Arthur Koestler CBE (UK: /ˈkɜːstlər/, US: /ˈkɛst-/, German: [ˈaʁtuːɐ̯ ˈkœstlɐ], Hungarian: Kösztler Artúr [ˈkøstlɛr ˈɒrtuːr]; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was an author and journalist born in Austria-Hungary. He was born in Budapest and studied in Austria, except for his early years in school. In 1931, he joined the Communist Party of Germany but left in 1938 after becoming unhappy with Stalin’s ideas.

In 1940, Koestler moved to Britain and wrote the novel Darkness at Noon, which criticized strong, controlling governments and made him famous worldwide. Over the next 43 years, he supported many political causes and wrote books, memoirs, biographies, and essays. In 1949, he secretly worked with a British organization called the Information Research Department (IRD), which helped publish and share his writings and funded his work. In 1968, he received the Sonning Prize for his important contributions to European culture. In 1972, he was honored as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and in 1979, he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. On 1 March 1983, Koestler and his wife, Cynthia, died by suicide at their London home after taking large amounts of barbiturate-based Tuinal capsules.

Life

Arthur Koestler began his education during the late years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother briefly stayed at a hospital where Sigmund Freud worked. In Vienna during the time between World War I and World War II, he became the personal assistant to Vladimir Jabotinsky, an early leader of the Zionist movement. While traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young Communist, he met Langston Hughes. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a party in Valencia before being captured by Franco’s forces and imprisoned. In Weimar Berlin, he joined a group led by a Comintern agent named Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met important German Communists, including Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, and Bertolt Brecht. When fleeing France and fearing capture by the Gestapo, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took the pills weeks later when he thought he could not leave Lisbon, but he survived. Along the way, he had lunch with Heinrich Mann, drank with Dylan Thomas, became friends with George Orwell, met Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s London apartment. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly because of the help from Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped start the Congress for Cultural Freedom with Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he gave lectures that impressed young Salman Rushdie.

Koestler was born in Budapest to Jewish parents, Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles). Henrik’s father, Lipót Koestler, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1861, Lipót married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a wealthy timber merchant, and their son Henrik was born on August 18, 1869, in Miskolc, Hungary. Henrik left school at age 16 and worked as an errand boy for a clothing business. He taught himself English, German, and French, and later became a partner in the firm. He later started his own business importing textiles into Hungary.

Koestler’s mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on June 25, 1871, into a well-known Jewish family in Prague. Among her ancestors was Jonas Mischel Loeb Jeitteles, an 18th-century doctor and writer, whose son Judah Jeitteles was a famous poet—Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Adele’s father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna, where she grew up until about 1890. When financial problems arose, Jacob left his wife and daughter and moved to the United States. Adele and her mother moved from Vienna to Budapest to live with Adele’s older married sister.

Henrik and Adele met in 1898 and married in 1900. Their only child, Arthur, was born on September 5, 1905. The Koestlers lived in large, well-furnished rented apartments in Jewish areas of Budapest. During Arthur’s early years, they hired a cook-housekeeper and a foreign governess. His primary education began at a private kindergarten founded by Laura Striker (née Polányi). Her daughter, Eva Striker, later became Koestler’s lover, and they remained close friends for life.

The start of World War I in 1914 caused Koestler’s father to lose foreign business partners, and his business failed. The family moved temporarily to a boarding house in Vienna. After the war ended, they returned to Budapest. As written in Koestler’s autobiography, he and his family supported the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution of 1919. Although the small soap factory owned by Koestler’s father was taken over by the government, the elder Koestler was named its director and was paid well. Even though the autobiography was published in 1953, after Koestler became an anti-communist, he wrote positively about the Hungarian Communists and their leader, Béla Kun. He remembered the hope for a better future he felt as a teenager in revolutionary Budapest.

The Koestlers later saw Budapest briefly occupied by the Romanian Army and then the White Terror under the right-wing rule of Admiral Horthy. In 1920, the family returned to Vienna, where Henrik started a new successful import business.

