Arthur Koestler CBE (September
5, 1905, Budapest – March
3, 1983, London) was a Hungarian polymath who became a naturalized British subject. He wrote journalism, novels, social philosophy, and books on scientific subjects. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of
Germany, but left the party seven years later, after emigrating to the United Kingdom. By the late 1940s, he was one of the most recognized and outspoken British anti-communists, and he remained politically active through the 1950s. He wrote several popular books,
including Arrow in the Blue (the first volume of his autobiography), The Yogi and the Commissar (a collection of
essays, many dealing with Communism), The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing
Vision of the Universe, The Act of Creation, and The Thirteenth Tribe (a new theory on the origins of
Eastern European Jews). Koestler's Magnum opus, the novel Darkness at Noon about the
Soviet 1930s purges, ranks with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as a fictional
treatment of Stalinism. He also wrote Encyclopædia Britannica articles.
Life
He was born Kösztler Artúr (Hungarian names have the surname first) in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to a German-speaking Hungarian family of
Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father, Henrik, was a prosperous start-up industrialist and inventor. His great business success was a "health"
soap, which substituted conventional soaps based on animal fats (scarce during the WWI). Henrik's mineral soaps were thought to
have health qualities thanks to their weak radioactivity, which in those times was considered curative. When Artur was 14, his
family moved to Vienna. It was at this age which he had a "mystical experience", which perhaps
gave rise to his later interest in the paranormal. [1]
Koestler studied science and psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became President of a Zionist
student fraternity. A month before he was due to finish his studies, he burnt his matriculation book and did not take his final
examinations but made "aliyah" to Israel (then a British Mandate). From 1926 to 1929 he lived in
the British Mandate of Palestine, firstly in a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley ("Heftzibah"), and later in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where he almost starved.
He left Palestine for Paris as a correspondent to the Ullstein group of German newspapers. A year
later he became science editor for Ullstein based in Berlin; a highlight of that post was membership in a 1931 Zeppelin expedition to the North Pole.
He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1931, but left it after the
Stalinist show-trials of 1938. During this period he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and climbed Mount Ararat in Turkey. In Turkmenistan, he met the Black American writer Langston Hughes.
In his memoir The Invisible Writing, Koestler recalls that during the
summer of 1935 he "wrote about half of a satirical novel called The Good Soldier
Schweik Goes to War Again..... It had been commissioned by Willy Münzenberg
[the Comintern's chief propagandist in the
West] ... but was vetoed by the Party on the grounds of the book's 'pacifist errors' ..." (p. 283).
Soon after the outbreak of World War II, the French
authorities detained him for several months as a resident alien in Vernet Internment Camp
[2] in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains. Upon his release, he joined the
French Foreign Legion. He eventually escaped to England via Morocco and Portugal. In England,
he served in the British Army as a member of the British Pioneer
Corps, 1941-42, then worked for the BBC. He became a British subject in 1945, and returned to France after the war, where he rubbed shoulders with the set
gravitating around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir (one of the characters in de Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins is
believed to be based on Koestler).
Koestler returned to London and spent the rest of his life writing and lecturing.
In June 1950, Koestler attended and delivered the keynote address at a conference of anti-Communist intellectuals in Berlin that led to the founding of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom. He was made a Commander in the
Order of the British Empire in the 1970s.
In 1983, suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemia, Koestler committed joint suicide with his third wife, Cynthia, by
taking an overdose of drugs. He had long been an advocate of voluntary euthanasia, and in
1981 had become vice president of EXIT (now the United Kingdom's Voluntary Euthanasia Society). His will endowed the chair of
parapsychology at the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland.
Speaking out against Nazi atrocities during World War II
During the Second World War, Koestler continually spoke out against the atrocities of
the Nazi regime in Germany — his Central European
Jewish family background made him particularly involved in a way that many British and
United States politicians were not. He had also witnessed personally, the growth of
extremist tendencies in the region.
