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Ar Thur Koestler and Mysticism
AR THUR KOESTLER AND MYSTICISM by NILS BJORN KVASTAD ARTHUR Koestler was an influential writer during the first years after the war. His attacks on communism got a world-wide echo, in particular among intellectuals. To the reading public he was in the first place a political writer. But according to himself the political content is only one aspect of his literary production from his first years as an author. As important were some mystical experiences he had while sitting in one of Franco's prisons awaiting execution during the Spanish Civil War. These experiences had for him certain ethical impli cations, and an important theme in his first books was the contrast between the ethics derived from his mystical experiences on the one hand and Marxist-Leninist ethics as well as the ethical implications of Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. In his autobiography Koest ler writes about how his first books were influenced by his mysti cal experiences, or the 'hours by the window' as he called them: 'In the years that followed I wrote a number of books in which I at tempted to assimilate the (mystical) experiences of cell no. 40. Ethical problems had hitherto played no part in my writing, now they became its central concern. In 'The Gladiators', ( ...), and 'Darkness at Noon', ( .•. ), I tried to come to intellectual terms wi th the in tuiti ve glimp ses gained durin g the 'hours by th e win dow'. Both novels were variations on the same theme: the problem of Ends and Means, the conflict between transcendental morality and social expediency. -
Lost in Back-Translation
24 The German Times October 2018 ARTS & LIFE Lost in back-translation The rediscovered original manuscript of Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon allows for a new interpretation of a literary and political classic Rubashov, who is arrested and The book does not reveal the be resold for up to eight times works were all translated from one of the interrogation scenes, BY LUTZ LICHTENBERGER soon thereafter imprisoned. In country in which it is set. At the retail price. By mid-year, the the English. Scammell notes that Rubashov scoffs that “our lead- captivity he is interrogated to several points in the novel there novel had sold 300,000 copies, German-speaking readers would ership [is] more grotesque than t’s the political novel of the excruciating effect by two exam- are indications it may be Nazi and after two years, two million. have regarded the novel as “testi- that jumping jack’s with the little day, a warning signal, a reck- ining magistrates, Ivanov, an erst- Germany, or perhaps communist With the escalation of the Cold mony of a foreign culture.” This, mustache” – a direct reference to Ioning with all forms of totali- while friend and fellow traveler, Soviet Union. Scammel writes War, however, Koestler’s anti- perhaps, encouraged many of Hitler. However, the phrase in tarianism, a riveting literary dys- and Gletkin, a hostile and ruth- that early on, more astute critics totalitarian – indeed universal – them to overlook the passages Daphne Hardy’s original transla- topia. As a matter of fact, Dark- less inquisitor. The two officials called attention to the generally message passed nearly unnoticed. -
Review of Reflections on Hanging by Arthur Koestler
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW REVIEW [VOL 25 Rutledge; Taney and Stone surely have little in common. One ends the book with a feeling that the great trait of the best judges is unselfishness, the capacity to see society clearly, without the distortion of vision that accom- panies the drive to succeed, to persuade, to gain power. We trust the justices of our Supreme Court with some of the greatest powers of government; we do so because they are characteristically beyond the desire for power. Much of their labor is disclaiming the exercise of power. In a society of frantic grasp- ing for influence, of shrill competing claims, of strident advertisement, the good judge is calm and quiet. In the troublesome days between 1935 and 1937 there was much discontent among the loquacious because judges were not more like legislators. But perhaps the reverse would be a more wholesome ideal for our time. ARTHUR SUTHERAND* 6 Professor of Law, Harvard University. Freedom, Virtue, and the First Amendment. By Walter F. Berns. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1957. Pp. 264. $4.00. Professor Berns, of the Yale Political Science faculty, has written an un- usual book. In considering the function of the Supreme Court in American government,' he rejects the "libertarian" doctrine of "judicial restraint."' He also rejects the "libertarian" thesis that the freedoms of the Bill of Rights are ultimate and absolute values in our society.3 He would have the Court exer- cise all its power to decree the good, the true and the beautiful.4 Perhaps some day he will provide the touchstone so that we may all readily recognize these qualities. -