In September 1922, Koestler entered the University of Vienna to study engineering and joined the Zionist dueling student group Unitas. When Henrik’s business failed, Koestler stopped attending classes and was expelled for not paying fees. In March 1926, he wrote to his parents saying he would go to Mandate Palestine for a year to work as an assistant engineer and gain experience to help him find a job in Austria. On April 1, 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine.

For a short time, Koestler lived in a kibbutz, but his request to join the group called Kvutzat Heftziba was denied. For the next twelve months, he supported himself with low-paying jobs in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Often without money or food, he relied on friends and acquaintances to survive. He sometimes wrote or edited newspapers, mostly in German. In early 1927, he briefly went to Berlin, where he managed the secretariat of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionist party, Hatzohar.

Later that year, through a friend, Koestler got a job as the Middle East correspondent for the Berlin-based newspaper group Ullstein-Verlag. He returned to Jerusalem, where he wrote detailed political essays and lighter stories for his main employer and other newspapers for the next two years. He lived at 29 Rehov Hanevi’im in Jerusalem. He traveled widely, interviewed world leaders, and gained a strong reputation as a journalist. As he wrote in his autobiography, he realized he would never truly fit into Palestine’s Jewish community, the Yishuv, and especially that he could not pursue a journalistic career in Hebrew.

In June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully asked Ullstein to transfer him from Palestine. In September 1929, he was sent to Paris to fill a position in the Ullstein News Service. In 1931, he was called to

Influence and legacy

Arthur Koestler was a well-known intellectual in the twentieth century. Many important thinkers and movements of that time either met him or were influenced by his ideas. He was interested in many popular ideas, including education, psychology, Zionism, communism, existentialism, and topics like psychedelic drugs and euthanasia.

Koestler wrote many books, including novels, autobiographies, reports, a history of science, essays, and articles on subjects such as genetics, psychology, evolution, and the paranormal. His book Darkness at Noon was a major anti-Soviet work that had a strong influence on European Communists and indirectly affected election outcomes. Geoffrey Wheatcroft noted that Koestler’s most important works were those he completed before age 40, including his first memoirs and a series of anti-totalitarian novels.

Koestler was involved in many political and non-political issues, such as Zionism, communism, voluntary euthanasia, ending the death penalty, and changing rules about dogs returning to the United Kingdom. In his book The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), he defended biologist Paul Kammerer, who claimed to have found evidence for Lamarckian inheritance. Koestler suggested that Kammerer’s experiments might have been tampered with by a Nazi sympathizer. He proposed a modified version of Lamarckism to explain some rare evolutionary events.

Koestler criticized neo-Darwinism in his writings but did not oppose the general idea of evolution. A biology professor called him a "populariser" of science, even though his views were not widely accepted by scientists. An article in The Skeptical Inquirer described him as someone who supported Lamarckian evolution, questioned Darwinian natural selection, and believed in psychic phenomena.

Koestler also opposed scientific reductionism, such as behaviorism, which was promoted by B.F. Skinner. In 1968, he gathered scientists like C.H. Waddington and Ludwig von Bertalanffy at his retreat in Alpbach to discuss anti-reductionist ideas. Though he did not gain widespread scientific credibility, he wrote works that blended science and philosophy, such as Insight and Outlook and The Ghost in the Machine. He viewed the universe as a hierarchy of systems, calling the intermediate systems "holons" because they act as both whole units and parts of larger systems.

In his later years, Koestler was interested in mysticism and paranormal phenomena, including extrasensory perception and telepathy. In The Roots of Coincidence (1972), he argued that these phenomena could not be explained by physics. He classified types of coincidence, such as "the library angel," where information is found by chance rather than through searching. He also discussed Paul Kammerer’s theory of coincidence and Carl Jung’s related ideas. His studies on levitation and telepathy were more controversial.

Koestler was born Jewish but did not practice the religion. In a 1950 interview, he suggested that Jews should either move to Israel or fully assimilate into other cultures. In The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), he proposed that Ashkenazi Jews descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people who converted to Judaism in the 8th century. He argued that proving no biological link between Ashkenazi Jews and ancient Israelites could reduce anti-Semitism. He also criticized the Balfour Declaration, stating it involved promising a country to one group while ignoring others.

