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as a kind of social-scientific elite. These were people who were uniquely
open to what the underlying historical laws were organizing for them,
parsing the forces that made it possible to disregard wills. Communist
intellectuals would penetrate and manipulate social forces in the manner
of a
Realschule
student modeling bridges. They would make the world
achieve its potential. They would bring about new and final social con–
ditions that, in turn, would ultimately bring out the best in human nature.
We get our best statement of this state of mind not from the memoirs, but
from
Darkness at Noon,
when our hero, Rubashov, and his interrogator,
Ivanov, begin their intellectual duel:
At the time ... what did the others know of history? Passing rip–
ples, little eddies and breaking waves. They wondered at the chang–
ing forms at the surface and could not explain them. But we had
descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses,
which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were
the first
to
discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws
of her inertia, of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and
of her sudden eruptions. That was the greatness of her doctrine.
The Jacobins were moralists; we were empiricists. We dug in the
primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew
more than ever men have known about mankind: that is why our
revolution succeeded.
How could Koestler of all people have fallen for such claims? He had
been among the comparatively small number of German intellectuals
who understood how the philosophical implications of quantum physics
undermined the materialist certainties that were of cardinal importance
to communist intellectuals. Although Koestler was moving from
abstract speculations to political activism when he joined the Party, he
was also abandoning the new physics for a political science- Engels's
treatise on materialism, Lenin's corresponding theory of the Party–
which, given a little reflection, had been largely discredited by the larger
implications of the new physics.
Koestler applied for membership on the last day of
I93I
and was
deeply disappointed when Party officials demanded that his status
remain a secret and that he join no cell, so as not to jeopardize his still–
influential position with the Ullstein papers. For the first half of
I932,
he played out his assigned role in the Party
apparat.
He met his contacts
twice a week, in secret, and dictated Ullstein gossip along with bits of
inside diplomatic news to a mysterious, unfriendly woman, who was at
