War fever

It is a little known fact that Emanuel Lasker, the German world chess champion, who reigned from 1894 to 1921, was keen for Germany to enter the first world war. This seems at odds with his internationalism (he spent a long time in Britain, and represented England, rather than Germany, in the great Hastings tournament of 1895).
 
Lasker’s immediate response to the outbreak of hostilities was to pen a series of distinctly pro-war articles in the autumn of 1914. In one article, which appeared on 13 September, he stated that ‘the goal of occupation and administration of France by Germans is as sure as mate by rook and king against king’. This is very much a beginners’ checkmate since it is so simple — thus more insulting to the French than to England. Henry Butler (until this point Lasker’s friend and a leading official of the Brighton Chess Club, which had organised his King’s Gambit match against Chigorin in 1903) was so enraged by the articles that he smashed a large portrait of Lasker by jumping through it with both feet.
 
It seems strange that a man such as Lasker, who had devoted his life to the peaceful conflict of playing chess around the world, should have become so warlike. But Lasker’s bellicose stance seems to have prevailed among German intellectuals and the educated elite of the day. The so-called ‘Aufruf an die Kulturwelt’ of 4 October 1914, was a further pro-war tract, signed by 93 German intellectuals, scientists and artists, including a number of Nobel prize winners, such as Max Planck. Thomas Mann in his ‘Gedanken im Kriege’, published 60 days after the declaration of war, in the Neue Rundschau, praised the ‘cleansing of the soul’ and ‘moral regeneration’ which the conflict would cathartically effect.
 
Here is the conclusion of an important game from Lasker’s big win at the St Petersburg tournament of 1914.