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Arthur Koestler (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. He was a communist during much of the 1930s, and remained politically active until the 1950s. He wrote a number of 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 giving a new theory of the origins of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Koestler's most famous work, 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 (Hungarians put the surname first - see Hungarian name) in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, to a German-speaking Hungarian family of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. His father, Henrik, was an industrialist and inventor whose business ideas revealed flawed judgement; for example, he invested for a while in the manufacture of a kind of radioactive soap. When Artur was 14, his family moved to Vienna. In 1918, Hungary obtained its independence from Austria and flirted for a while with Bolshevism (the Hungarian Soviet Republic).

Koestler studied science and psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became involved in Zionism. After completing his studies, he worked as a news correspondent. From 1926 to 1929 he lived in the British Mandate of Palestine, partly in a kibbutz. He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1931, but left it after the Stalinist purges 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 1931, Koestler was a member of a zeppelin expedition to the North Pole.

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 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 in a camp for resident aliens at Le Vernet - 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. He was made a CBE in the 1970s.

In 1983, Koestler, suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemia, committed joint suicide by taking an overdose of drugs with his third wife Cynthia. He had long been an advocate of voluntary euthanasia, and in 1981, had become vice-president of "EXIT", a British group campaigning for it. 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."

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, Koestler became fluent in Hungarian, 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, and/or studied in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Palestine (pre-independence 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 claimed to have produced the first Hebrew language crossword puzzles.

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 wrongly 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). He did not merely arrive at different answers to accepted questions; rather, he tended to ask questions that no one else thought to ask.

This originality resulted in an uneven set of ideas and conclusions. Some of them, such as his work on creativity (Insight and Outlook, Act of Creation) and the history of science (The Sleepwalkers), are arguably brilliant and challenge us to readjust our thinking. 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.

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.

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. He left a substantial part of his estate to establish the Koestler Institute at the University of Edinburgh dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomena. His The Roots of Coincidence centered on yet another line of unconventional research by Paul Kammerer, this time his claim of a quantum theory of coincidence or synchronicity, a theory Koestler evaluated in light of the writings of Carl Jung. More controversial were Koestler's studies of levitation and telepathy.

Judaism

Although a lifelong atheist, Koestler's ancestry was Jewish. His biographer David Cesarani has claimed that Koestler deliberately disowned his Jewish ancestry.

Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe 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 current 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. Some Palestinians have eagerly seized upon this thesis, believing that to identify most Jews as non-Semites seriously undermines their historical claim to the land of Israel. The thesis of The Thirteenth Tribe has since been criticized. To date, the genetic evidence has been inconclusive. Some researchers claim to find a Middle Eastern genetic element in virtually all Ashkenazim. Others note both Turkic words and Turkic genetic markers in these populations. But the usefulness of genetic markers in determining ancestry can be problematic; for instance, Ashkenazim also display a high level of similarity to the genetic markers of Khoisan Bushmen in Southern Africa. A thorough review of the scientific literature can be found at Khazaria.com. He used historical references, and cultural traits to support this hypothesis; however the work predates genetic testing, which would have added a whole new layer of material to the controversy.

When Koestler resided in Palestine during the 1920s, he lived on a kibbutz, an experience forming the basis of his unfinished Thieves in the Night. His view of Israel was that it would never be destroyed, short of a second Shoah. He supported the statehood of Israel, but opposed a diaspora Jewish culture. In an interview published in the London Jewish Chronicle around the time of Israel's founding, Koestler asserted that all Jews should either migrate to Israel, or assimilate completely into their local cultures. Koestler was also no dogmatic Zionist; for instance, he proposed that Israel drop the Hebrew alphabet for the Roman.

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. He wrote about this experience in an article about the drug culture titled Return Trip to Nirvana, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 1967. This article challenged Aldous Huxley's defence of drugs in his 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

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. The title Synchronicity was also inspired by Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence, which mentions 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."

The cyberpunk manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell was also inspired by Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine.

Inspector Finch can also be seen reading a copy of The Roots of Coincidence in the graphic novel, V for Vendetta. Koestler is referenced several times in the work.

In the 2002 film Red Dragon, "The Act of Creation" is one of the books seized from Hannibal Lecter's cell.

Bibliography

A comprehensive introduction to Koestler's writing and thought is the following 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":

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 3406521770.
  • David Cesarani, 1998. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. ISBN 0684867206.
  • Hamilton, Iain, 1982. Koestler: A Biography. ISBN 0025476602.
  • Koestler, Mamaine, 1985. Living with Koestler. ISBN 0297785311 or ISBN 0312490291.
  • Levene, M., 1984. Arthur Koestler. ISBN 080446412X.
  • Mikes, George, 1983. Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship. ISBN 0233976124.
  • Pearson, S. A., 1978. Arthur Koestler. ISBN 0805766995.

Langston Hughes's autobiography also documents their meeting in Turkestan during the Soviet era.

Books by Koestler (excluding autobiography)

Writings as a contributor

External links

1905 births | 1983 deaths | British essayists | British Jews | British novelists | British philosophers | British political writers | British World War II veterans | Commanders of the Order of the British Empire | Drug-related suicides | German language writers | Hungarian communists | Hungarian essayists | Hungarian Jews | Hungarian novelists | Hungarian philosophers | Jewish novelists | Khazar studies | Polyglots | Spanish Civil War people | Writers who committed suicide

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