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themselves; the socialists were my own kin who had betrayed their
trust. You cannot hate a tiger for being a tiger; but the irresponsi–
ble keeper who exposes the people to the beast's claws you would
like to shoot on the spot-even before you shoot the tiger.
There was some possibility of fleeing to the United States-Palestine
was now out of the question for him-but this was the summer of
1932,
the depth of the Depression, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt's elec–
tion; and to any Ullstein Jewish intellectual, America seemed the very
proof of capitalism's decadence.
In
Germany, one in three workers was
living on the dole, near starvation, yet the German newspapers spoke
laconically about millions of tons of American coffee dumped into the
sea, wheat burned, pigs cremated, oranges doused with kerosene-"to
ease," Koestler writes with continuing distaste, "the conditions of the
market."
It
was an awful paradox that seemed
to
foretell the demise of the
whole international system of market societies. Intellectuals the world
over-Gide, Malraux, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Sinclair, Dos Passos,
Steinbeck, to mention only a few-seemed to concur and joined in
expressing a kind of populist, if not properly proletarian optimism.
"Even by a process of pure elimination," Koestler writes, "the Commu–
nists, with the mighty Soviet Union behind them, seemed the only force
capable of resisting the onrush of the primitive horde with its swastika
totem." There was no more dignified move than to the Left, and no
more serious one than to the militant Left.
Still, in spite of these huge forces narrowing his choices, what made
Koestler's turn
to
communism so contrary was the wholeheartedness
with which he began
to
devote himself not only
to
the Party, but
to
its
"scientific" claims. Koestler did not simply make an implicit contract
with the Party leadership to accept their discipline so long as a winning
struggle against fascism had
to
be waged. No, the same young man who
had months before written treatises on the new physics undermining
materialist assumptions of science suddenly espoused Soviet Marxism's
deterministic theories of class struggle, its materialist theories of history
and consciousness, in a way quite like his embrace of the strictures of
ultra-nationalist Zionism a few years before. He had "fallen in love," he
writes, "with the Five Year Plan":
It
was not by process of elimination that I became a Communist
. . .. Tired of electrons and wave-mechanics, I began for the first
time
to
read Marx, Engels and Lenin in earnest. By the time I had
