Who was Bobby Fischer?

There is more to say about Robert J. Fischer than the previous topic about Frank Brady easily allows.

Perhaps we can continue a broader, more sensible conversation here.

My position is pretty much as I posted in the earlier topic:

As far as I can tell, Fischer came from such a bizarre, chaotic situation, he came by his psychological problems -- especially paranoia -- honestly.

Fischer grew up fatherless and in near-poverty. His mother was an intelligent, ex-medical student, who studied in Moscow but returned to the US then moved her family around the country trying to make ends meet. She was also a communist and a political activist. The FBI investigated both Fischer and his mother as possible communist agents. Interestingly, she was diagnosed with a paranoid personality disorder after a court-ordered psychiatric exam.

Although Fischer's mother was cleared by the FBI -- after accumulating a 750 page file -- I wouldn't be surprised if she did work for the Soviets in some capacity. Somehow she completed her medical training in East Berlin in the sixties.

Fischer dropped out of school and broke up with his mother while a teenager. After that it was just Fischer and chess plus a handful of supporters. As he grew to be one of the strongest players in the world, the Soviet chess establishment was indeed conspiring against him.

After he won the world championship, he became a world famous celebrity with all the hassles and manipulations that go with fame and for which Fischer had no defenses except to retreat into seclusion. Many people have been broken by fame.

Fischer had almost no personal resources beyond what he could achieve over a chess board. As world champion, he had nowhere to go but down.

Rightly or wrongly, I think of mad people as people with hroken brains. Just as your pancreas can stop working properly and you become diabetic, your brain can stop working and you become schizophrenic or something else.

In that sense, I don't believe Fischer was mad. The stress of his childhood, the struggle to single-handedly defeat the Soviet chess machine, and the challenges of fame, broke this young man into a sad, bitter, paranoid adult.

chessmickey: I don't believe people who tell me with such certainty just what Soviet intelligence and Communists would or would not do.

Nor do you have any certain knowledge of what Regina Fischer might or might not do for the Party.

In principle and in practice we now know that American Communist Party members took orders from Moscow. Which is not to say that their obedience was perfect nor that Moscow trusted each and every one of them implicitly.

Many liberal supporters of the Rosenbergs, the atomic spies who were executed for espionage, were unpleasantly surprised to discover from the decoded VENONA cables that Julius Rosenberg certainly was spying for the Soviets.

I don't know that Regina Fischer did any work for the Soviets. I just said that it wouldn't surprise me if she did.

I do find it interesting that somehow she got her medical degree in East Berlin when she was in her fifities. A reward for some favors? Who knows. How did that happen?

We do agree that Paul Nemenyi was Fischer's biological father. His photo on wiki sealed the deal for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nemenyi

JUST SAY THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!!

I'm not interested in rehashing the anti-communism of the fifties. My point is that as a child Bobby Fischer grew up in a bizarre, secretive world about as far from a typical American family as possible.

His mother was a communist who had spent years studying in Moscow, where she met and married Hans-Gerhardt Fischer. Beacuse of anti-semitism she was forced to leave the USSR and Europe. Later she gets pregnant by Paul Nemenyi and Bobby Fischer is born. She does not tell Bobby of his real father, although Nemenyi occasionally visits their Brooklyn apartment and takes Bobby on outings.

What a weird way to grow up, especially in 1950s America. Who can blame Fischer for becoming distrustful and paranoid?

I sure didn't know any child whose family life hit all these markers:

* Single parent
* Mother concealed biological father from child
* Kept moving all over the country for unclear reasons
* Mother was a communist
* Mother had spent years studying in the USSR
* Mother was under FBI surveillance

What is a chlid supposed to make of all this?

I'm not seriously confusing anything. I would prefer if you left me out of your comments.

Most people know that admission to university and graduate schools often involves string pulling or at least personal recommendations.

In communist countries the government is involved with everything. The GDR government had to OK the admission of an American citizen in her fifties to an East Berlin medical school. I doubt she got in just because she had high MCATs.