Koestler and a minority of writers and public figures believed that if they sufficiently described the horrors being committed
in Europe in news media and public meetings, it would spur the West to action. Despite their efforts, these protests often fell
on deaf ears. Capturing their frustration, Koestler described these people as the "screamers". In 1944, he wrote:
| “ |
We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night
when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the
German Parliament; we said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought
we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing-by hot steam, mass-electrocution, and live
burial-of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing in recorded
history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while
I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness.[1] |
” |
Despite these frustrations, Koestler and the "screamers" continued their campaign until the late stages of the war.
Multilingualism
In addition to his mother tongue German, and the Hungarian of his homeland, Koestler became fluent in English, and French, and knew some Hebrew and Russian. His biographer David Cesarani claims there is some evidence that Koestler may have picked up some Yiddish from his grandfather. Koestler's multilingualism was principally due to his having resided,
worked, or studied in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Palestine (pre-1948 Israel), the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France, all by 40 years of age.
Though he wrote the bulk of his later work in English, Koestler wrote his best-known novels in three different languages:
The Gladiators in Hungarian, Darkness at Noon in German (although the original is now lost), and Arrival and Departure in English. His journalism was written in German, Hebrew, French and
English, and he even produced the first Hebrew language crossword puzzles and wrote the
sketches for the first Hebrew cabaret ("HaMatateh").
Women
Koestler was married to Dorothy Asher (1935–50), Mamaine Paget (1950–52), and Cynthia Jefferies (1965–83). He also had a very
short fling with the French writer Simone de Beauvoir. Cesarani claimed that Koestler beat and raped several women, including film director Jill Craigie. The resulting protests led to the removal of a bust of Koestler from public display at the
University of Edinburgh.
Questions have also been raised by his suicide pact with his last spouse. Although he
was terminally ill at the time, she was apparently healthy, leading some to claim he
persuaded her to take her own life.
Mixed legacy
Just as Darkness at Noon was selling well during the Cold War of the 1940s and '50s, Koestler announced his retirement from politics. Much of what he wrote
thereafter revealed a multidisciplinary thinker whose work anticipated a number of trends by many years. He was among the first
to experiment with LSD (in a laboratory). He also wrote about
Japanese and Indian mysticism in The Lotus and the Robot (1960).
This originality resulted in an uneven set of ideas and conclusions. Topics covered by his works include creativity
(Insight and Outlook, Act of Creation) and the history of science (The Sleepwalkers). Some of his other pursuits,
such as his interest in the paranormal, his support for euthanasia, his theory of the origin of Ashkenazi Jews like himself,
and his disagreement with Darwinism, are more controversial.
Politics
Koestler was involved in a number of political causes during his life, from Zionism and
communism to anti-communism, voluntary
euthanasia, and campaigns against capital
punishment, particularly hanging. He was also an early advocate of nuclear disarmament. In 1943 he met Jan Karski.
Journalism
Until the bestseller status of Darkness at Noon made him financially comfortable, Koestler often earned his living as a
journalist and foreign correspondent, trading on his ability to write quickly in several languages, and to acquire with facility
a working knowledge of a new language. He wrote for a variety of newspapers, including Vossische Zeitung (science editor) and B.Z. am Mittag (foreign editor) in the 1920s. In the
early 1930s, he worked for the Ullstein publishing group in Berlin and did freelance writing for
the French press.
While covering the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, he was captured and held for several
months by the Falangists in Málaga, until the British Foreign Office negotiated his release. His Spanish Testament records these experiences, which he soon transformed into his classic prison
novel Darkness at Noon. After his release from Spanish detention, Koestler
worked for the News Chronicle, then edited Die Zukunft with Willi Münzenberg, an anti-Nazi, anti-Stalinist German language paper based in Paris, founded in 1938. During and after World War II, he wrote for a number of English and
American papers, including The Sunday Telegraph, on various subjects. He was
a frequent contributor to Encounter, one of the most influential periodicals of the
Cold War period.
