Tweet
Wolfgang Heidenfeld
August 9, 2021
Readers of chess magazines of the 60s and 70s of the past century will be familiar with the name Wolfgang Heidenfeld. He was enjoyable to read!
He is in the news by way of the fact that his son Mark won the Irish Championship.
Coláiste Éanna, in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, was the venue for the 100th Irish chess championship, which was won by Mark Heidenfeld (53), an IT consultant based in Germany.
Therein hangs an extraordinary story. His father, Wolfgang Heidenfeld, was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany for South Africa in the 1930s.
By a circuitous route he came to Ireland in 1957, became fascinated, and finally moved his family here in 1961. Mr Heidenfeld senior won the Irish championship six times.
Mark was born in Ireland, but moved to Germany as a child. He remains affiliated to Ireland in chess and qualifies to play in the Irish championship.
He last won the Irish championship in 2000, and last participated in 2001. The pandemic gave him time and space at home in Ulm, southern Germany, to practice.
His father died in 1981, when Mark was 13, but he bequeathed him a chess library of 1,000 books.
“I was quite fortunate in a number of games. I didn’t quite believe it until it happened,” he said of his win.
“It’s been a long time since I won a big tournament. I’m really happy that it went this way.”
Ireland has one grandmaster, Alexander Baburin, who learned chess in the old Soviet Union, the powerhouse of the game worldwide. The ICU wants to have five Irish grandmasters and 5,000 players on a regular basis.
The portents are good. Mr Heidenfeld succeeds Tom O’Gorman, who was just 18 when he won the championship last year.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/irel...itle-1.4642325
Wolfgang’s Wikipedia entry:
Wolfgang Heidenfeld 29 May 1911 – 3 August 1981) was a German chess player.
Heidenfeld was born in Berlin. He was forced to move from Germany to South Africa in the 1930s because he was a Jew. There, he won the South African Chess Championship eight times, and he represented South Africa in the Chess Olympiad in 1958. Besides chess-playing he was also a writer, door to door salesman, journalist, and designer of crossword puzzles. His hobbies were poker, bridge and collecting stamps as well as playing chess. During World War II he helped decode German messages for the Allies.
In 1955 he beat former world champion Max Euwe. He also won games against Miguel Najdorf, Joaquim Durao and Ludek Pachman. He never became an International Master—he did eventually attain the required qualifications but declined to accept the award from FIDE.
He wrote several chess books including Chess Springbok (1955), My Book of Fun and Games (1958), Grosse Remispartien (1968; in German; an English edition entitled Draw!, edited by John Nunn, was published in 1982), and Lacking the Master Touch (1970).
In 1957, after visiting Ireland, he moved to Dublin. In 1979 the family moved back to Ulm where he died two years later.
August 9, 2021
Readers of chess magazines of the 60s and 70s of the past century will be familiar with the name Wolfgang Heidenfeld. He was enjoyable to read!
He is in the news by way of the fact that his son Mark won the Irish Championship.
Coláiste Éanna, in Rathfarnham, Co Dublin, was the venue for the 100th Irish chess championship, which was won by Mark Heidenfeld (53), an IT consultant based in Germany.
Therein hangs an extraordinary story. His father, Wolfgang Heidenfeld, was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany for South Africa in the 1930s.
By a circuitous route he came to Ireland in 1957, became fascinated, and finally moved his family here in 1961. Mr Heidenfeld senior won the Irish championship six times.
Mark was born in Ireland, but moved to Germany as a child. He remains affiliated to Ireland in chess and qualifies to play in the Irish championship.
He last won the Irish championship in 2000, and last participated in 2001. The pandemic gave him time and space at home in Ulm, southern Germany, to practice.
His father died in 1981, when Mark was 13, but he bequeathed him a chess library of 1,000 books.
“I was quite fortunate in a number of games. I didn’t quite believe it until it happened,” he said of his win.
“It’s been a long time since I won a big tournament. I’m really happy that it went this way.”
Ireland has one grandmaster, Alexander Baburin, who learned chess in the old Soviet Union, the powerhouse of the game worldwide. The ICU wants to have five Irish grandmasters and 5,000 players on a regular basis.
The portents are good. Mr Heidenfeld succeeds Tom O’Gorman, who was just 18 when he won the championship last year.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/irel...itle-1.4642325
Wolfgang’s Wikipedia entry:
Wolfgang Heidenfeld 29 May 1911 – 3 August 1981) was a German chess player.
Heidenfeld was born in Berlin. He was forced to move from Germany to South Africa in the 1930s because he was a Jew. There, he won the South African Chess Championship eight times, and he represented South Africa in the Chess Olympiad in 1958. Besides chess-playing he was also a writer, door to door salesman, journalist, and designer of crossword puzzles. His hobbies were poker, bridge and collecting stamps as well as playing chess. During World War II he helped decode German messages for the Allies.
In 1955 he beat former world champion Max Euwe. He also won games against Miguel Najdorf, Joaquim Durao and Ludek Pachman. He never became an International Master—he did eventually attain the required qualifications but declined to accept the award from FIDE.
He wrote several chess books including Chess Springbok (1955), My Book of Fun and Games (1958), Grosse Remispartien (1968; in German; an English edition entitled Draw!, edited by John Nunn, was published in 1982), and Lacking the Master Touch (1970).
In 1957, after visiting Ireland, he moved to Dublin. In 1979 the family moved back to Ulm where he died two years later.