What made Regina Fischer such an attractive choice that an East Berlin medical school would give up one of its slots to her instead of young native who would stay in East Germany to practice medicine?

How did Regina pay for medical school? She had been living in near poverty through the fifties. Yet she travels abroad for training. Did she receive some windfall or somehow save up enough money?

It's a curious business when you think about it. Perhaps there are innocent answers but I've looked around on the web and not found any.

What do you mean "innocent answers", as opposed to what, some half-baked cockamaney bullshit you just invented of her being a prostitute?

Socialist and communist countries typically have very high quality education standards - particularly the USSR and I assume east germany - and are often very cool when it comes to awarding grants and routes for people who want to better themselves if they meet the right criteria. It's only the cut-throat capitalist US system that has their education system get its students into debt for the rest of their lives.  

Excuse me if I don't share your idealistic notions of how socialist and communist countries operate.

For instance, the training and privileges which the USSR showered upon its best chess talent wasn't out of high-minded regard for "people who want to better themselves." No, their chess programs and athletic programs were funded as part of their propaganda campaign against the West.

I find it hard to believe the GDR would give up a scarce medical school slot to a middle-aged American woman without some non-academic reason involving benefits to the GDR or the USSR.

Save your "cockamaney bullshit" charges for other forums.

An innocent explanation might be that her ex-husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, an East German scientist of some note, might have pulled strings for Regina's admission to medical school in East Berlin.

In any event I did not start this topic to discuss the curious case of Regina Fischer.

It was the issue of Fischer's sanity or lack of it which spurred my interest in the previous topic.

It seems one is stuck. Fischer was not a normal person. He was something more than an eccentric curmudgeon, but he was less than a raving schizophrenic or silent catatonic.

You sound like you've pretty much got your mind made up and won't consider any thoughts contrary to your view. You're just as bad as Robbie1969 in that other thread.

Darth_Algar: How so? I take that as an insult, frankly. Tell me about how open-minded you are.

The people I've known closest to Fischer's level of strange -- my mother, cousin and a few people I've counseled on a suicide hotline -- were clearly crazy. My mother and cousin were in and out of hospitals.

Still, I'm disinclined to call Fischer crazy. He functioned well enough to stay loose and free aside from political imprisonment. I would be willing to dismiss him as a crank if his ranting about the Jews didn't become so personal and paranoid.

Tin-Cup: That's the photo all right!

If I just glanced at it without reading the text, I would assume without question I was looking at Bobby.

Mersaphe: Thanks for a cogent response!

Of course people like Kasparov, great champions, have worked insanely hard at chess and have not lost their minds. But that is different from Bobby. He became world champion and basically quit chess, he quit everything he had spent the the first 30 years of his life working towards.

But why did Bobby quit? That's the question IMO. Before he won the championship, he spoke of his plans to be an active champion who would keep playing and not hide away for three years until the next challenger emerged.

Fischer didn't get lazy. I think it was a symptom of something deep and disturbed.

This forum is serious. No place for me.

What seems more realistic is that Bobby thought there was more to life than chess and decided to pursue his other interests and hobbies after 1972, but he eventually realized that chess was the only thing that gave him inspiration and hope and strength.

I'd like to believe that. The problem is I don't know of any evidence (I don't mean that as Robbie does) that Fischer pursued other interests and hobbies after 1972.

Nor did he play a single tournament or match game until 1992.

If Fischer had been dating girls, trying his hand at sculpture, guitar or surfing, going to parties, taking college courses, reconciling with his family or anything, I might agree with you.

According to IM Peter Biyiasis, who played well over a hundred speed games with Fischer while Fischer stayed with him, in 1981 Fischer was stronger than ever.

Fischer's mental problems were sufficiently obvious when he was barely a teenager that GMs Robert Byrne and Pal Benko told Fischer he should consider seeing a psychiatrist.

Make no mistake. I'm not someone who wants to knock Fischer and tear him down. I was a kid when Fischer was a shooting star. I looked up to Fischer and loved him. His struggle was my struggle. I so much wanted him to have a happy ending.

Alas, life is not so simple.