A Century of Chess: Erich Cohn from 1910-1918
In Chess Secrets I Learned From The Masters, Edward Lasker writes:
"Erich Cohn was a highly gifted young man, of a family too poor to send him to the University. However, he had found a patron who offered to pay his way through college to enable him to get his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, so that he could obtain a teaching position in his favorite field, the History of Art. Cohn was as handsome as a "Greek God," withal very modest and serious, interested in every phase of intellectual endeavor. But chess proved his undoing. After winning the Master title he could not withstand the temptation to travel to the many master tournaments which were organized in Germany and the adjoining countries. He was not as lucky as I, who possessed three friends to help fight the demon, the habit-forming mental opiate which chess can be to young, impressionable, ambitious boys. Cohn gradually neglected his studies, he did not graduate in proper time, and his patron withdrew his support. Thus he was reduced to playing chess professionally. But without the driving energy of a Mieses and the towering strength of a Teichmann, Cohn drifted from bad to straitened circumstances, and when he was killed in the early days of the First World War, many of his friends thought of the proverb: 'Whom the Gods love, they take from the earth in his youth.'"
That’s the overriding sense of Cohn - as a tragic figure, a golden youth who had frittered away some of his promise in the pre-war years and then had his life cut short by the war. If (to name the figures I’ve already covered in this series), Breyer seems like a figure out of Kafka and Janowski out of Tolstoy, Cohn is a Thomas Mann character - an encapsulation of the collapse of Central Europe.
Lasker, by the way, isn’t exactly right about all of his details. Cohn was killed not in the first days but near the very end of the war - on August 28, 1918. There’s surprisingly little available online about his war service - he’s the only leading chess master that I know of to actually have been killed in combat in World War I - and it's not even clear whether he served with the Red Cross, as is mostly reported online, or if, as in the memoirs of physician Harry Marcuse, who encountered him on the Western Front, he was "a simple artillery soldier." A booklet assembled in his memory by Bernhard Kagan would be suppressed in the Nazi period given Cohn's Jewish origins.
In chess terms, I have to say that I’m a likely skeptical of Cohn as a member of the elite. He had a good record, and strong tactical vision, but didn’t contribute much theoretically or in the deep analysis of the game. In games against the world’s best, he often seemed to get surprisingly lucky, and some of his best results were in thematic tournaments (particularly the Abbazia 1912 King’s Gambit tournament) which only half count.
Had Cohn lived, he might well have been the heir to Richard Teichmann, a sharp, tactically-astute player, a leading light of German chess and steady presence on the international scene.
Sources: There's really very little on Cohn online. There's a German-language biography of him at Chessbase. Edward Winter has a couple of stray posts.
