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knew. And, as a matriarch, there was his lovely wife Jenka, who
made us welcome in the family. Sperber had been a professor of psy–
chology and an Adlerian analyst. But he was primarily a novelist
(whose trilogy,
The Burned Bramble, The Abyss,
and
Journey Without
End
remains the most penetrating set of novels about the Communist
movement we have), an essayist and a political figure. His recently
published three-volume autobiography was widely acclaimed on
publication in German and French (a section of it appeared in
Parti–
san Review
1, 1984), and just before his death he had been awarded
the German Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The intellectual
core of his life was his unyielding opposition to the totalitarianism of
the right and the left. He was, in temperament and tone, an
alter
kaempfer.
Raymond Aron, the coolest and the most systematic thinker of
the four, was a sociologist and journalist who, especially in his later
years, had an enormous influence both on intellectual opinion and
on policy makers. Perhaps more than any other French political
theorist, Aron can be credited with breaking the hold of Stalinism on
French intellectuals. Throughout the late forties, fifties, and sixties,
it was a rear-guard battle, as Aron isolated himself from the fashion–
able modes of French thought. For years, he fought Sartre (an old
school comrade) as Sartre flirted with communism; and this was no
easy task as Sartre was a brilliant essayist and Pied Piper for the in–
telligentsia of postwar France. But by the seventies and eighties,
Aron's stature and influence had grown immensely, and he had be–
come a balancing force against the "new philosophers" who had be–
come somewhat neoconservative, and the extreme intellectual right ,
which he detested.
Arthur Koestler, in his range and mercurial moods, perhaps
the most representative figure of the European intelligentsia, was
also probably the most single important figure among those who first
challenged the illusions held by the left about the Soviet Union.
Darkness at Noon,
in its description of the black logic of communism,
and of the reasons that led the old Bolsheviks to "confess" at the Mos–
cow Trials, revealed the premises of totalitarian rule that George
Orwell elaborated in
1984.
A talented journalist, Koestler made his
reputation with a slew of political novels and a set of autobiographi–
cal volumes which illuminate the history of his generation . In the
last decades, weary of political battles, he returned to a first love, the
writing about science and the explorations of the sources of creativ–
ity, as well as some of the further reaches of parapsychology. Whether
