Hein Donner: The Biography

By Alexander Münninghoff

Hein Donner (1927-1988) was a Dutch Grandmaster and one the greatest writers on chess of all time. He was born into a prominent Calvinistic family of lawyers in The Hague. His father, who had been the Minister of Justice and later became President of the Dutch Supreme Court, detected a keen legal talent in his son. But Hein opted for a bohemian lifestyle as a chess professional and journalist. He scored several excellent tournament victories but never quite fulfilled the promise of his chess talent. Hein Donner developed from a chess player-writer into a writer-chess player. His provocative writings and his colourful persona made him a national celebrity during the roaring sixties. His book ‘The King’, a fascinating and often hilarious anthology spanning 30 years of chess writing, is a world-wide bestseller and features on many people’s list of favourite chess books.



The author Harry Mulisch, his best friend, immortalized Hein Donner in his magnum opus The Discovery of Heaven. In 2001 the book was adapted for film, with Stephen Fry playing the part that was based on Donner. Included in Hein Donner is the interview in which Harry Mulisch tells about his friendship with Donner. After suffering a stroke at the age of 56, Donner lived his final years in a nursing home. He continued writing however, typing with one finger, and won one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious literary awards. Alexander Münninghoff has written a captivating biography of a controversial man and the turbulent time and age he lived in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New in Chess
• Release date: Apr 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9789056918934

Alexander Münninghoff

Alexander Münninghoff was born in Posen, Poland, in 1944. A journalist and expert on Russia, he won the prize for newspaper journalism (a Dutch Pulitzer), and is the author of Tropical Years in Moscow, about his time as a correspondent in the Soviet Union. A passionate chess player, Münninghoff wrote the biographies of Dutch chess grand master Jan Hein Donner, and the chess master he dethroned, former world champion Max Euwe. In the anti-German postwar years and throughout his career, Münninghoff never told his friends or colleagues about his family, the complex chronology of which he reveals in his memoir, The Son and Heir. The book went on to win the prestigious Libris History Prize in 2015 and the Littéraire Witte Award in 2016.

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Bibliography

Preface

Quite soon after agreeing to write a book on Hein Donner, the misgiving crept up on me that, while in principle any human life can be couched in a biography, perhaps here we might be dealing with an exceptio donneriana, if not a praeclusio donneriana. After all, hadn’t everything chess-related that could be of any importance already been written down with a master’s hand by the subject itself, in pieces that had been eminently collected in The King by his paladins Tim Krabbé and Max Pam? And hadn’t Donner already granted us a good look into his psyche in his several volumes, which had been crowned with literary laurels?

A second inspection taught me that my fear was entirely justified. During his life, contrary to all other chess players not only in the Netherlands but everywhere in the world, Donner made himself so emphatically and pointedly visible, both in speech and in writing, that there is in fact nothing to add. Donner cut the ground from under the feet of any biographer so thoroughly that we might just as well speak of a furtive ‘last will’ saying: ‘Don’t you dare write even one letter about me, you nincompoop!’ Which is an understandable demand from somebody who spent a big part of his life gravely insulting countless people.

Nevertheless, a biography had to be written, of course. Not a hagiography – that would ridicule Donner posthumously and undeservedly – and neither should it be a diatribe against him. Preferably it should be a rendition, as objective as possible, of the quite chaotic life of a very controversial man.

I would like to thank in the first place my dozens of conversation partners: Hein’s family members and friends, enemies and rivals, who, without any noticeable restraint, each from their own little corner and in their own way, shed their light on the Donner phenomenon.

Of the official institutions, I’d like to thank the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (= International Institute for Social History) in Amsterdam for giving me inspection of the Provo archives, and the municipal archives of The Hague, who granted me access to the archive of the chess club Discendo Discimus.

Maarten de Zeeuw, who, as it turned out, had already spent a lot of time collecting Donner material with the intention to write his own book on the man sometime, especially surprised me by his stoic compliance. The amount of data he had already collected was impressive, and I have shamelessly made use of it. I have often tried to imagine how I would feel if somebody else ran off with my subject, even using my material for his own glory. At such moments I felt a deep anger well up inside of me.

Therefore, it is only fitting that I express my warm gratitude for the selfless collaboration to which Maarten de Zeeuw has managed to force himself, in spite of everything. The entire chess-technical part of this book was done by him, and in the biographical part he has saved me more than once from errors, painful omissions and mistakes. I will gladly add that for his analytical work he was able to use the help of Harald van Dijk, grandmaster Lembit Oll and Evert-Jan Straat in several places. For the chess player who takes this book in his hand, the result will be downright surprising: it turns out that several ‘evergreens’ have been wrongly evaluated for years, and, thanks to De Zeeuw’s detective work, the thought-provoking ‘Krabbé collection’ has been extended with sixteen games.

