Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)

[KALKI]

Arthur Koestler, CBE (5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany until, disillusioned by Stalinism, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work, which gained him international fame.

Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. 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 (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.




Origins and early life

Koestler was born in Budapest to Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles). He was an only child. His father Henrik Koestler, of Jewish Hungarian descent, was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary. According to Koestler's authorized biography, Henrik's father, Leopold Koestler, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army who Magyarised his name to "Lipot".[4] In 1861 he married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant. Henrik left school at age 16 and took a job as an errand boy with a firm of drapers. He taught himself English, German and French, and eventually became a partner in the firm. He then set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary.[5]

Arthur's mother, Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles) was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague. Among her ancestors were Mishel Loeb, a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose son Judah became a well-known poet. Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Her father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna, where Adele grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, her father abandoned his wife and daughter and emigrated to the United States. Adele and her mother moved from Vienna to Budapest to stay with Adele's married sister.

Henrik Koestler met Adele in 1898, married her in 1900, and on 5 September 1905, Arthur, their only child, was born. The Koestlers lived in spacious, well-furnished, rented apartments in various predominantly Jewish districts of Budapest. During Arthur's early years they employed a cook/housekeeper as well as a foreign governess. His primary school education started at an experimental private kindergarten founded by Laura Striker (née Polanyi). Her daughter Eva Striker later became Koestler's lover, and they remained friends all his life.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 deprived his father of foreign suppliers, and his business collapsed. Facing destitution, the family moved temporarily to a boarding house in Vienna. When the war ended, the family returned to Budapest.

As noted in Koestler's autobiography, he and his family were sympathetic to the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution of 1919. Though the small soap factory owned at the time by Koestler's father was nationalized, the elder Koestler was appointed its director by the revolutionary government and was well paid. Even though the autobiography was published in 1953, when Koestler had become an outspoken anti-Communist, he wrote favorably of the Hungarian Communists and their leader Bela Kun and recalled fondly the hopes for a better future he had felt as a teenager in revolutionary Budapest.

Later, the Koestlers witnessed the temporary occupation of Budapest by the Romanian Army, and the White Terror under the right-wing regime of Admiral Horthy. In 1920 the family returned to Vienna, where Henrik set up a successful new import business.

In September 1922, Arthur enrolled at the Vienna Polytechnic University to study engineering, joining a Zionist duelling student fraternity.[6] When Henrich's business failed, Koestler stopped attending lectures, and was expelled for non-payment of the fees. In March 1926 Koestler wrote a letter to his parents telling them that he was going to Palestine for a year to work as an assistant engineer in a factory, for the purpose of gaining experience which would help him find a job in Austria. On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine.

1926–1931 Palestine, Paris, Berlin and Polar flight

After arriving, for a few weeks Koestler lived in a kibbutz, an agricultural collective. His application to join the collective (Kvutzat Heftziba) was rejected by its members. For the next twelve months, he supported himself by menial jobs in the cities of Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Frequently penniless and starving, he often depended on friends and acquaintances for survival. He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German. In the spring of 1927, he left Palestine briefly, to run the Secretariat of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party in Berlin.

Later that same year, through a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem, where for the next two years, he produced detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist.

On June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine. In September he was sent to Paris to fill a vacancy in the bureau of the Ullstein News Service. A year later, in 1931, he was called to Berlin and appointed science editor of Vossische Zeitung and science adviser to the Ullstein newspaper empire. The same year he was Ullstein's choice to represent the paper on board the Graf Zeppelin airship's Polar flight, which carried a team of scientists and the Polar aviator Lincoln Ellsworth to 82 degrees North (thus not to the North Pole) and back. Koestler was the only journalist on board: his live wireless broadcasts and subsequent articles and lecture tours throughout Europe brought him further kudos. Soon after, he was appointed foreign editor and assistant editor-in-chief of the mass-circulation Berliner Zeitung am Mittag. In 1931 Koestler, encouraged by Eva Striker, and impressed by what he believed to be the achievements of the Soviet Union, became a supporter of Marxism-Leninism; and on 31 December 1931, he applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany.