On April 28, two weeks after his 76th birthday, my longtime friend Alexander Münninghoff died. Last year he had been diagnosed with cancer.
He was a gifted and witty man of many talents and the general Dutch public knew him not only as a writer, but also as a radio columnist and as a TV-presenter of educational courses on various subjects. As a journalist for the daily paper Haagsche Courant he travelled the world and reported on many wars.
He had studied Russian literature in Leiden, became a correspondent in Moscow in the time of the Soviet Union, and later after the break-up of the USSR, in the new Russia he founded a cultural center, the “Dutch Institute in St Petersburg.”
Unlike some other Moscow correspondents, in Soviet times he did not look at all lean and emaciated when he was on leave in the Netherlands. “My pantries are well stocked,” he said with a contented smile. How did he do it? Trading and bartering undoubtedly. Much later, when he had published his splendid family chronicle De stamhouder, I would learn that the trait of being a successful businessman ran in the family, though it had skipped Alexander’s father.
All his life he was an enthusiastic chess player who could enjoy all forms of chess – blitz, classical chess and even correspondence chess – to the fullest. He wrote many articles on Soviet chess, interviews with Russian top players and some beautiful chess books. Two of these, his biography of Max Euwe and the book about Hein Donner, which he modestly called “a biographical sketch,” were also published in English and received as pearls of international chess literature.
Alexander was a great afficionado of the Hoogovens Tournament (later known as Corus and Tata), where he participated every year, at least when he was not abroad. With Lex Jongsma he wrote the book 60 Jaar Hoogovens Schaaktoernooi 1938-1998, in which he lyrically described the end of the 1998 tournament: “Hundreds of us went out into the chilly night. The black hole of the beach was our goal and there we stood, the chess tribe. Crackle, bang, fire and glow: ‘See you in 1999’ it shone towards us.”,
The firework at the beach of Wijk aan Zee was to celebrate the jubilee of the 60th edition of the annual tournament, which had only been cancelled in 1945, and to announce in a spectacular way that it would be continued, something which had not been at all certain. Alexander wrote: “We were flooded by a warm wave inside. For The Tournament goes on. A termination would be unimaginable, it’s as simple as that.”
His masterpiece as a writer was not about chess, but his book De stamhouder, which appeared in 2014 after he had labored over it for more than 15 years. It became a great success in the Netherlands and was subsequently translated into many languages. In English, it appeared as Son and Heir. A serial for Dutch TV based on the book is in the making. The success was well-deserved, and according to Alexander, it came at the right time, “As the bottom of the treasury had become visible.” He liked to live in grand style, even till his last days, which were brightened by good company, oysters and champagne.
Alexander often used a flowery writing style, but not in this book. He didn’t need it, as the content is sensational enough in itself. His grandfather was a Dutchman who, after World War I, made an immense industrial fortune in Latvia and lost it at the outbreak of World War II. His wife, Alexander’s grandmother, was an energetic Russian countess of Baltic-German extraction, loving fun and parties. Back in the Netherlands under German occupation, the grandfather recovered as a businessman, was allowed to make business trips to neutral Sweden and used these to give information to the Allied forces.
Alexander’s father chose a different path. He became a member of the German Waffen SS with the aim of fighting the Russians and recovering the family fortune. Alexander himself was born in 1944 in the German city Posen, which is now the Polish city Poznan. The city was still in German hands, but heavily bombarded by the Allies.
Alexander’s mother was German, his father you might call a mixture of Dutch, Russian, Latvian and a bit of German. Anyway, his father was contemptuous of everything Dutch.
In the Netherlands after the war, Alexander lived in his grandparents’ villa near The Hague together with his mother, who was spurned by her in-laws and also by her husband, who had joined the family shortly after the war.
After a few years, she fled with little Alexander to Germany, but a few months later the grandfather, who was used to having his way, sent out a small expedition to Germany to have young Alexander kidnapped and brought back to the Netherlands. Alexander would see his mother again only 18 years later, when he visited her in Germany, where he found her living in sad poverty.
What a life. It seems a miracle that someone with such a heavy burden from the past could become the dashing, cordial and cheerful man he was. “How could you have become so normal?” a fellow writer who carried his own ancestral burden once asked. “A good wife,” said Alexander.
After his death, there were many obituaries, most of them collected on the website schaaksite.nl. They all say basically the same: Alexander spread light, and wherever he was, there was enthusiasm, humor and joy.
The game viewer shows a game of the kind that Alexander enjoyed. Crackle, bang, fire and glow. And quite a few blunders, but who cares?
Click here to view the game viewer.