About the work
“Schachnovelle” (The Royal Game, also published as “Chess Story”) is the last and best-known work of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, written in 1941/42 in Brazilian exile. Shortly before his death in February 1942 Zweig sent the typescript to his translator Alfredo Cahn; the first German edition appeared in Buenos Aires on 7 December 1942 in only 300 copies, followed in Europe in 1943 by an edition from the Stockholm exile publisher Bermann-Fischer. The material has been adapted for the stage many times, for example by Helmut Peschina (2014), and set as an opera by Violeta Dinescu (1994) and Cristóbal Halffter (2013).
Plot
On a passenger steamer from New York to Buenos Aires, the first-person narrator, an Austrian émigré, learns that the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic is on board, a withdrawn, barely educated son of a South Slav Danube boatman with an extraordinary gift for the game. When a group of passengers led by the ambitious McConnor plays against him, a stranger intervenes and saves the game with a draw: Dr. B., a manager of aristocratic and church assets whom the Gestapo held for months in solitary confinement at Vienna's Hotel Metropole after the 1938 Anschluss. There a stolen book of master games kept his mind alive, until playing against himself drove him into “chess poisoning” and a breakdown. Against Czentovic he wins the first game; in the second, the champion's deliberately slow play wears him down until, at a word from the narrator, he resigns and renounces chess.
Cultural significance
The novella belongs to the canon of world literature, is widely read in schools and was the subject of 58 translation contracts by 2012; Marcel Reich-Ranicki included it in his canon of German literature in 2003. Scholars read it as a confrontation with Nazi barbarism and as an early literary depiction of trauma. It was filmed in 1960 by Gerd Oswald with Curd Jürgens and Mario Adorf, and in 2021 by Philipp Stölzl.