Arthur Koestler (5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was an Austro-Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest, and was educated in Austria, apart from his early school years. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism.
Having moved to Britain in 1940, Koestler published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work that gained him international fame. Over the next 43 years, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1949, Koestler began secretly working with a British Cold War anti-communist propaganda department known as the Information Research Department (IRD), which would republish and distribute many of his works, and also fund his activities. In 1968, he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for [his] outstanding contribution to European culture". 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. On 1 March 1983, Koestler and his wife Cynthia died of suicide together at their London home by swallowing lethal quantities of barbiturate-based Tuinal capsules.
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 prosperous timber merchant, and their son Henrik was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary. 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 later set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary.
Koestler's mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague. Among her ancestors was Jonas Mischel Loeb Jeitteles, a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose son Judah Jeitteles became a well-known poet—Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Adele's father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna, where she grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, Jacob 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 older married sister.
Henrik and Adele met in 1898 and married in 1900. Arthur, their only child, was born on 5 September 1905. 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 Polányi). 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 Koestler's 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. Although the small soap factory owned at the time by Koestler's father was nationalised, the elder Koestler was appointed its director by the revolutionary government and was well-paid. Even though the autobiography was published in 1953, after Koestler had become an outspoken anti-communist, he wrote favourably of the Hungarian Communists and their leader Béla Kun. He fondly recalled the hopes for a better future he had felt as a teenager in revolutionary Budapest.
The Koestlers later witnessed the temporary occupation of Budapest by the Romanian Army and then 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, Koestler enrolled in the University of Vienna to study engineering, and joined the Zionist duelling student fraternity Unitas. When Henrik's latest business failed, Koestler stopped attending lectures and was expelled for non-payment of fees. In March 1926, he wrote a letter to his parents telling them he was going to Mandate Palestine for a year to work as an assistant engineer in a factory to gain experience and help him obtain a job in Austria. On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine.
Palestine, Paris, Berlin, and polar flight, 1926–1931
For a few weeks, Koestler lived in a kibbutz, but his application to join the collective (Kvutzat Heftziba) was rejected by its members. For the next twelve months, he supported himself with menial jobs in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Frequently penniless and starving, he depended on friends and acquaintances for survival. He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mainly in German. In early 1927, he left Palestine briefly for Berlin, where he ran the secretariat of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's revisionist Zionist party Hatzohar.
Later that 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 he produced detailed political essays and some lighter reportage for his principal employer and other newspapers for the next two years. He was a resident at 29 Rehov Hanevi'im in Jerusalem. He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents, and prime ministers, and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. As noted in his autobiography, he came to realise that he would never really fit into Palestine's Zionist Jewish community, the Yishuv, and particularly that he would not be able to have a journalistic career in Hebrew.
In June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine. In September 1929, he was sent to Paris to fill a vacancy in the bureau of the Ullstein News Service. In 1931, he was called to Berlin and appointed science editor of the Vossische Zeitung and science adviser to the Ullstein newspaper empire. In July 1931, he was Ullstein's choice to represent the paper on board the Graf Zeppelin's week-long polar flight, which carried a team of scientists and the polar aviator Lincoln Ellsworth to 82 degrees North and back. Koestler was the only journalist on board: his live wireless broadcasts and subsequent articles and lecture tours throughout Europe brought him further attention. Soon afterwards 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 the achievements of the Soviet Union, became a supporter of Marxism–Leninism. On 31 December 1931, he applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany. As noted in his biography, he was disappointed in the conduct of the Vossische Zeitung, "The Flagship of German Liberalism", which adapted to changing times by firing Jewish journalists, hiring writers with marked German nationalist views, and dropping its longstanding campaign against capital punishment. Koestler concluded that Liberals and moderate Democrats could not stand up against the rising Nazi tide and that the Communists were the only real counter-force.
In the early 1930s, Koestler moved to the Soviet Union. In 1932, Koestler travelled in Turkmenistan and Central Asia, where he met and traveled with Langston Hughes. During his stay in the Soviet Union, he also lived for a time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, alongside physicist and writer Alexander Weissberg. At the time, the Ukrainian SSR was in the middle of a catastrophic man-made famine. Much later, he would describe how in the train station of Kharkiv, "[Ukrainian peasant women] held up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, sticklike limbs, and swollen, pointed bellies" as a result of the widespread malnutrition. Nevertheless, at this time, he remained a convinced Soviet sympathiser, and echoing the official version of events by the Soviet government, he claimed that those starving were "enemies of the people who preferred begging to work." Koestler wrote a book on the Soviet Five-Year Plan that did not meet with the approval of the Soviet authorities and was never published in Russian. Only the German version, extensively censored, was published in an edition for German-speaking Soviet citizens.