Alexander Münninghoff

The Hague, 1994

Preface to the English edition

‘The genius of Hein was that he was there.’

Anyone who is thus characterized by others must have made a big impression on his environment. Where people’s memories of the deceased are mostly limited to mentioning one or more of their distinctive qualities, this quote by one of Donner’s friends reflects precisely the slight desperation that used to seize anyone who crossed the path of this imposing giant.

A few seconds after you’d met him, you already knew you were dealing with a phenomenon, that with him as a conversation partner you would be lured into a minefield, with provocative propositions about everything under the sun – propositions which perhaps didn’t seem quite tenable at first hearing but which he managed to defend with so much debating power that eventually, exhausted, you threw in the towel. And then you would stand a good chance of being publicly branded an idiot and a nitwit by Hein. That prospect was reason for some to turn away from Donner, but this tended to have the adverse effect: he would just pretend you didn’t exist, and that was even worse.

This looks like a picture of someone who wilfully and arrogantly tried to seclude himself from his environment, but it wasn’t that bad. Certainly, Donner had enemies, and there were people who really felt he had stabbed them to the heart. But he also had many, many admirers, who found his completely unconventional lifestyle refreshing (on most days he didn’t get up until three o’clock in the afternoon, he never opened any letters, which led to problems with the tax authorities that he would ignore, and he personally torpedoed his job at IBM by sleeping on his desk – lying on his back), coupled as it was to his indisputable, but almost puzzling grandmastership. The discussion continues to this day whether a little more sense of structure couldn’t have taken him much higher up in the chess hierarchy.

But that was just the way Hein was – a grandmaster who didn’t have a board and pieces in his own home most of the time, who discovered Chess Informant by coincidence at a time when it had been an indispensable tool for all his colleagues for years already, who, partly because of this, was beaten with black before move 20 in the same variation of the Sicilian twice in a short time span, and who, in spite of this, hardly ever took any account of the fact that his opponents were people who made plans too – but who also managed to win great tournaments like Hoogovens 1963 and Venice 1967, ahead of a whole range of top players.

Fortunately, Donner left us an extensive oeuvre which encompasses much more than just chess. He enjoyed a legendary friendship with one of the greatest Dutch writers ever, Harry Mulisch (whose book The Discovery of Heaven is largely about Donner), and, with his many columns and books, gradually grew to be a well-known Dutchman. That is what he remained until his death in 1988. In the years before that, after a brain haemorrhage, typing with one finger, he couldn’t produce much more than one hundred lines a week. But this did result in a collection of fantastic ‘incunabula’, or ‘sparkling minima’ as the columnist Renate Rubinstein called them, which earned him a great Dutch literary prize right at the end of his life.

For the chess world, Hein Donner lives on in The King, the book that is called ‘the thick Donner’ in Dutch chess circles. In this marvellous anthology, Tim Krabbé and Max Pam, two laureated authors themselves, have included Donner’s best chess pieces. The English translation of the book has found its way all over the world.

Now, after precisely a quarter of a century, as an addition to The King, the publisher New In Chess has decided to bring out a translation into English of my Donner biography which dates from 1994. This is of course tremendously pleasing for me. But my gratitude reaches further than just my personal interest: in this decision I see a recognition of the fact that with Hein Donner we had an absolutely unique human being in our midst – someone who deserves to be rescued from oblivion also today, not only as a chess player but also, especially, as an intractable, sometimes bizarre and sometimes also endearing person. And, above all, as a fighter: if in a discussion you were White, then he would be Black, and vice versa.

He was a chess player of a type that has disappeared from the playing halls of this century. In my opinion, the current top players, and also those a little bit lower on the list, have started to identify dangerously closely to the calculating monsters they let loose on their concoctions after every game.

This doesn’t make them very attractive for the greater chess audience, and I can’t see any change coming in this – apparently the ivory tower of chess wisdom is so attractive for most top players that in their press conferences they limit themselves to a few statements, expressed in the first eight letters of the alphabet and the first eight numbers, and then swiftly disappear.

