First comes Helene Fischer, then Viktor Zoi.
The German hit hero sings about the breath that she lacks, and the Russian rock hero about the knock on the door and that of the heart.
Elisabeth Pähtz looks up at the blue of the sky over Brandenburg, and her lips move sometimes silently and sometimes softly to the music.
She sings and speaks Russian too.
Anna Prizkau
Editor in the features section.
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The other, fake, more famous Elizabeth also learned Russian in the “Queen's Gambit”. Like Elizabeth Harmon, Elisabeth Pähtz is a chess player, is a professional. Even those who can't play chess know Harmon, have seen them on Netflix or read about them in the book, the model for the series, by Walter Tevis, which has now been published in German. She is an orphan, learns chess from the caretaker in a basement, gets better and better, soon defeats everyone. At the end of the Cold War, she flies to Moscow and plays against a Soviet world champion.
Pähtz know those who read the sports section in newspapers and those who play chess themselves.
She learned it from her father and is the best player in Germany, grandmaster and international champion.
Elisabeth Pähtz lowers her ice-blue eyes from the sky and pulls up the straps of her dark blue swimsuit.
The interview - today on a rubber dinghy, on a lake.
It's the weather, it's hot.
The reality looks different
While Pähtz is still adjusting the blue polyamide, she explains: “The highest title is grandmaster, then comes international master, then grandmaster, then international champion.” Yes, it's complicated, because in chess there is an open category in which everyone can play along, and a female, in which only women play, tells the blonde woman in the boat. In the book and in the series, the redhead beats the world champion in the end, her story becomes a global success. Why? It's a big mystery. Reality looks different, even the real exceptional athletes Judith Polgár and Hou Yifan have never achieved in classical chess what women achieve in fiction.
“We will never see a woman become world champion in the open category, at least I will not see it,” says the chess player, she is now 36.
At 34, she left the German national team.
It was about equality, women's fees, which were much, much lower than men's fees, and more sloppy training.
Elisabeth Pähtz exhales loudly, takes a breath and says: “Why, please, is the bonus for men twice, three times as high as for women?
What is the argument to justify such a thing?
I've asked that often. "
Is it now about intelligence?
She is now taking a break and is silent. A look at the shore. Flat, faceless and green Brandenburg. The wind moves the trees, the thin branches dance. The place looks like only the branches are dancing here. This calm does not suit this woman, because the chess player looks wild and angry. “It wasn't until I left in 2019 that people finally listened to me,” she says. But those were the new, not the old bosses of the German Chess Federation. "And now we are a model association worldwide when it comes to equality." That is why Pähtz is playing for Germany again, flying to the World Cup in Sochi on Tuesday, more precisely to the Women's World Cup. So back to the big riddle again: Why do women play chess worse than men? Do they play worse at all?