PREFACE OF THE AUTHOR
When the first volume "Problemschach" appeared, covering a period, the author was already considering a plan to continue the survey of contemporary problem composition. That this intention has been realized with the now available second volume is due to the pleasing success of its predecessor, the unanimous applause of the professional world and, above all, the favorable reception by the reader. The selection from the years does not claim to be representative. However, the author may hope that, despite all necessary subjective judgment, it nevertheless reflects something of what characterizes the situation of the chess problem in our time — the chess problem which, despite its limitation regarding the available material, nevertheless offers the creative will of gifted people unforeseeable possibilities even today. Day by day, of course, ever higher demands are placed on its theoretical knowledge, its technical skills and its artistic expressiveness; increasingly the view of the chess problem as a form of expression of the creative human spirit that should be taken seriously and which can be adapted to the same standards of value applied to works of legitimate arts is gaining acceptance among authors and the public. Accordingly, solving chess problems has become a kind of art contemplation. The modern solver with normal sensibilities is rightfully disappointed when a problem leaves him unsatisfied in terms of its artistic value, when he is not rewarded with appropriate intellectual enjoyment for the effort expended. This might be the case, for example, with problems based solely on difficulty, or with those whose basic ideas have not been worked out clearly and understandably enough. There is no place for such phenomena in the collection. The inner structure of the book, as well as the external arrangement of diagrams and comments — it has proven itself and is already beginning to set a trend — correspond to the first volume, as does the restriction to orthodox problems with the requirement "mate in n moves." The author was even less inclined to include the so-called fairy chess problems (those that deviate more or less from the normal rules of play), since this genre is already quite widespread in the literature and lovers of such performances are far fewer in the audience than among the creative community. The main part contains numerous two-, three- and many-move problems of German origin. The book concludes with notable foreign authors with additional problems that appeared in the German specialist press as first publications during the reporting period. This serves to express the bond with friends beyond the borders and to allow comparison with important works by internationally significant composers. Although this second volume follows the first chronologically, it is not a continuation in the sense that knowledge of the former would be a prerequisite for understanding the latter. This time, too, all mentioned topics and technical terms have been exhaustively explained. The repetition of certain fundamental and constantly recurring terms had to be accepted and can be useful primarily from a didactic point of view. Special care has again been taken with a comprehensive technical terminology index, and the composers' directory has been considerably expanded. However, the book cannot and does not wish to be a lexicon of problem chess. For that, a great completeness in the theoretical-terminological area would have had to be sought, which the author is inclined to regard as a disadvantage rather than an advantage, since he considers the clearing out of specialist language of obsolete and superfluous terms a necessary current task. To loosen the accompanying text, several pages of quotations are interspersed; they may serve the serious and systematic student as respites to refresh mind and spirit.
