Hermann Weißauer

Hermann Weißauer (* 4 October 1920 in Freising; † 2 August 2014 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein) was a German chess composer and publicist. The Weißauer-Bahnung is named after him.

His life
Weißauer was the son of a primary school teacher, graduated from the humanistic Dom-Gymnasium Freising in 1939 and began to study chemistry in Munich. However, he was called up in 1941 and was taken prisoner of war in Norway at the end of the Second World War. He resumed his chemistry studies in 1946 and received his doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1952. From 1953, he worked in colour research at BASF. Weißauer secured a whole series of patents for BASF, including an American patent for water-soluble anthraquinone dyes and their production together with a colleague.

Throughout his life, Weißauer was an enthusiastic chess player. He had been a member of the Ludwigshafen 1912 chess club since 1953 and took part in the final round of the German team championship with this club in 1956 and 1958. In 1990, on his 70th birthday, he received the Plate of Honour of the Palatinate Chess Federation. He was particularly interested in chess composition. He composed around 500 chess problems, mainly new German three-move problems. In 1978 he founded the German Problem Solving Championships, a tournament in solving chess problems, which he chaired for a long time. From 1979, Weißauer edited the problem section of the chess magazine Rochade Europa for many years. He has been an International Arbiter of Chess Composition since 1987 and was made an Honorary Master of Chess Composition by the World Federation of Chess Composition (WFCC) in 2012. 

In May 2002, the German Chess Federation expressed its gratitude and appreciation to him in the form of a certificate of honour. His services were also recognised with honorary membership of the Schwalbe and in 2010 with the plate of honour of the German Chess Federation "in recognition of his achievements and his commitment to problem chess". A popular line combination motif bears his name: the Weißauer-Bahnung; other topics Weißauer dealt with were the battery exchange and the "four-knight mate" in miniature.

The Weißauer move
This is a black-white orbit: a black long pacer removes an obstructing white mass and then orbits anticritically (in the sense of Hans Klüver: antimetacritically) for a white long pacer on the line that has become free.

A further development of this railway motif was the Weißauer-Pachl railway, first shown in 2006, which dispenses with the white blocking stone (i.e. the white mass to be removed).

Writings
A new synthesis of β-3-oxindolyl-alanine. Diss. Munich, 1952.
Richard Schattner and his chess problems. Published by Wolfgang Bruder, Dossenheim 1998.
P. A. Orlimont and his chess problems. The life, work and impact of P. A. O. Nightrider Unlimited, 2009 (2nd edition; 1st edition 1991). ISBN 978-3-9806906-0-7
With Franz Pachl: The country needs new ideas. In: Die Schwalbe, April 2009, issue 136, pp. 67-70.
With Franz Pachl: Jubiläumsturnier 100 Jahre Schachklub Ludwigshafen 1912 für orthodoxe Dreizüger: Preisbericht, Degener Verlag, Potsdam 2013.
Literature
Franz Pachl: Do you also like to puzzle? 376 selected chess puzzles by Dr Hermann Weißauer. Udo Degener Verlag, 2009. ISBN 978-3-940531-08-7

Source: wikipedia.de