HE CONTRIBUTION of GEORGE ORWELL and ARTHUR KOESTLER to the POLIT- ICAL THEORY of TOTALITARIANISM ~Oland James Wensley
~HE CONTRIBUTION OF GEORGE ORWELL AND ARTHUR KOESTLER TO THE POLIT ICAL THEORY OF TOTALITARIANISM ~oland James Wensley ·A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts , Department of Economies and Political Science, McGill University, Montreal. August, 1964. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE i-v CHAPTER I: The Men and the Age 1-18 Situation in the 1930's Pl-2; Koestler's personal background P3-6; Koestler's background related to his thought P6-10; Orwell's personal background Pl0-12; Orwell's background related to his thought Pl2-16; Koestler and Orwell compared in general terms Pl7-18. CHAPTER II: Spain 1937 - The Impact of Totalita rianism on Koestler and Orwell 19-34 Situation in Spain 1936-37, Pl9-20; Koestler's Spanish experience P21-26J Orwell's Spanish experience P26-30; meaning of the Spanish experience for Koestler and Orwell as defined in terms of ''li.m.ited '' and "luxuriant r• totalita rianism P31-34. CHAPTER III: Arthur Koestler and Limited Totalita rianism 35-61 Koestler's view of man and society P35-38J Koestler's idea of the genesis of totalitarianism P39-41; attraction of Communism for Koestler P41-43; Koestler's conception of Stalinism P44-48; Koestler's theory of history P47-48; Koestler's idea of totalita rianism P48-56; the meaning of '' limi ted '' totalitarianism in Koestler's work ex pounded P56-61. CHAPTER IV: George Orwell and Luxuriant Totalita rianism 62-83 Orwell's view of man and society P62-64; Orwell's ideas compared with Koestler's on this P65-69; Orwell's extension of the anomalies of the modern age P69-73; Orwell on totalitarian stability1 distortion of reality, and the in vasion of the human personality P73-80; Orwell's conception of luxuriant totalitarianism P80-83. -
Daniel Brick's Judisk Krönika
Cultural Zionism in Sweden: Daniel Brick's Judisk Krönika Stephen Fruitman Umeå I. Introduction The present study examines the content of the pendence" . Spotlighting those years reveals an Swedish-Jewish Zionist periodical Judisk Krö- especially vibrant, if at times trying period in nika during its earliest years of publication, Swedish-Jewish debate. I consider this reading 1932 to 1950, under the editorship of its found- of Judisk Krönika to be the first step toward a er, Daniel Brick. The onus will be on how the more comprehensive study of cultural Zionism magazine, in its brightest and most ambitious in Sweden, which will include use of archival years, acted as a conduit through which the and secondary sources to provide a more com- ideas of cultural Zionism flowed into Sweden. plete picture of this instance in Swedish-Jewish Through essays, reports, editorial comm- intellectual history. ments, book reviews and debates, the circle of intellectuals grouped around Brick clamoured for a revivification of what they considered to be the moribund cultural life of Swedish Jewry, II. Judisk Krönika: An Overview the result (in their eyes) of decades of Reform dominance in communal life. Not wishing to make themselves any less "Swedish", the cul- tural Zionists nevertheless insisted that Jews Daniel Brick: Voice of a "Reflective Youth" in Sweden (and Norway, Denmark, and Fin- land) needed to adopt an international per- Daniel Brick (1903-87) was the son of an immi- spective, integrating the proposed idea for a grant from Lithuania, a man described as both Jewish national home in Palestine into their "deeply religious" and a "chovev-zionist [lover lives as a source of cultural pride and spiritual of Zion], warmly interested in the Jewish pio- renewal. -
Honors 392, Cosmology, Self and Society: Prof B
Question Authority...Question Reality...Question the Questioner...Question the act of Questioning… The ultimate questions as to the meaning of our actions and as to the meaning of life in general always tend to involve astronomical problems. Hans Reichenbach Honors 392, Cosmology, Self and Society: Prof B. McGrane Adventures in Cosmologies Fall 2018 Roosevelt 216 COSMOLOGY, SELF AND SOCIETY: ADVENTURES IN COSMOLOGIES (with deference to Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, 1933) OVERALL COURSE STRUCTURE: The Ancient Greeks, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The 20/21st Centuries First, some important philosophical, orienting general statements: "Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man." (Plato, Timaeus, 360 B.C., my emphasis, in Ferris p19) "Even before the start of history, the sky must have been commonly used as a compass, a clock, and a calendar...We know that the stars were used for similar purposes very early in history." (Weinberg, To Explain the World, 2015, p55) "Why do we need to know whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa? What business of ours is it, anyway? Can this knowledge -