Paranormal and scientific interests
During the last 30 years of his life, Koestler wrote extensively on science and scientific practice. The post-modernist scepticism colouring much of this writing tended to alienate most of the scientific
community. A case in point is his 1971 book The Case of the Midwife Toad about the biologist Paul Kammerer, who claimed to find experimental support for Lamarckian
inheritance.
Koestler's trilogy culminating with The Ghost in the Machine and
later Janus: A Summing Up bridges concepts of reductionism and holism with his systemic
theory of Open Hierarchical Systems. Holons in a Holarchy have the dual tendency of integration and development and out of balance they tend to a pathology. He
included his concept of Bisociation that became a profound basis for other's work on creativity and James Papez/Paul McLean's Schizophysiology
to explain the often irrational behaviour of humans as part of Open Hierarchical Systems.
Mysticism and a fascination with the paranormal
imbued much of his later work, and greatly influenced his personal life. For some years following his death a Koestler Society in
London promoted investigation of these and related subjects. He left a substantial part of his estate to establish the Koestler
Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh dedicated to the study of
paranormal phenomena. His The Roots of Coincidence makes an overview of
the scientific research around telepathy and psychokinesis and compares it with the advances in quantum physics at that time. It mentions yet another
line of unconventional research by Paul Kammerer, the theory of coincidence or synchronicity. He also presents critically the related writings of Carl
Jung. More controversial were Koestler's studies of levitation and telepathy. Koestler had joined the SPR in 1950, but perhaps did not publicise
this interest for fear of ridicule [3].
Judaism
Although a lifelong atheist, Koestler's ancestry was Jewish. His biographer David
Cesarani claimed that Koestler deliberately disowned his Jewish ancestry.
When Koestler resided in Palestine during the 1920s, he lived on a kibbutz. This experience
provided background for his novel Thieves in the Night.
He supported the statehood of Israel, but remarked that the Balfour Declaration
of 1917 amounted to "one nation solemnly promising to a second nation the country of a third." [citation needed] He believed that Israel would never be destroyed short of a second Shoah. [citation needed] However, he opposed a diaspora
Jewish culture: In an interview published in the London Jewish Chronicle around the time of Israel's founding, Koestler
maintained that all Jews should either migrate to Israel or else assimilate completely into their local cultures.[citation needed] As for Jewish culture in Israel,
Koestler proposed that Israel drop the Hebrew alphabet for the Roman. [citation needed]
Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) advanced the controversial
thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the Israelites of antiquity, but
from the Khazars, a Turkic people in the
Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the 8th century and were
later forced to move westwards into present-day Russia, Ukraine
and Poland. Koestler stated that part of his intent in writing The Thirteenth Tribe was to
defuse anti-Semitism by undermining the identification of European Jews with Biblical Jews,
with the hope of rendering anti-Semitic epithets such as "Christ killer" inapplicable. Ironically, Koestler's thesis that
Ashkenazi Jews are not Semitic has become an important claim of many anti-Semitic groups.
Recent genetic research studies have contradicted the main thesis of The Thirteenth Tribe. For example, a 2000 study of
haplotypes by Hammer et al indicates that the Y
chromosomes of most Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are of Middle Eastern origin,
containing mutations that are also common among Palestinians and other Middle Eastern
peoples, yet are uncommon in the general European population. These results strongly suggest that most male ancestors of the
Ashkenazi Jews can be traced primarily to the Middle East.[2] A second study (2006) by Behar et al, based on haplotype analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), also indicates
that about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descended matrilineally from just four women. These four "founder lineages"
were "likely from a Hebrew/Levantine mtDNA pool"
originating in the Near East in the first and second centuries CE.[3]
Hallucinogens
In November, 1960, Koestler participated in Timothy Leary's early experiments with
psilocybin at Harvard. According to fellow participant Charles Olson, Koestler was distressed by the effects of the drug and isolated himself in an unfurnished
bedroom in the Cambridge house Leary used for his project. Koestler again experimented with psilocybin at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, comparing this
trip to Walt Disney's Fantasia.