This biography of Donner shows that it can (and perhaps must) be different, and so I am especially grateful to the publisher, who is willing to put this reminder in print in a language that can be understood also by chess players outside the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Alexander Münninghoff

The Hague, December 2019

Note by the editor

In this English edition of the Hein Donner biography, a number of details have been added, collected from sources that became available after 1994, the year the Dutch edition was written. The main new sources are the now defunct Dutch chess magazine Matten, the documentaries Hein Donner – Ein Heldenleben (Jan Bosdriesz, Max Pam) and De Liefde voor Hout (Jop Pannekoek, Max Pam) and the books De Geest van het Spel (John Kuipers) and Het Oog van de Meester by Erik Fokke.

An interview by Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam with Harry Mulisch, published first in Matten 3 (2008), in which the Dutch writer talks about his friendship with Donner, has been added by courtesy of Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam (Chapter 11).

The games in Chapter 12, ‘Games and Annotations’, analysed by Maarten de Zeeuw, have been checked with the computer engine Stockfish 10 and corrected where necessary. Also, two games have been added to this collection.

This book contains several quotations from Donner’s articles collected in the book The King. For these, we have used the excellent translations by Richard de Weger in The King.

1

The first Donner to enter our country was Gottfried Otto Donner, a Prussian hatter who came from the vicinity of Breslau. In 1776, at twenty years of age, he refused guard duty with Frederic the Great, and after an adventurous six-year-long peregrination through Central Europe he was hired as a mercenary by the Dutch Prince William V. This Donner was so sturdily built that he was admitted to the Prince’s grenadiers, who were in fact his bodyguard. If the Urheber of the family ever thought that a quiet life was awaiting him in the Netherlands, as opposed to Prussia, then he was gravely disappointed. The times were turbulent. It transpired that, in 1787, during an obscure melee of skirmishes in the grounds of the Summer Palace in Soestdijk, the guarding of which Donner had been charged with, a bullet was fired that hit him in the nose, leaving his head through the ear, resulting in a crushed palate. Donner survived, but he was never able to speak again in a normal way. The Prince had a gold palate plate made for him, which was held in place with a sponge in the mouth of the unfortunate soldier. The ‘old grenadier’, as this ‘proto-Donner’ was habitually referred to in the family stories, died in 1836, 80 years old, in the village of Renkum near Arnhem, and was buried in the Lutheran cemetery there.

His son Johan Christiaan, born in 1793, survived his old father by two years only: he died from typhus fever in 1838. He was known to have continuously and intensely regretted omitting to remove that gold plate from his father’s mouth during the latter’s burial.

It may be of some relevance to point out to the reader the cabbalistic initials with which the Donners made their entrance in our country: G.O.D. and his son J.C.: that is really something, and it can’t have been a coincidence. The latter also had a brother, Christiaan Gottfried, who was executed in 1824 in Arnhem, at 29 years of age, for murdering his landlady. She was called Mrs. Van der Wiel.

J.C.’s youngest son-but-one, Johannes Hendrikus Donner (1824-1903), gave that solemn organ sound of Christian political commitment to the Donner line that it has managed to keep until today, in spite of the activities of ‘our’ Hein Donner (who was named after this Johannes Hendrikus). This member of the Donner family was a clergyman, an exegete, and, from 1880 onwards, a member of the Dutch House of Parliament for the Anti-Revolutionary Party. He had nine children, all of whom lived to be very old. The middle child was Andreas Matthias (1859-1937), who was Hein’s grandfather – a clergyman who seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church to the Reformed Church of the Netherlands.

Hein’s father, who, in perfect simplicity, was called Jan, was born in Assen on 3 February 1891. He went to study law in Utrecht, to the dismayed amazement of the people of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, who thought that someone with a brain like that ought to go out and do theology. After his graduation in 1912 (when he was 21!) he proceeded to study political science in Leiden, rounding off with a graduation in 1919. The times were troubled, and pregnant with war violence, and Jan Donner simply didn’t find any opportunity to spend his college days in merriment at one of the corpora. After having filled a post as a local government official in Deventer, this ‘classical anti-revolutionary’ ended up at the Ministry of Justice in The Hague in 1922. There, he immediately stood out as a council advisor for his lucid views on legal matters, his undiminishing capacity for work, and his fabulous memory. When in March 1926, after a chronic managerial crisis that had been going on for four months, people were working behind the scenes at the urgent request of Queen Wilhelmina to form a cabinet of public servants that could overcome the deadlock between the Catholic and Protestant politicians, Doctor of Law Jan Donner was approached by Dirk Jan de Geer for the Ministership of Justice. Initially Donner said no, out of modesty among other things, but when Her Majesty was making ready to do a ‘final, personal appeal’ to the young lawyer, of course the latter didn’t let it come this far, and consented. God – Orange – Donner: this strong alliance, and the duties resulting from it for the latter, were proverbial for those who knew the family.

