Free Reappraisals by Tony Judt

proportion. But then Sidney Hook, a fellow organizer of the Congress, rightly observed that “Koestler was capable of reciting the truths of the multiplication table in a way to make some people indignant with him.”
    This made Koestler an uncomfortable presence, someone who brought disruption and conflict in his train. But that is what intellectuals are for. Arthur Koestler’s nonconformism—which makes him as mysterious to his biographer as he was annoying to his contemporaries and precious to his friends—is what has assured him his place in history. Below the rages and the polemics, beyond the violence and the predatory sexuality, the eccentricities and the changes of direction, there seems to have been a steady current of moral concern and political insight that charges his best writing with a lasting glow. As Thomas Fowler says of Alden Pyle in The Quiet American , “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
    This essay first appeared in the New Republic in 2000 as a review of Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind by David Cesarani.

CHAPTER III
    The Jewish Europe of Manès Sperber
    The conventional history of Europe in the twentieth century begins with the collapse of continental empires in the course of World War I. From Lenin’s revolution in 1917 there arose a vision that in time came to seem the only alternative to the descent into Fascism of much of the civilized world. Following the heroic struggles of World War II and the defeat of Fascism, the choice for thinking people seemed to lie between Communism and liberal democracy; but the latter was polluted for many by its imperialist ambitions, by the self-serving character of its democratic proclamations. Only at the end of the century, in our own day, has Communism, too, lost its last shreds of credibility, leaving the field to an uncertain liberalism shorn of confidence and purpose.
    That is the history of our century, as it seemed, and seems, to many in its time; and only in retrospect, and slowly, have its deeper and more convoluted patterns and meanings been unraveled and acknowledged, by scholars and participants alike. But there is another history of our era, a “virtual history” of the twentieth century, and it is the story of those men and women who lived through the century and also saw through it, who understood its meaning as it unfolded. There were not many of them. They did not need to wait for 1945, or 1989, to know what had happenedand what it had meant, to see beyond the illusions. For various reasons, they saw across the veil earlier. Most of them are now dead. Some of them died young, paying dearly for their disquieting perspicacity. A strikingly large number of these clear-sighted voyagers through the century were Jews, many from East-Central Europe.
    Manès Sperber was one of them. He is not very well known in the English-reading world; he wrote mainly in German, occasionally in French. His major work of fiction, Like a Tear in the Ocean , which appeared in 1949, is a very long, semiautobiographical roman à clef and not widely read. Its subject matter is a little like that of the early novels of André Malraux: It dissects the thoughts and the actions of small groups of intellectuals, revolutionaries, and conspirators adrift in the century. Unlike Malraux, however, Sperber was never attracted to “historic personalities” of the Left or the Right. Indeed, the elegiac mood of his book, and its intellectual tone, is more reminiscent of Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon or Victor Serge in The Case of Comrade Tulayev , two other ex-Communists obsessed with their former allegiance.
    But Sperber was an influential man in his day. He was a member of that brilliant fellowship of exile in postwar Paris that included Czesław Miłosz, Kot Jelenski, Ignazio Silone, Boris Souvarine, François Fejtö, and Arthur Koestler. From 1946 he held a strategic editorial position at Calmann-Levy, the French publishing