Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), a Hungarian-British Jewish author, is perhaps most well-known for his repudiation of communism in Richard Crossman’s (1949) The God That Failed. Born in Budapest, Koestler was an only child. His family were relatively well-off, living in large rented apartments within Budapest with a cook and foreign governess. The outbreak of World War One, however, in 1914, caused his father’s business to collapse and they were forced to move to a boarding house in Vienna. Returning to Budapest when the war ended, the family supported the Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution in 1919, which Koestler continued to speak favourably of in his autobiography (published in 1953).
In 1922, Koestler attended the Vienna Polytechnic University, studying engineering, but was soon expelled for non-payment of fees, and left Vienna to work as an engineer in a factory in Mandate Palestine for a year. In 1927, he began working as the Middle East correspondent for Ullstein-Verlag newspapers, and worked in Jerusalem for two years. He was later transferred to Paris and in 1931 was appointed science editor for Vossische Zeitung. That same year, with the support of designer Eva Striker (1906-2011), he joined the Communist Party of Germany. He described the experience of turning to communism in The God That Failed (1949), calling it a kind of ‘mental rapture which only the convert knows’:[1]
The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jig-saw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question; doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past – a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance of the tasteless, colourless world of those who don’t know.[2]
In the 1930s, he wrote a book on the Soviet Five-Year Plan in German. Between 1933 and 1935, he worked against fascism in Paris, writing propaganda for the Comintern chief propaganda director, Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940). In 1936, he visited General Franco’s headquarters in Seville for the Comintern, undercover as a Franco sympathiser to collect proof of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’s involvement in Franco’s military work.[3] This led to his later work, L’Espagne Ensanglantée. In 1937, he returned to Spain, and was arrested by Luis Bolín (1894-1969), head propagandist for Franco, after the fall of Málaga. He was kept in prison until June that year, when he was finally exchanged for another prisoner.
These experiences seem to have contributed to a disillusionment with communism, which led to his resignation from the Communist Party in 1938, after he had written The Gladiators (1939). This was soon followed by its sequel, Darkness at Noon (1940), and the final part of the trilogy, Arrival and Departure (1943).
The Gladiators is a novel which portrays the Third Servile War that took place between 73-71 BC. In contrast to Howard Fast’s later novel on the Spartacus revolt, Spartacus (1951), this text is explicitly anti-party communism. Both sides of the revolt are depicted as corrupt, both morally and sexually, and revolution is depicted as ultimately futile. Indeed, we see the revolutionaries themselves essentially turn into their capitalist oppressors, the Sun State (the ideal communist state) turning into a pipe dream as greed and power overtake morality on both sides:
Did we fight and endure the most unusual hardships in order to exchange the old yoke for a new one? In the old days your belly growled with wrath, now it growls with discipline. Life in the Sun Town has become jaded and narrow; enthusiasm and fraternity of yore – what has become of them? The old chasm between leaders and common people has opened again, the Imperator [referring to Spartacus] meets only with Councillors and diplomats – to whose entertainment, I might add, the scarcity of provisions does not seem to apply; but no matter.[4]
Koestler is deeply disparaging of the Communist Party through the guise of Spartacus’ revolutionaries. He uses the ancient world as an allegory to depict the corrupt and oppressive state of the Communist Parties in the USSR and beyond. It is consistent with the way in which he speaks of the Communist Party in his chapter in The God That Failed (1949), too, where he states the following:
In the face of revolting injustice, the only honourable attitude is to revolt, and to leave introspection for better times. But if we survey history and compare the lofty aims in the name of which revolutions were started, and the sorry end to which they came, we see again and again how a polluted civilisation pollutes its own revolutionary offspring.[5]
Koestler makes it clear, then – it is the Party, the “ideology”, that is the problem in communist circles; ‘when ideas become ideology – i.e., when the revolutionary consciousness is brought, in Leninist fashion, to the movement from the outside – they display their pernicious effects’: ‘Revolutionary leaders inevitably become tyrants, but they at least preserve the word for the oppressed masses.’[6]
During World War Two, he was arrested in 1939 and detained by the French Government after turning himself in, being released after British government pressure. He then joined the French Foreign Legion and deserted in North Africa, hoping to reach Daphne Hardy (1917-2003), his lover who was carrying his manuscript for Darkness at Noon. When he reached the UK with no entry permit, he was imprisoned, and Daphne’s English translation of Darkness at Noon was published with him still in prison. He was released in early 1941.
In 1942, he was given a job in the UK Ministry of Information, where he wrote propaganda films, broadcasts, and essays for the British Government. Koestler became a close friend of George Orwell (1903-1950). In 1956 he organised anti-Soviet action in response to the Hungarian Uprising.
Arthur Koestler was a strong, party-political communist turned anti-communist activist, who, in his The Gladiators (1939), used Roman history to depict the futility underlying revolutionary action and the cynical view which he had of communism under The Party.
This profile was written by Anna Coopey
[1] Crossman (1949): The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (The Right Book Club) p. 32.
[2] Crossman (1949) p. 32.
[3] He was forced to flee after his cover was blown by a German acquaintance.
[4] Koestler, Arthur (1939/1981): The Gladiators (Vintage Classics) p. 202.
[5] Crossman (1949) p. 26.
[6] Bokina, John (2001): From Communist Ideologue to Postmodern Rebel: Spartacus in Novels from The European Legacy, Vol. 6, Issue 6 (pp. 725-730), p. 726.
