Arthur Koestler

1905–1983

Hungarian-British author and journalist Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest and educated in Vienna. He worked as a journalist in Palestine in the late 1920s, and then returned to Europe, where he was arrested and imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War and again in France. Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940), advocating against totalitarian regimes, brought him fame. Koestler settled in England, where he supported political causes and wrote essays, novels, and memoirs. His was one of the earliest voices describing and protesting the Holocaust. His death was self-inflicted.

Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator

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On Disbelieving Atrocities

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We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started on the night when the epileptic van der Lubbe set fire to the German Parliament; we said that if you don’t quench those flames at…

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Thieves in the Night

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But the distant lulls were merely the frame of the picture; the feast for Joseph’s eyes was the green Valley of Jezreel itself, the cradle of the Communes. Twenty years ago a desolate marsh cursed…