In Return Trip to Nirvana, published in the Sunday Telegraph in 1967, Koestler wrote about the drug culture and
his own experiences with hallucinogens. The article also challenged the defence of drugs in Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception:
I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of
"the chemical opening of doors into the Other World", and with his belief that drugs can procure "what Catholic theologians call
a gratuitous grace". Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in
either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
Cultural influence and references
In his younger days, the singer Sting was an avid reader of Koestler. His band of the time,
The Police, were to name one of their albums Ghost in the Machine after one of Koestler's books. Their album
Synchronicity was also inspired by Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, which discusses Carl Jung's
theory of the same name. Koestler knew little about the burgeoning New Wave (music) scene, and is alleged to have said:
Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out
there is a pop group called The Police—I don't know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks—and
they've made an album of my essay The Ghost in the Machine. I didn't know anything about it until my clipping agency sent
me a review of the record.[4]
Koestler's will also left money for the The Koestler Trust, which helps prison inmates to
express themselves creatively, as a means to rehabilitation. The trust continues to exhibit work by prisoners on a regular basis.
He also left money for the Department of Parapsychology in Edinburgh.
Bibliography
A comprehensive introduction to Koestler's writing and thought is this 1980 anthology of passages from many of his books,
described as "A selection from 50 years of his writings, chosen and with new commentary by the author":
- 1980. Bricks to Babel. Random House, ISBN 0-394-51897-7
Autobiography
The books The Lotus and the Robot, The God that Failed, and Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen, as well
as his numerous essays, all contain autobiographical information.
Biographies
- Atkins, J., 1956. Arthur Koestler.
- Buckard, Christian G., 2004. Arthur Koestler: Ein extremes Leben 1905-1983. ISBN 3-406-52177-0.
- David Cesarani, 1998. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. ISBN
0-684-86720-6.
- Hamilton, Iain, 1982. Koestler: A Biography. ISBN 0-02-547660-2.
- Koestler, Mamaine, 1985. Living with Koestler. ISBN 0-297-78531-1 or ISBN 0-312-49029-1.
- Levene, M., 1984. Arthur Koestler. ISBN 0-8044-6412-X.
- Mikes, George, 1983. Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship. ISBN 0-233-97612-4.
- Pearson, S. A., 1978. Arthur Koestler. ISBN 0-8057-6699-5.
Langston Hughes's autobiography also documents their meeting in Turkestan during the Soviet era.
Books by Koestler (excluding autobiography)
- 1934. Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen. Very difficult to find. In his The Invisible Writing, Koestler calls
the book Red Days and White Nights, or, more usually, Red Days. Of the five foreign language editions − Russian,
German, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian − which were intended, only the German version was eventually published, "thoroughly
expurgated", in Kharkov, Ukrainian S.S.R., U.S.S.R.
- 1935. The Good Soldier Schweik Goes to War Again.... Unfinished and unpublished.
- 1937. L'Espagne ensanglantée.
- 1939. The Gladiators, 1967 reprint, ISBN 0-02-565320-2. A novel on the
revolt of Spartacus.
- 1940. Darkness at Noon, ISBN 0-09-942491-6
- 1942. Dialogue with Death. Abridgement of Spanish Testament.
- 1943. Arrival and Departure, novel. 1990 reprint, ISBN
0-14-018119-9
- 1945. The Yogi and the Commissar and other essays.
- 1945. Twilight Bar. Drama.
- 1946. Thieves in the Night.
- 1949. The Challenge of our Time.
- 1949. Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917-1949.
- 1949. Insight and Outlook.
- 1951. The Age of Longing.
- 1955. The Trail of the Dinosaur and other essays.
