Herbert Grasemann

 Herbert Grasemann (* 21 December 1917 in Graudenz; † 21 June 1983 in Berlin) was a German chess composer and chess writer. He occasionally published works under the pseudonym Arne Mangs, which is an anagram of his surname.

Life
Grasemann's father came from Berlin. He had been a professional soldier, but had long since retired from active service. During the First World War, he was reactivated as an instructor in Graudenz. His wife followed him there in 1917, as the food supply in Berlin was very poor at the time, but returned to Berlin in the summer of 1918 after Herbert Grasemann's birth.

Herbert Grasemann first attended a public school, then the Askanisches Gymnasium, where he graduated in 1936. He then began training as an industrial clerk, which he completed in 1939.

Wide-ranging interests
Football and music initially played a decisive role in his leisure time. The young Herbert Grasemann had been playing football for the BFC Germania 1888 club since 1927 and was a member of the Berlin city junior team four times. He played this sport until 1953 despite his serious war injury. Grasemann also took piano lessons for a total of ten years.

In 1933 Grasemann composed his first chess problem, inspired by the chess problem appendix of Jacques Mieses' Reclam volume Schach. He sent the three-mover to Josef Benzinger, who provided material for the problem sections of various newspapers and magazines, in the hope of publication. In 1935, the piece was actually published (free of charge) in the chess section of the anti-Semitic satirical magazine Die Brennessel. As Grasemann later recalled in an autobiographical series in the Deutsche Schachblätter, he was less than enthusiastic: no fee and a publication venue that was dubious in several respects, not only because of the paper itself, but also because of the low quality of the chess column in his eyes. As a result, he initially turned away from problem chess and towards music.

During the war
In autumn 1939, Grasemann was immediately drafted into the Wehrmacht. In July 1941, he was an armoured driver on the Eastern Front and suffered a serious war injury near Minsk: he lost his left arm. Grasemann managed to get out of the tank and wandered around for four weeks with a festering arm stump. He spent the following year and a half in various military hospitals until he was discharged as a war invalid. Whilst still in hospital, Grasemann began to compose three- and four-move chess pieces again.

After his return to Berlin, Grasemann married Luise Schmidt from Bernau in 1943 and began studying law at Humboldt University. In 1944, the marriage produced a son. Grasemann now sent some of his new chess compositions to Josef Halumbirek, the supervisor of the chess problem section in the Deutsche Schachzeitung, to which he had subscribed since January 1939. Halumbirek replied in a long letter; he attested to Grasemann's talent, but did not yet consider the compositions ready for publication and recommended that he first study the history and theory of chess composition.

Life from chess
In the magazine Horizont, an American-licensed semi-monthly for the "young generation", edited by Günther Birkenfeld and with contributions from Elisabeth Langgässer and Wolfdietrich Schnurre, among others, Grasemann wrote about his chess compositions.

Kurt Richter announced the first major composition tournament of the post-war period in the magazine Horizont, an American licensed semi-monthly newspaper for the “young generation”, directed by Günther Birkenfeld and with contributions from, among others, Elisabeth Langgässer and Wolfdietrich Schnurre. The prize report appeared in April 1947, and the entries by Grasemann, who had been completely unknown until then, were surprisingly successful: he won first prize and an honorable mention for another composition.

In response to this success, Berthold Koch, the managing editor of the specialist magazine Schach-Express (which was later renamed Schach and still exists today) published fortnightly by the East Berliner Express-Verlag, offered Grasemann a job at this publishing house, which would mainly involve supervision the problem category included. Grasemann also managed to get a paid job as a chess trainer at the East Berlin chess club Rotation Berlin, in whose first team he played game chess: He held weekly training evenings, each supplemented by a half-hour lesson on problem chess. These two activities allowed him to give up his unloved law studies in 1948 and devote himself entirely to problem chess - albeit with considerable financial restrictions, as there was hardly enough money for a family of three.

