I had the great pleasure of meeting Mark Siemons in Berlin recently. Mark is now based in Berlin but was formerly a China correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and heard about my go books there. He asked to interview me, in order to promote go by writing about the game in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. Since there was about to be a ball to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Scottish Country Dancing Society, I decided to combine the two things and went to Berlin to do the interview there.

It has now appeared. It's in German, of course, under the title "Das Spiel der Wandlungen" (The Game of Transformations). The full reference is 25 May, 2025 | No. 21 | Page 33 | Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. There is an online subscription service but, if it is not online only, you may be able to find the actual paper either within Germany or at a shop in other countries that sells foreign newspapers.

As befits this august newspaper, the article is thoughtful, thought-provoking and wide-ranging, touching on religion, politics, philosophy and even current tariff economics (if that's not something of an oxymoron). A little highbrow even, but one way of describing the whole piece is that it sets out to justify the famous quote often attributed to world chess champion Emanuel Lasker, that if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

If Lasker's interest in go interests you, you can find much more in another German production but one written in English: Volume 2 of the scrupulously sourced biography "Emanuel Lasker" edited by Richard Forster et al. (Exzelsior Verlag, Berlin 2018), pages 165 ~ 213. I was an editorial consultant for this, but the very well-written text was by Theo van Ees and Christian Wohlfarth, and so you are in very safe hands.