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times joined by a higher-up called "Edgar." (Both paced the floor,
Koestler remembers with a shudder, marching at right angles across his
sitting room, which created an atmosphere of fraternal collaboration:
"That is about as much warmth as I got out of the Party at that stage .")
Gradually, like a suitor courting a woman who is playing hard to get,
Koestler insinuated himself deeper into the Party's network. This meant
slowly yielding his independence of mind. The first "bourgeois ten–
dency" to go was his journalist's curiosity, which he replaced with a view
of the world couched in the Party's sophistry. Koestler could see no rea–
son why, for example, with Hitler's power growing, the Party fought the
Social Democrats as a "class-enemy" and refused to work for a united
front . However cowardly the Socialist politicians, they had some eight
million supporters and-this was before the Von Papen coup-were still
a considerable power in the Reichstag. From his position at the Ullstein
papers Koestler knew many in the Socialist rank and file to be people of
courage and sincerity. Should the communists really have been working
all along to bring down the Weimar state? That question, Koestler was
informed, was not to be pursued. He accepted the discipline.
Morally, the Party was always right because its aims were right, in
accord with history as it must unfold. It was justified in all its actions,
however apparently unscrupulous. Logically, the Party was always right
because it embodied-"and knew it embodied"-the will of the Prole–
tariat, the active, universal class of history. Opponents of the Party on
this or that issue, however cogent their arguments, were the mere prod–
ucts of their perverting environment, the bearers of false consciousness.
Renegades from the Party were lost souls. The Social Democrats, while
"subjectively" allies of the Party's causes, were objectively allies of the
Nazis; they were always lackeys of the ruling class, "Social Fascists."
None of these claims persuaded Koestler. The point is, they consoled
him.