- 1956. Reflections on Hanging.
- 1959. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe.
ISBN 0-14-019246-8 An account of changing scientific paradigms.
- 1960. The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler. (excerpted from The Sleepwalkers.) ISBN 0-385-09576-7
- 1960. Lotus and the Robot, ISBN 0-09-059891-1. Koestler's journey to
India and Japan, and his assessment of East and West.
- 1961. Control of the Mind.
- 1961. Hanged by the Neck. Reuses some material from Reflections on Hanging.
- 1963. Suicide of a Nation.
- 1964. The Act of Creation.
- 1967. The Ghost in the Machine. Penguin reprint 1990: ISBN
0-14-019192-5.
- 1968. Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967.
- 1970. The Age of Longing, ISBN 0-09-104520-7.
- 1971. The Case of the Midwife Toad, ISBN 0-394-71823-2. An account of Paul Kammerer's research on Lamarckian evolution and what he called
"serial coincidences".
- 1972. The Roots of Coincidence, ISBN 0-394-71934-4. Sequel to The
Case of the Midwife Toad.
- 1972. The Call Girls: A Tragicomedy with a Prologue and Epilogue. A novel
about scholars making a living on the international seminar-conference circuit.
- 1973. The Lion and the Ostrich.
- 1974. The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973, ISBN 0-394-49596-9.
- 1976. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, ISBN
0-394-40284-7.
- 1976. Astride the Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70, ISBN 0-394-40063-1.
- 1977. Twentieth Century Views: A Collection of Critical Essays, ISBN 0-13-049213-2.
- 1978. Janus: A Summing Up, ISBN 0-394-50052-0. Sequel to The Ghost in
the Machine
- 1981. Kaleidoscope. Essays from Drinkers of Infinity and The Heel of
Achilles, plus later pieces and stories.
Writings as a contributor
- The Encyclopoedia [sic] of Sexual Knowledge (1934) (In his The Invisible
Writing, Koestler uses the ligature, spelling the word "Encyclopœdia".)
- Foreign Correspondent (1939)
- The Practice of Sex (1940)
- The God That Failed (1950) (collection of testimonies by
ex-Communists)
- Attila, the Poet (1954) (Encounter ; ; 1954.2 (5)). On loan at the UCL
library of the School of Slavonic & Eastern European Studies.
- UCL library online
- Beyond Reductionism: The Alpbach Symposium. New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (co-editor with J.R. Smythies,
1969), ISBN 0-8070-1535-0
- The Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome
(1973)
- The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art (1976)
- Life After Death, (co-editor, 1976)
- Humour and Wit. I: Encyclopædia Britannica. 15th ed. vol.
9.(1983)
- *humour -
Encyclopædia Britannica(by Arthur Koestler)
Notes
- ^ "On Disbelieving Atrocities", New York Times Magazine, January 1944 and reprinted in
The Yogi and the Commissar, Macmillan (1945), pp. 88-92.
- ^ Hammer, M. F.; A. J. Redd, E.
T. Wood, M. R. Bonner, H. Jarjanazi, T. Karafet, S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, A. Oppenheim, M. A. Jobling, T. Jenkins, H. Ostrer,
and B. Bonné-Tamir (May 9 2000). "Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic
haplotypes". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- ^ Behar, Doron M.; Ene Metspalu,
Toomas Kivisild, Alessandro Achilli, Yarin Hadid, Shay Tzur, Luisa Pereira, Antonio Amorim, Lluı's Quintana-Murci, Kari Majamaa,
Corinna Herrnstadt, Neil Howell, Oleg Balanovsky, Ildus Kutuev, Andrey Pshenichnov, David Gurwitz, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, Antonio
Torroni, Richard Villems, and Karl Skorecki (March 2006). "The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event". The
American Journal of Human Genetics 78 (3): 487-97. PMID 16404693.
- ^ Cesarani, David (1999) Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. Free
Press.
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