Grasemann now lived with his wife and child in a small apartment in the West Berlin district of Wedding, published chess compositions and earned his living from working for the sports publisher and from chess training in East Berlin. This was soon followed by other tasks, some voluntary and some paid: in 1950, Grasemann also took over the problem section of the West Berlin Deutsche Schachzeitung from his mentor Halumbirek. He began giving lectures on the subject of problem chess in the House of German-Soviet Friendship in East Berlin, organized two problem chess competitions between Baden and Berlin in 1953 and 1954, completed lecture tours through the GDR and finally led a major event for the 1960 Chess Olympiad in Leipzig. He also took part in the founding of the Commission for Problems and Studies in the German Chess Association of the GDR (of which he was not allowed to be a member because of his residence in West Berlin), represented the GDR several times at congresses of the international FIDE Commission for Chess Composition and presented two collections of chess problems that were published as books by Sportverlag in 1955 and 1959.

After the wall was built
After the Wall was built in 1961, Grasemann was unable to continue the financially precarious existence that Grasemann had created for himself in his niche. Since he didn't want to move to East Berlin, his professional relationships with the problem chess of the GDR were severed from one day to the next. He had to hand over the problem section of chess, and in 1962 he also stopped working for the Deutsche Schachzeitung and instead took over the problem section of the German Chess Papers in 1962, which he headed until his death in 1983. Above all, he now had no choice but to look for a career outside of chess composition for the first time at the age of 44. After some back and forth, in 1963 he managed to find a job in the administration of a West Berlin housing association. In 1973 he finally became a managing board member of the Mayor Reuter Foundation, which provides cheap housing for trainees, students and other people who are not financially strong.

The chess writer
Already during this time and especially in his retirement since 1979, Grasemann published more books on chess composition for a broader audience. The introduction to chess without a partner, published in 1977 as a Humboldt paperback, was particularly successful and reached a circulation of 43,000 by 1982 - a distribution that had never been achieved before for the genre of chess composition. The sequel, Chess without a Partner for Experts, went into print with an initial print run of 13,000, as did The Art of Checkmate. In addition, he continued to look after the problem section of the German Chess Papers and also wrote texts and solution discussions on chess composition to the teletext editorial team on the Freies Berlin channel.

After two operations in the spring of 1983, Grasemann suffered a heart attack with pulmonary edema, from which he ultimately died.

Chess composition
Grasemann viewed Walther Freiherr von Holzhausen as his teacher in theoretical questions. In his apartment in Wedding he often met with other chess composers, such as Hans Vetter, Willy Roscher and Stefan Schneider, who, inspired by these conversations, published his essay Purpose Economy in 1948. Later he continued to meet many chess composers, including the future grandmaster Hans-Peter Rehm and the PCCC founder Nenad Petrović.

Grasemann composed numerous tasks, mostly moremovers, but also some in the area of fairytale chess. He further developed the New German multi-movement problem. Many of his works have won awards and several have been included in the FIDE albums. In the FIDE albums he achieved 21.83 points.

Chess writer
After the Second World War, Grasemann worked full-time as a chess writer. From 1947 to 1961 he set up the Problems and Studies section of the magazine Schach-Expreß, then headed the composition corner of the Deutsche Schachzeitung for a year and from 1962 until the end of his life that of the German Chess Papers. After Grasemann's death, Friedrich Chlubna took over this work.

In addition, he wrote important books on chess composition:

Problem chess, Berlin 1955
Problem Chess Volume II, Berlin 1959
Problem Jewels, Berlin 1964
Chess without a partner for beginners, Munich 1977
A reverend's idea that made history, self-published, Berlin 1981
Chess without a partner for experts, Munich 1982
The art of checkmating, under the pseudonym “Arne Mangs”, Munich 1983
Grasemann also wrote a textbook:

Fun with chess for young people, Humboldt-Verlag (No. 479) 1985
An autobiographical series of articles came to an abrupt end with Grasemann's death:

The whole of life is a problem, under the pseudonym "Arne Mangs", in: Deutsche Schachblatt, 5/1983, pp. 131-132, 6/1983, pp. 158-160, and 8/1983, pp. 217-218 .

Personal
Grasemann was married to Luise Grasemann († 1991 in Berlin at the age of 78) for 40 years until his death.

Individual evidence
  Anders Thulin: CHESS PSEUDONYMS AND SIGNATURES. An Electronic Edition, Malmö, preliminary 2008-06-22 (Memento from January 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive) (PDF; 307 kB)
  See Ursula Heukenkamp: Under the emergency roof. Post-war literature in Berlin

Source: de.wikipedia.org