Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian author. In 1968 he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for outstanding contribution to European culture" and in 1972 he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Background
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest, where his grandfather had fled from Russia during the Crimean War. Most of his childhood years were spent living with his family in boarding houses in Budapest and Vienna, tended by a succession of governesses. With his father he maintained a civilized, reserved relationship. He recalled that his formative years were dominated by guilt, fear, and loneliness, factors he believed contributed to his “subsequent preoccupation with physical violence, terror, and torture.”
Education
He became attracted to communism at the age of fourteen when the Communist party rose to power in Budapest in 1919. In his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, published in 1952, he wrote: “[Communism] had the sound of a good, just, and hopeful word.”
Between 1922 and 1926, he studied technical engineering at the University of Vienna, but dropped out on an impulse before graduation, after having devoted most of his academic years to Zionist Revisionist politics and to the self-taught study of psychology and psychiatry.
Career
In 1926 he boarded a ship to Palestine. After a futile attempt at settling in the Jezreel Valley, he endured a year of poverty and semistarvation while establishing and running, single-handed, a political press agency in Haifa. The agency closed down a few months later, and after a succession of short-lived jobs in Palestine, he spent a brief spell in Berlin, working for the Revisionist party. He was cynical about the ideals motivating the kibbutz society, and his experiences in Palestine formed the basis of his novel, Thieves in the Night (1946).
The turning point of his career came in 1927 when he received a post as the Middle East correspondent of the Ullstein newspaper chain, for which he worked in Jerusalem and later in Paris until 1930. Losing interest in Zionism, he spent the next three years as scientific editor of the Vossische Zeitung in Berlin and foreign editor of the B.Z. am Mittag. During 1931, he was the only member of the press on board the Graf Zeppelin polar expedition.
His sympathies increasingly turned toward Marxism with the “beginning of the age of barbarism in Europe,” as he states in his autobiography, and he visited Russia during 1932 and 1933. However, he abandoned the party in 1938, following Stalin’s purges. His novel Darkness at Noon (1941), in which a Bolshevik under inhuman psychological pressures admits to crimes he did not commit and denounces totalitarian judicial practices, was very influential. The God that Failed (1949) also describes his disillusionment with communism.
In 1936 Koestler became the war correspondent of the London-based News Chronicle. Sent to cover the Spanish Civil War, he was captured by the Nationalists and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to a prison sentence following the international protest that ensued, and he spent one hundred days in Franco’s jails, describing his agonizing experience in Spanish Testament (1937).
In 1939-1940 he was interned in a French detention camp, after which he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. He escaped to Britain when France fell and served in the British Pioneer Corps.
In 1945 he returned to Palestine as a special correspondent for the Times of London and served as a special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, the New York Herald Tribune, and Le Figaro in 1948. His book Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1917-1949 (1949) is a survey of the British Mandate period and the emergence of the State of Israel. Koestler himself, however, opted for assimilation, the only alternative he believed was open to Diaspora Jews who did not want to immigrate to Israel.
His book The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) contains essays on political subjects. From the late 1950s he turned to philosophical analyses of art, society, science, and religion, such as The Lotus and the Robot (1960), which examines the contemporary significance of Yoga and Zen Buddhism, and The Act of Creation (1964) on the creative process. His Thirteenth Tribe (1967) endeavors to show that the bulk of European Jewry is descended from the Khazars, an Indo-European people who settled in southern Russia.
On March 3, 1983, Arthur Koestler was found dead in his apartment together with his third wife, Cynthia, in an apparent suicide pact. He had been suffering from leukemia and Parkinson’s disease. He left 600,000 dollars to promote university study of psychic phenomena.
Views
ARTHUR KOESTLER ON HIS FAMILY
Over thirty years before his death from an overdose of tranquilizers, Koestler wrote in Arrow in the Blue, the first volume of his autobiography:
“The family tree of the Koestlers starts with my grandfather Leopold and ends with — me.”
“With the present writer’s death, which according to a Gypsy predicition will be unexpected and violent, the Koestler, or Kostler, or Kestler, or Kesztler saga will come to a fitting end.”
Membership
Served in the French Army, 1940, in the British Army, 1941.