Collaboration with the Information Research Department

Arthur Koestler's work was supported and shared in secret by a hidden group within the UK Foreign Office called the Information Research Department (IRD). From 1949 onward, Koestler had close personal connections with IRD members and supported their efforts to oppose communism. His relationship with the British government was so strong that he acted as an unofficial advisor to British propagandists. He encouraged them to create a series of anti-communist books aimed at left-wing readers, hoping to compete with the popularity of the Left Book Club.

Languages

Arthur Koestler first learned to speak Hungarian, but his family later used German mostly at home. From a young age, he became well-versed in both languages. It is believed he also learned some Yiddish by talking with his grandfather. By his teenage years, he was fluent in Hungarian, German, French, and English. While living in Israel, Koestler became skilled enough in Hebrew to write stories and create what is thought to be the first Hebrew crossword puzzle in the world. During his time in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1933, he arrived with only 1,000 Russian words and no knowledge of grammar, but he learned enough everyday Russian to communicate. Koestler wrote his books in German until 1940, after which he wrote only in English; the book L'Espagne ensanglantée was translated into French from German. Koestler is reported to have created the word "mimophant," which he later used to describe Bobby Fischer.

Quotes

In August 1945, Koestler was in Palestine, where he read about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima in the Palestine Post. He told a friend: "That is the end of the world war, and it is also the beginning of the end of the world."

Published works

• 1934 (reprinted in 2013): Die Erlebnisse des Genossen Piepvogel in der Emigration
• 1939: The Gladiators (about the revolt of Spartacus)
• 1940: Darkness at Noon
• 1943: Arrival and Departure
• 1946: Thieves in the Night
• 1951: The Age of Longing, ISBN 978-0-09-104520-3
• 1972: The Call-Girls: A Tragicomedy with a Prologue and Epilogue (a novel about scholars working on international seminars and conferences), ISBN 978-0-09-112550-9

• 1945: Twilight Bar
• 1937: Spanish Testament
• 1941: Scum of the Earth
• 1942: Dialogue with Death
• 1952: Arrow in the Blue: The First Volume of an Autobiography, 1905–31 (reprinted in 2005), ISBN 978-0-09-949067-8
• 1954: The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography, 1932–40 (reprinted in 1984), ISBN 978-0-8128-6218-8
• 1984: Stranger on the Square (co-written with Cynthia Koestler; published after Koestler’s death, with an introduction and epilogue by Harold Harris, published by Hutchinson in London), ISBN 978-0-09-154330-3

Note: The books The Lotus and the Robot, The God That Failed, and Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen, as well as many of Koestler’s essays, may include additional autobiographical details.

• 1934: Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen (about Koestler’s travels in the USSR). In The Invisible Writing, Koestler refers to this book as Red Days and White Nights, or more commonly, Red Days. Five foreign language editions (Russian, German, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian) were planned, but only the German version was published in Kharkov, Ukrainian S.S.R. This edition is very rare.
• 1937: L'Espagne ensanglantée
• 1942 (summer): Le yogi et le commissaire
• 1945: The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays
• 1948: “What the Modern World is Doing to the Soul of Man” (an essay in The Challenge of Our Time, 1948)
• 1949: Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917–1949
• 1949: Insight and Outlook
• 1952: The Trail of the Dinosaur (available on Google Books)
• 1955: The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays
• 1955: The Anatomy of Snobbery (published in The Anchor Review, No. 1)
• 1956: Reflections on Hanging
• 1959: The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (ISBN 978-0-14-019246-9; a description of changes in scientific ideas)
• 1960: The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler (an excerpt from The Sleepwalkers), ISBN 978-0-385-09576-1
• 1960: The Lotus and the Robot (ISBN 978-0-09-059891-5; a description of Koestler’s travels in India and Japan and his thoughts on East and West)
• 1961: Control of the Mind
• 1961: Hanged by the Neck (reuses 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 978-0-14-019192-9)
• 1968: Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–1967
• 1971: The Case of the Midwife Toad (ISBN 9