The Arthur Koestler Story
By Waltraud Pospischil
A voice for criminal justice reforms
Arthur Koestler [ – ] made a major impact by shining a light on the need of fair, humane conditions for people in detention. He published harrowing accounts of his own imprisonments at the beginning of WW2 and lobbied against capital punishment, which was still legal in the UK at the time. In , he personally initiated and sponsored the Arthur Koestler Award. Only through his own generous donations were monetary prizes made available for artistic achievements of prisoners, detainees, and psychiatric patients. Following further sponsorship through him, it became a charitable trust in , and he left monetary support for beneficiaries after his death in
Background
Born in in Budapest, when the city was still part of the pre-WW2 Austrian-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, he grew up witnessing social, ideological, political and scientific changes. He recalled controversial lived experience accounts and stories, documented through his extensive writing as a journalist and author. Koestler had close connections, often as a ‘critical friend’ to famous people of his time. It was an epoch where
George Orwell
One striking fact about English literature during the present century is the extent to which it has been dominated by foreigners &#; for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Still, if you chose to make this a matter of national prestige and examine our achievement in the various branches of literature, you would find that England made a fairly good showing until you came to what may be roughly described as political writing, or pamphleteering. I mean by this the special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism. Under this heading novels, autobiographies, books of &#;reportage&#;, sociological treatises and plain pamphlets can all be lumped together, all of them having a common origin and to a great extent the same emotional atmosphere.
Some of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler himself. Some of these are imaginative writers, some not, but they are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about
Arthur Koestler, (September 5, – March 1, ) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. In , he was awarded the Sonning Prize &#;for outstanding contribution to European culture&#; and, in , he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
The mystical experience quoted below occurred in , during the Spanish Civil War. Arthur Koestler, a German exile writing for a British newspaper, had been arrested by Nationalist forces in Málaga and sentenced to execution. He spent every day in prison awaiting death (only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government). Koestler had busied himself by etching mathematical formulas on the walls with a spring he extracted from his mattress. He wrote that he was most elated by his reconstruction of Euclid’s proof that the number of prime numbers is infinite.
&#;And then, for the first time, I suddenly understood the reason for this enchantment: the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means. The infinite is a mystical mass shrouded in a haze; and yet it was possible
Bricks to Babel
A person could describe the book as Koestler's search for meaning in the universe which ultimately comes to: a hope placed in paranormality. Why? He started with bare materialism which included a foundation in Zionism but found the life hard and relatively fruitless. He switched this out for Marxist materialism only to find that hollow and exploitative. Then he went in a more scientific direction by searching how the material of the universe sorts its
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