The Prisoner Intellectuals
Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com) The Prisoner Intellectuals • Paul Berman • May 5, 2010 | 6:34 pm Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic By Michael Scammell (Random House, 689 pp., $40) I. The opening pages of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon are thrilling to read. In a very few sentences, Koestler managed to wrap his arms around one of the huge and mysterious philosophical master-themes of the last two centuries, and, in a muscular feat of poetic compression, to reduce his giant theme to a handful of simple images: The cell door slammed behind Rubashov. He remained leaning against the door for a few seconds, and lit a cigarette. On the bed to his right lay two fairly clean blankets, and the straw mattress looked newly filled. The wash-basin to his left had no plug, but the trap functioned. The can next to it had been freshly disinfected, it did not smell. The walls on both sides were of solid brick, which would stifle the sound of tapping, but where the heating and drain pipe penetrated it, it had been plastered and resounded quite well; besides, the heating pipe itself seemed to be noise-conducting. The window started at eye- level. And Rubashov observes the vista beyond the window bars: the snow, the moon, the Milky Way, a marching sentry, the yellow light of electric lanterns. You will remember that Rubashov is a hardened militant of the Communist revolution. In the old days, when he was a high-ranking commissar, he used to enforce Communist discipline on the party rank-and-file in different parts of the world, in the interest of the Soviet Union. -
Ld1 in PURSUIT of TRUTH
IN PURSUIT OF TRUTH Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday Edited by PA UL LEVINSON \ with Fore words by (t 21). Isaac Asimov and Helmut Schmidt Chancellor, Federal Republic of Germany I1b2. f'.- t4 z;-Ld1 HUMANITIES PRESS INC. Atlantic Highlands, NJ 248 liv PURSUIT OP TROT/I hope and no proof is Stoicism and Judeo-Christian religion, in which irrationalism and stoicism alternate. Yet there is no inconsistency in the philosophy of hope without proof, especially as a moral injunction to oiler the benefit of doubt wherever at all possible. Now, the philosophy of hope without proof is not exactly Popper's. It began with T. H. Huxley, the famous militant Darwinian, and H. C. Wells. Its best expression is in Bertrand Russell's Free A Popperian Harvest0 Man's Worship," the manifesto of hope born out of despair, clinging to both despair and reason most heroically. This famous paper, published in Russell's W. W. BARTLEY, III Philosophical Essays of 1910, is a sleeper. It was hardly noticed by It is by its methods rather than its subject-matter that philosophy contemporaries and followers, yet now it is the expression of current religion, is to be distinguished from other arts or sciences. ofcurrent scientific ethos. Here, I think, Popper's philosophy of science gave it A. J. Ayer, 1955' substance. Philosophers arc as free as others to use any method in searching Or perhaps Russell's "Free Man's Worship" gives Popper's philosophy of truth. There is no tnethod peculiar to philosophy. -
Infallibility Complex: the British Left and the Soviet Union, 1930-1950
Infallibility Complex 31 Infallibility Complex: The British Left and the Soviet Union, 1930-1950 Greer Rose Gamble Third Year Undergraduate, Macquarie University In his 2003 Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, British novelist Martin Amis asks a pertinent question: why. Why ‘everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen’ but ‘nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky’, why ‘everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann’ but ‘nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzershinsky’; and crucially, why ‘everybody knows of the 6 million of the Holocaust’ but ‘nobody knows of the 6 million of the Terror Famine’.1 Comparative historians have attempted to remedy this disparity, but the situation remains such that even Robert Conquest, Cold War era chronicler of the Stalinist Terror, replied when asked why he considered Hitlerism to be “worse” than Stalinism, ‘Because I feel it to be so.’2 This article intends not to challenge the elevation of the Third Reich over the USSR in historical comparisons of evil, but rather to look at why the Terror has not been granted the same prominence. I argue that a portion of responsibility for the disparity, as it applies to the Anglosphere at least, can be ascribed to a deliberate campaign of misinformation undertaken by parts of the Western literary Left, including of course the Communist and fellow-travelling but also occasionally the liberal democratic Left, in the 1930s and 40s. We will see that members of these groups took an active interest in the Soviet Union, and through their travels and researches were often among the first Westerners to discover information about state atrocities. -
Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe Symposium Presentations W A S H I N G T O N , D. C. Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe Symposium Presentations CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM 2004 The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. First printing, April 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Peter Hayes, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Michael Thad Allen, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Paul Jaskot, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Wolf Gruner, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Randolph L. Braham, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Christopher R. Browning, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by William Rosenzweig, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Andrej Angrick, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Sarah B. Farmer, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Rolf Keller, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Contents Foreword ................................................................................................................................................i -
A Different 'Darkness at Noon'
The New York Review of Books April 7, 2016 A Different ‘Darkness at Noon’ by Michael Scammell Rene Saint Paul/RDA/Everett Collection Arthur Koestler, circa 1950 Last July a German doctoral student named Matthias Weßel made a remarkable discovery. He was examining the papers of the late Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht for a dissertation on Arthur Koestler’s transition from writing in German to writing in English at the end of the 1930s. Oprecht was a left-wing fellow traveler who had founded his famous publishing house Europa Verlag in Zurich in 1933, and was well known for his anti-Nazi views and support for writers in exile, including Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Ignazio Silone—and the young Arthur Koestler. Weßel told me that at the time, “I was looking for letters and royalty reports, because I wanted to know how many copies were printed of the first German edition of Koestler’s Spanish Testament.” He failed to find the answer to his question, but while looking over the Europa holdings in the Zurich Central Library he came across a cryptic entry: “Koestler, Arthur. Rubaschow: Roman. Typoskript, März 1940, 326 pages.” This was extremely odd. Weßel knew of no such novel (Roman) in Koestler’s German writings, but the name Rubaschow rang a bell. Rubaschow (in English, Rubashov) is the hero of Koestler’s finest novel, Darkness at Noon. Weßel hardly dared think about what he had found, suspecting a sequel or perhaps a false entry, for it was well known that the original text of the novel—the last one Koestler wrote in German before he switched to English—was lost during his flight from France at the start of World War II. -
Finding Aid Was Produced Using Archivesspace on June 11, 2021
Spalek, John M.; Papers ger106 This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on June 11, 2021. M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives Spalek, John M.; Papers ger106 Table of Contents Summary Information .................................................................................................................................... 3 Administrative History ................................................................................................................................... 3 Scope and Contents ........................................................................................................................................ 4 Arrangement of the Collection ...................................................................................................................... 5 Administrative Information ............................................................................................................................ 5 Controlled Access Headings .......................................................................................................................... 6 Collection Inventory ....................................................................................................................................... 6 Tape Recordings .......................................................................................................................................... 6 Photographs ..............................................................................................................................................