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A man who knew his century: Arthur Koestler, born 100 years ago
National Review, Sept 12, 2005 by David Pryce-Jones
IN a slightly dingy side street, not far from the center of Budapest, stands a house with a plaque on its brick wall recording that on September 5, 1905, Arthur Koestler was born in an apartment on the first floor. The course of his life was to dramatize the epoch's defining struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. His world-famous novel Darkness at Noon, and then his groundbreaking essay in the collection The God That Failed, powerfully dispelled the appeal of Communism. In return, throughout the Cold War the Soviets and their mouthpieces attacked him as an Enemy of the People, and it was too dangerous for him to revisit Budapest. What a revolution that they are proud of him now in his native country! That plaque signifies that Hungary has regained its freedom, and Koestler's courage and genius are recognized at last.
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Koestler liked to say that he was a typical Central European blown about in the storms of the century. This was true in the sense that the coming Age of the Dictators was unimaginable in families like his. His father was a businessman with quirky and loss-making ideas, for instance developing radioactive toilet soap and a machine for cutting envelopes open. That family apartment, Koestler recorded, was "stuffed with plush curtains, antimacassars, tassels, fringes, lace covers, bronze nymphs, cuspidors, and Meissen stags at bay." Social claustrophobia, his Jewish heritage, curiosity about everything under the sun, and above all a supreme intelligence set him off on a lifelong existential inquiry.
Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing, his two volumes of autobiography, document like no other books contemporary intellectual fashions and passions. As a young man at the University of Vienna, Koestler became a Jewish nationalist, a Zionist. In 1926, in the first of a series of steps motivated by ideological belief, he emigrated to British-controlled Palestine. He learned Hebrew. Chance brought him a job as a journalist with the Ullstein press, Germany's leading publishers. This meant moving back to Europe, and he reached Berlin on September 14, 1930, the day of the elections that sealed Hitler's rise to power. The age of reason and enlightenment, he was to write, was drawing to a close.
Communism appeared to oppose Nazism, and that naturally attracted Koestler. But he makes it clear that for him the doctrine fulfilled the much wider task of answering his existential doubts, in particular the inferiority complex he ascribed to himself. A closed system, Communism relieved the believer of responsibility for himself. The Party commissioned him to write a travel book about the Soviet Union. Now he learned Russian, and in July 1932 he took a train to Kharkov in the belief that once more he was emigrating to a promised land. Much later--long after the commissioned travel book--he wrote an account of that journey to analyze how he could so have deceived himself, but it still comes as a shock that someone of such superior intelligence could have observed the victims of Stalin's enforced famine in Ukraine and rationalized the horror away. (The Party published only an expurgated version of his original travel book. Some KGB archive must have the complete manuscript of what would be a major literary curiosity.)
Luckily Koestler was allowed to leave the Soviet Union. In Paris he then became part of the Comintern propaganda outfit directed by the inventive but sinister Willi Munzenberg. In that capacity, he was sent undercover as a war correspondent for a British newspaper to the Franco side in the Spanish civil war. In Spanish Testament, yet another classic, he describes the series of events in which he was detected as a Communist agent, and held in solitary confinement under sentence of death for over a hundred days. In a characteristic phrase he speaks of the "oceanic feeling" that the prospect of execution induced. A committee of the great and the good made a scandal of his plight, and he was then exchanged for one of Franco's pilots who had been shot down.
Communism in fact proved not the opposite of Nazism, but its kindred spirit. In obedience to Stalin, the German Communist party played Hitler's game by helping to destroy the moderates, the Social Democrats, in a tacit collaboration with Nazism that the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 brought into the open, and that made world war inevitable. In the last years of peace, living in Paris, Koestler came to realize that Communism was essentially a religious rather than a political phenomenon; it was a new faith based on Soviet mythology. The doctrine held that the ends justified the means, and that, he concluded, was the root of its evil.
Liberated from the Party and in possession of inside knowledge of its workings, Koestler sat down to write Darkness at Noon. He modeled his hero Rubashov on Bukharin and Radek and other victims of Stalin's recent and terrifying show trials. They were palpably not guilty of the accusations against them but confessed nonetheless. An astounded world wondered why they had consented to their own judicial murder. In Koestler's account, the Party has higher but hidden reasons for demanding that these men confess to crimes they could not have committed. Since by definition the Party can do no wrong, their self-incrimination is a last service to it. "Die in silence" is a refrain running through the novel. The reality was far simpler: These unfortunates were tortured and their wives and families victimized because a paranoid Stalin saw them as rivals. Nonetheless this imaginative depiction of Communism in practice proved more powerful than any number of polemics, and soon gave Koestler his international reputation.
