Kurt Timpe

Kurt Timpe (09.10.1896 - 23.02.1963) 

Kurt Timpe (09 October 1896 - 23 February 1963), who was born in Berlin 125 years ago and was stranded in Göttingen at the end of the Second World War with serious health problems that made it impossible for him to pursue a regular career, found access to problem chess there. This gave him stability and fulfilment in the rest of his life. Initially he devoted himself to the preliminary examination of the three-move and moremover chess problems submitted for the Schwalbe (Germain magazine for chess problems). Since the reorientation of Schwalbe in 1959 (after a year without publication), Timpe took on extensive tasks. In addition, he now also took care of the solutions and maintained extensive correspondence with chess problem solvers and chess composers. His many activities included maintaining the list of members and mailing the journal as well as compiling the tables of contents for the volumes published after the war. Timpe hardly ever published his own chess works; only two of his chess problems are known.