase with its general accessibility for millions of
players. They become visible, for example, in the current boom in chess

23 Slavoj Žižek: Wie ein Dieb bei Tageslicht. Macht im Zeitalter des posthumanen Kapitalismus.
Frankfurt/Main: Fischer 2019, 265.
24 Cf. Sahra Wagenknecht: Die Selbstgerechten. Mein Gegenprogramm für Gemeinsinn und

Zusammenhalt. Frankfurt/New York 2022, 391.

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72 CHESS AND FREEDOM

following the success of the streaming series Queen's Gambit. They refute, in
both private and public spaces, the assumption that the traditional board
game has turned into an anachronism, which has briefly resurfaced
following the inevitable defeat of super-grandmasters of chess by digital
programs.

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