Arthur Koestler and the Generation of Adventure
The intellectual and moral level of European elites is shockingly low. I say shockingly because as an American I found the European (and British) accents gave a very sophisticated quality to their discourse. Now, after living in France for almost twenty years, they sound as idiotic as the typical US senator. See the recent Macron and Baerbock speeches as prime examples of this descent. Or maybe it is just that I understand the world a bit better now.
I put the current generation in contrast to the generation that came of age in the first-half of the 20the century. It has been over three decades since I read Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon. Just the other day I finished his memoir of the first months of the Second World War (written after his escape to England in 1941), ironically titled Scum of the Earth, referring to himself and the other refugees that the French government rounded up, put into concentration camps, and in many cases subsequently handed over to the Gestapo after the debacle.
Here is a brief description of his life from the Afterward:
Kœstler, like so many of the seminal writers of modern English – Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot – first came to these shores as a mature immigrant. In Koestler’s case, he fled imprisonment in Nazi-occupied France, as you will just have read in Scum of the Earth. When he was arrested as an undesirable and dangerous alien in Paris on October 4, 1939, he was thirty-four years old and had already made a name for himself as a talented and politically engaged journalist. Kœstler was born in Budapest into a Hungarian Jewish family. As a young man he studied pure science in Vienna, an environment that led him to become a keen Zionist. He was a follower of Vladimir Jobotinsky, the talented right-wing Zionist leader, though once he landed in Palestine he joined a left-wing kibbutz. His stay in the kibbutz lasted only a few weeks; he was too much of an individualist to fit in and not a natural agricultural worker. He spent the next year as a loafer in Haifa and Tel Aviv, drawn to all sorts of unlikely pursuits, such as selling advertising for a new Hebrew-language newspaper, surveying, and writing fairy tales. He was an unlikely citizen of the new nation for he never mastered Hebrew and had only a very limited interest in Jewish tradition, history and culture. He often starved and slept on the floor of offices belonging to friends. Then came a sudden breakthrough – an offer to write for leading German and Austrian newspapers. Within a couple of years he became what he wanted to be – a star journalist. In 1929 he left Palestine for Paris, gradually abandoning Zionism for the world-inclusive creed of Communism. He travelled a great deal, flying in a Zeppelin over the North Pole and making a long stay in the Soviet Union. He became a formal member of the Communist Party in 1931 and a committed activist. His experience of the Spanish Civil War (1936–7) was as a columnist for the London News Chronicle, though it seems that he also had political duties through his position within the Communist International. The confusing ethics of this period, and his experience of imprisonment by the Fascists under sentence of death in Seville, were described in Spanish Testament (1938) which was later reshaped into Dialogue with Death (1942). He formally broke allegiance with the Communist Party in 1938, after the Moscow purges and show trials reached their bizarre conclusion, leaving the Russian army critically weakened at the start of the Second World War. In Paris, after war was declared in 1939, another sort of purge was unleashed. Kœstler along with other liberal free-thinkers, communists and socialist exiles – the ironical ‘scum of the earth’ of the book’s title – were targeted by right-wing elements within the French regime even before the Nazi victory and the swift emergence of French ‘Vichy’ fascism. Hundreds of writers and political figures were arrested. Some managed to escape but many were caught in the internment camps, committed suicide or were deported to Germany where they were murdered. There was of course no logical reason why Kœstler should have been arrested. As a Jew and a man of the left, his and-Nazi credentials were above suspicion while as a Hungarian (Hungary was a neutral country at the time) he should also have been outside the police dragnet. It is ironic that Darkness at Noon was written in this period, between Koestler’s first arrest in Paris and his second in the spring of 1940. His hair-raising escape across the breadth of German-occupied France, to the safety of England, provides the narrative background for Scum of the Earth, which also reveals his mature reflections on the unwritten civil war within European society that was waged through out the ’20s and ’30s.
Scum of the Earth was Interesting to me, in part, because it is a veritable tour de France, a country that I now call my home. But more so because Koestler epitomized the erudite men and women of action living in the first half of the twentieth century.
Given below are two more passages from Scum of the Earth that recount the horrible and incredible outcomes of the Scum.
On the third day of our stay in the Stadium, the arrival of Fuhrmann, a German Liberal journalist, created some hilarity. Fuhrmann, a man of forty and quite a well-known figure in the Weimar Republic, had been put in a concentration camp by the Gestapo and had escaped a few years ago to Austria. When the Nazi marched into Austria, he escaped to Eger. When Eger was attached to Germany after Munich, he escaped to Prague. When the Nazis occupied Prague, he escaped to Italy. When the war broke out and Italian non-belligerency began, he escaped to France by means of a fishing boat, which took him by night from San Remo to some lonely spot on the French shore near Nice. He had arrived in Paris forty-eight hours ago by train, and gone straight from the railway station to see P., a German refugee and fellow journalist, whose address he knew. He found Mrs. P. at home, who nearly fainted when he walked in. Then she told him that P. was in a concentration camp, that all German refugees had been interned, and that he must get himself interned at once, else he would get into a frightful mess with the police and be put in jail. The best thing he could do was to drive at onc
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