As a politician, Jan Donner proved to be a natural talent. At the formation of the third Ruys de Beerenbrouck cabinet in 1929, De Geer, who managed Finance, stipulated as a condition for his own continuing that Donner would also stay on. A number of important bills, among them the Collective Labour Agreement, the law on public limited companies and the Public Servants’ Law, were established under Doctor of Law Jan Donner. This was tough, technical subject matter, engineered by a capable, reliable, dedicated lawyer in good conscience and according to his ability, in the service of his country. As he also indicated in his memoirs – which were written by hand and intended for exclusive use inside the family – duty was his principal motive, but that was also enough for him. The greatest satisfaction for him was when he saw that his hard work had yielded concrete results.

His life and work radiate soundness and straightness, but not much passion, which may be the reason why Jan Donner didn’t make school as a lawyer. By nature he was a man of practice, not a philosopher. He was ingenious, but not really interesting.

Only at the presentation of his Wet op de Smalende Godslastering (= Blasphemy Law) in 1932, Donner did show some signs of personal involvement. On this occasion, albeit reluctantly, he opened ‘the chambers of his heart’: the communist leader David Wijnkoop had ‘hit him hard’, as he claimed, with his article titled ‘Christus op de mestvaalt’ (= ‘Christ on the dunghill’) in the Tribune.

‘Hit him hard’! Hein did not learn the art of giving as good as he got in his characteristic vicious way, of scathingly reprimanding people, from his father – that much is clear.

In 1933, two days after the burning of the Berlin Reichstag, early in the year when dark clouds were gathering over Europe, the Ruys de Beerenbrouck cabinet fell due to a bill, introduced by Donner, which, as an economy measure, was intended to abolish a large number of magistrate’s courts. Donner was appointed a member of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, a position he resigned in 1943 by a dismissal at his own request.

By 1933, the Donner family was complete. In 1916, Jan had married Golida Wilhelmina van den Burg (‘Go’ in short), the daughter of an organ trader. Go was very musical, like her father, and there is no doubt that she could have gone far as a singer, if domestic duties – to which, by the way, she reconciled herself uncomplainingly – had not forced her to perform less artistic tasks.

The Donners had six children: André (1918-1992), Reynout (1920-1990), Ineke (1922-2005), Beppie (1924-2002), Hein (1927-1988) and Go (1932-2015). At first the family lived in a terraced house in the Bentinckstraat, which was then still situated at the edge of the dunes in the The Hague ‘Statenkwartier’ that had been built around the turn of the century. This house was exchanged for a much more spacious mansion at the Statenlaan in the same neighbourhood. If you look at both houses and realize that Jan Donner lived in the Bentinckstraat for a long time, even during the period when he was a minister, you get an impression of the modesty of this great man, and of the sober lifestyle of his family. The home of the late prime minister Willem Drees at the Beeklaan, also in The Hague, which was always presented as a great example of Dutch ‘unpretentiousness’, was an opulent palace compared to the Donners’ ‘pied-à-terre’ in the Bentinckstraat.

110 Statenlaan, the house where Hein Donner lived until he was fourteen, was a ‘house-and-a-half’ of the well-known type: two rooms ensuite, with in the middle the sliding doors that became the proverbial stage for unforgettable performances of domestic dramatic art and cabaret in many Dutch families. The Donners didn’t do this. Furthermore, the rooms were not pretty, and they were quite hideously decorated – totally tasteless and cheerless, as if God himself was living there. The most pleasant part of the house was the conservatory, which looked out upon a quite small garden. There were no dogs in the house, because father Donner was heavily opposed to them. No cats either. They did have some domestic staff.

In the Donner house, life was very sober. Father was a teetotaller, which meant that not a single drop of alcoholic drink passed the doorstep. This rule was observed with painful strictness, and only once a minuscule change was allowed – after the war, in the 1950s, when a delegation came over from South Africa. For that occasion, through mediation of an in-law, a modest quantity of wine was purchased. But even the soiree of the Supreme Court in 1945, when father Donner had just become the President, was a completely dry affair. That festive party could not be held at the Literary Club De Witte, which had always been the reception arena of the Residence, as it was closed for alterations at the time. At the lamentations of his wife, who was desperately wondering how she was supposed to entertain the throngs of guests, the patriarch of the Donners said with a slightly grumpy undertone in his voice: ‘Oh, but then it will probably be over soon.’ ‘What puppetry,’ he thought at the same time, but he was in for a surprise: it was precisely this event that became one of the largest and lengthiest receptions in the period after the war. The entire Hague establishment used this occasion to spend plenty of time on catching up.

