A Century of Chess: Lasker-Tarrasch 1916

It’s a bit hard to believe that this match was played - both that anybody thought of organizing a chess match in Berlin in 1916 and also that Lasker and Tarrasch managed to put aside their differences to play a promotional match. Tarrasch's staunch patriotism was a given, but it's somewhat more surprising that Lasker, who had spent much of his adult life in England and the U.S., had been swept up by war fever, had invested his savings in war bonds and had written a pamphlet arguing that civilization would be destroyed if Germany lost the war. Proceeds from this match were dedicated to that most appetizing of charities, the German war effort. 

The match is a bit excruciating to play over. Lasker clearly hadn’t lost a step, and the games here are a testament to his resourcefulness, his ability to win from any type of position (above all, the dreary endgame of Game 2). Tarrasch, though, was not himself. He was 54 and had had several terrible years - by the time of the match, all three of his sons had died (one killed in action on the Western Front, one died by suicide, one in a streetcar accident). The fact that he was playing at all probably was a result of the deep optimism in his nature ("in spite of the war, we retain our keen interest in the art of chess as well in the other arts," he wrote in 1916) but in his play he looks like a ghost of himself. He drew the first game and then Lasker won the next five. A couple of the later games are just massacres. As competitive as Lasker was, it’s hard to imagine that by the end of the match he didn’t have a trace of pity for his old rival. 

Sources: simaginfan has a more thorough write-up on this match here. Soltis annotates one of the games in Why Lasker Matters. But this match has more or less just disappeared into the mists of time.