Robert Hübner, aged 76, died of stomach cancer on January 5 in a hospital in Cologne, the German city where he had been born. He had been ill for a long time. The death announcement from friends in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung had a motto from Franz Kafka: “Man sieht die Sonne langsam untergehen und erschrickt doch, wenn es plötzlich dunkel ist.” (One sees the sun setting slowly but still is startled when it is suddenly dark.)
People who wanted to express their sympathy were asked, in the spirit of the deceased, to give a donation to a society of friends of classical culture and literature in Cologne. No wreath or flowers at the place of the urn; Robert was a rationalist.
I met him for the first time at the U-20 European tournament in the Dutch city Groningen in 1964/1965, which did not have the status of an official European youth championship yet but is seen as a precursor of these.
I was 20 years old, Robert was 16. In the end we shared first place. Our game had been a dull 15-move draw. Why we were so peaceful, I cannot remember. From there, Robert’s chess career blossomed and when I compare my career to his, I think of the famous saying of Orson Welles: “I started at the top and worked my way down.” I may exaggerate and anyway, like Orson I had a lot of fun.
In his best years Robert was one of the strongest players in the world, but in interviews he tended to emphasize that he was not passionately devoted to chess, but that life as a professional chessplayer had come to him more or less without his conscious partaking.
In 1997 he told the magazine New in Chess: “When I played chess, I longed for my philological work and vice versa. This is a perfect way to remain dissatisfied.”
He had received his doctorate as a papyrologist from the University of Cologne in 1976 and remained there as a researcher for a number of years. I do not know how his employment ended, but I suspect it had something to do with an inability to work somewhere where someone else could tell him what to do.
He was a genius at languages. Latin and Greek of course, but also Finnish and Hungarian, the most difficult European languages.
I noticed that he spoke fluent Dutch at a young age, with the almost over-civilized intonation that hardly existed among Dutch people anymore, but that I later noticed among older Indonesians who still knew Dutch as a remnant of colonial times.
In New in Chess I read that he had become a fan of the stories by the great Dutch comic strip artist Marten Toonder about the bear Olivier B. Bommel.
Later he made a German translation of Homer’s Iliad, because he was critical of the available translations, and he self-published a booklet with his translation of the stories of a Finnish satirist who used the pseudonym Olli. It may have been a coincidence that Robert’s favorite bear Bommel was affectionately known as Sir Ollie.
In 1994, after the death of the German art dealer and chess patron Heinrich Jellissen, Hübner found that he was one of the many victims of Jellissen’s financial adventures. The top of the German chess world, players, officials and journalists, had invested many millions of German marks with Jellissen, who was considered an epitome of financial solidity. All these millions were gone, because after Jellissen’s death it became clear that his debts far exceeded his possessions.
This crash may have something to do with the fact that Hübner took up a freelance job as a translator of technical manuals.
Wasn’t that a bit beneath him after Homer? I think it was right up his alley, because the assignment was concrete and clear. If the translation was not right, the machine would not work. It would have been a suitable job for the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, who always yearned for the simple life, even considering a menial job in a Soviet village.
How many languages did Hübner speak? Twenty-two, it has been written, but more sober estimates put it at about twelve. If you were to ask him, he would probably shrug his shoulders or perhaps say that no one could speak an acquired language well.
After Hübner’s death, a chessplayer from the Dutch province Drenthe, who had made a study of the dialects of that province, wrote that he had met Hübner somewhere by chance and had found that Hübner knew a lot about the Drenthe dialects and had interesting insights into them.
Although Hübner sometimes wanted to question it, he was of course a chessplayer first and foremost. His highest position on the world ranking list was in July 1981, when he was third behind Anatoly Karpov and Victor Kortchnoi. Number four was Jan Timman, tied with Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov.
Hübner played in four series of candidates matches and in three of these something strange happened near the end. In 1971 he played against Tigran Petrosian in Seville. After seven games Hübner walked out because there was a lot of street noise and Petrosian had the advantage because he could switch off his hearing aid.
In 1981 Hübner after 10 of the planned 16 games, aborted his match in Merano against Viktor Kortchnoi, because he had found that his own press representative had spread unpleasant gossip about Kortchnoi. There had already been enough dirt spread about Kortchnoi by the Soviet Union and Robert did not want to be part of that. It had been the finals of the candidates and so Kortchnoi went on to play Anatoli Karpov for the world championship.
In 1983 Hübner played against Vasily Smyslov in Velden, Austria. At 7-7, there had to be a drawing of lots, and because the games had been played in the local casino, this was done with a roulette wheel.
Red or black? The tension was great. The ball landed on zero, which is neither red nor black, but green.
This might have been interpreted as a sign from above, indicating that turning a roulette wheel was an unseemly way to decide a candidates match, but this sign was unheeded. The croupier threw his ball again and Smyslov came out as the winner, which must have been entirely in keeping with Hübner’s pessimistic worldview.
In 1991, he played a candidates match against Jan Timman in Sarajevo in which nothing out of the ordinary happened. Timman won comfortably with 4½-2½. After the last game, he held a small party for a few Dutch journalists.
The wine he provided flowed freely. Timman told us that in the days before the match, he had almost been assaulted by Dutch skating fans who, after the European skating championships in Sarajevo, had torn down the chandeliers in the hotel lobby and filled the bath in their rooms with the contents of their minibars, a devilish mix. Jan had been recognized by one of the hooligans and had just managed to get to safety in his hotel room.
He had won the match and the skating fans had returned to the Netherlands. The mood rose in our press group. Hübner also joined in and apologized profusely for his weak opposition. Timman apologized in turn for having played, as White, so shamelessly for a draw in the last game.
Then grandmaster Bojan Kurajica invited Timman for an interview for Bosnian television. He said: “Just the normal things, Jan. Sarajevo beautiful city, blah, blah, blah, you know.” In this way he played the archetype of the kind of journalist that Hübner had often described with a shudder. Jan smiled and said that Bojan could count on him.
All’s well that ends well, but not quite. The Bosnian war would only start in 1992, but in retrospect I dare say that it was already in the air. It had been very quiet in Sarajevo while we were there.
Click here to view Tal- Hübner, 1973 Leningrad Interzonal.