Members of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands distinguished themselves, contrary to members of the Dutch Reformed Church, by a highly principled stand in everything. ‘Dutch Reformed’ was always associated with the flexibility of the Dutch ‘regents’, whereas the Reformed Church of the Netherlands was much more rigid, preferring a Calvinistic lifestyle. In the end, Doctor of Law Jan Donner actually adopted an in-between position. He could show flexibility – after all he was a politician – but he was also a Calvinist to the backbone. The ‘good cause’, however non-descript it might seem at some moments, was more than worth pursuing with loyalty and preparedness to sacrifice. Loyalty to the group, and a preparedness to sacrifice for the Reformed Church of the Netherlands. Principles. Inner asceticism, too. Such lofty terms were constantly floating through the air in the Donner house. But there was in fact only one person who also followed this guideline in practice – father. Father was a kind of god.

When Johannes Hendrikus was born on 6 July 1927, his environment seemed to be anything but optimally prepared for him: all the other children were suffering from scarlet fever, which was still a highly dangerous disease at the time, certainly for a newborn baby. Despite this, ‘Heini’, as he was called en famille, was soon thriving, and grew up to be a nice little fellow with long blond curls. It is carved in the memory of many that for a considerable length of time he was going around dressed in girl’s clothes. This was because his mother had been hoping for a girl. With the arrival of Go in 1932, this wish was in any case fulfilled.

Heini was never ill. He did almost end up under a tramcar once. One day in 1932, his parents had to attend a funeral, and Heini was brought by taxi to the kindergarten at the Groot Hertoginnelaan. Quite smart, the child got off the car by himself, thought he had to cross the road, and just bumped into the oncoming tram. He was unharmed – only an enormous bruise. That miraculous escape was generally regarded as a divine blessing.

Until the end of primary school, Heini had a wonderful life. He was spoiled by his mother, who adored him, and, through him, was able to put up her own form of resistance against the rigid, sober regime of her husband. By the way, she was not exactly unhappy – for example, she was able to enjoy the status that came along with her husband’s ministership much more than he could. But she also categorically protected her own territory, in which her own, secret rules were observed. She talked to herself a lot. If father was away for the evening, and she could go about her things undisturbed, like embroidering and such – then she would be humming and talking to herself, and she would appear to be very satisfied.

In the first years, father hardly interfered with the upbringing of the children; after all, he was always away running the country. Mother, on the other hand, was in all places at once – in Hein’s perception she was a kind of omnipresent goddess. He once claimed that she had the gift of bilocation: one time, when they had gone shopping, he was looking at a shop-window together with her. Then she sent him ahead to walk home, and a little later she opened the door herself when he rang the bell! (Donner himself may have had this gift too. In 1959, H.J. (Henk) van Donk MSc, the captain of the Dutch chess team that was going to play England in Cheltenham, didn’t succeed in waking up Donner in time on a Monday morning. But they had to catch a train for the return trip. Finally, Van Donk managed to roll Donner out of his bed, then established that the chess player was still entirely undressed, but, having done his duty, returned to the breakfast room – by the shortest route as far as he knew. To his utter amazement he found Donner already sitting at the table, fully dressed!)

Soon it became clear that Heini was a peculiar child. Besides being special, he was also a loner. Heini had a much too original mind to be able to follow the rigid line of the Donner household. And so he secluded himself from the others as much as possible, and tried to duck out of any confrontations with the order of the day. Which wasn’t very hard: the ties within the family were not very close, and all its members were individuals, differing widely from each other and emphatically living their own lives. ‘One by one, each of them is very decent, but put them all together and you’ve got nothing,’ was the way Hein summarized the situation later. Such dictums also revealed a certain forgiving nature Hein was wont to display towards his family members. After all, he had a tense relationship especially with his oldest brother André, who used to bully him continuously, and there were more such frictions of a more or less permanent nature. But eventually, magnanimously, he stepped over them.

He was very much interested in nature. Quite quickly, he had developed a broad knowledge of plants and animals (now and then his mother went to Artis Zoo specially with him, and with him only) and after some time managed to persuade his parents to buy him a large terrarium, which proceeded to dominate his little boy’s room. He used to withdraw to sit in that room for hours, occupying himself with such things as the other family members could never really make out. He was left in peace there, also by his parents. The usual domestic control seemed to stop before the door of that little room. When, before going to bed, he was expected to brush his teeth, Heini would successfully apply the acoustic trick of letting the tap run and loudly stirring the brush inside the cup. Sometimes small, creepy animals