A Century of Chess: Copenhagen 1923
Aron Nimzowitsch had been an emerging star before the war, finishing shared second at San Sebastián 1912 and qualifying for the elite St Petersburg tournament of 1914 where he failed, however, to make the final round. The war displaced him and after — as Hans Kmoch puts it — "some years of wandering," he settled in Denmark. The Danish master Jens Enevoldsen describes him as being "completely crazy at this time" and suffering from persecution mania, but Skjoldager and Nielsen, Nimzowitsch's leading biographers, dispute this and dig up an interview from 1923 presenting him as a hard-working refugee, learning Danish, organizing chess tours, and attempting to find his way back into journalism. He was largely absent from high-end chess in the early part of the 1920s, finishing third from last at Gothenburg 1920 and losing a match to Bogoljubow. But the evidence suggests that he was studying the game very deeply from the inside, and it's nice to think about Nimzowitsch's competitive withdrawal in the early 1920s as mirroring Fischer's absence in the period 1962-1970, with the sense that from solitude (and battling internal demons) a great player was finding as-yet-undiscovered layers to the game.
Nimzowitsch unveiled the results of his labors at a tournament in Copenhagen 1923. From a sporting point of view there’s nothing very special about this tournament — a standard model in which a few invited international masters, in this case Tartakower, Spielmann, Sämisch, sparred with the Danish locals Møller and Jacobsen, but from a theoretical point of view it’s a watershed in chess history, comparable to Steinitz's "scientific" play at Vienna 1873, the introduction of hypermodern ideas at San Sebastián 1911, the advent of the Hedgehog at Milan 1975 — one of very few events that signaled a completely different way of playing.
Copenhagen was the advent of true hypermodernism, as opposed to Nimzowitsch’s dress rehearsal of the early 1910s, an understanding of chess in which dynamic principles predominate and the potential energy of the pieces is carefully husbanded in order to release their kinetic power at the exact right moment. Nimzowitsch won the tournament easily, by two points, an impressive result given how long he had been absent from competitive chess, and he produced several masterpieces, notably the 'immortal zugzwang game' against Sämisch but also his games against Tartakower and Jacobsen, all of which would be published in My System and Chess Praxis with Nimzowitsch's usual jingoistic treatment and as demonstrations of the superiority of his approach.
As Edward Winter puts it, it’s tempting to imagine the games of Copenhagen being "instantly flashed around the planet as a specimen of hypermodern technique" although that’s not actually what happened. They were largely omitted from contemporary chess journals, and then, later in the decade, Nimzowitsch went on what Winter calls "a propaganda blitz" and made the Sämisch game — which Nimzowitsch declared was known "far and wide as the 'Immortal Zugzwang Game'" — the centerpiece of the new style.
The tournament takes its place in chess history exclusively for Nimzowitsch’s genre-bending contributions, but from a more mundane, sporting point of view, it also was a significant step forward for the German talent Friedrich Sämisch. Sämisch acquired a hard-earned reputation as a preeminent theoretician, finding strategic possibilities in unprepossessing-looking positions.
Sources: The Skjoldager/Nielsen book, only partially available online, is the best source on Nimzowitsch's refugee years. Hans Kmoch and Edward Winter write on Nimzowitsch at this time. Nimzowitsch writes on these games in My System and Chess Praxis. His analysis, actually, is to be taken with a grain of salt, but they are well worth their weight in entertainment value.
