The Scum of the Earth, by Arthur Koestler

Literary review by Ariane Bilheran for L'Antipresse n° 329 of 03/20/2022.

"A new movement will need to create a new moral climate

where the means justify the end and not the opposite.

Creating this moral climate: I think that's what I'm fighting for."

Arthur Koestler is an important witness and analyst of the totalitarian phenomenon of the twentieth century. After A Spanish Testament and Darkness at Noon, The Scum of the Earth, a manuscript written between January and March 1941, from London, recounts the French period of 1939-1940, the arbitrary round-ups, the persecutions and camps, and the flight from France.

For Koestler, writing is born from personal adventures, often at the limits of what is bearable: from the Spanish prisons of Malaga and Seville under Franco, to internment in the Vernet camp. But from his writing other adventures are born, more interior, more intimate, which question human existence, its relationship with itself, with others, with history, with our metaphysical status. Somewhere between a war diary and an autobiographical story, Koestler confronts the historical evidence with which he struggles during the turbulent period of the capitulation of France. We discover the anguish of the camps, the arbitrariness of the arrests, the absurdity of the French administration, which prepares "the merchandise" for the Nazis.

The individual creates historical events as much as he is created by them: "It was at that moment, on Friday, September 1, 1939, at one o’clock, in the Restaurant des Pêcheurs in Lavandou, that the war began for us." As always in his work, Koestler underlines the vicious forms of indoctrination of mass psychology and the way propaganda delights in paradoxes: "These newspapers had explained to them that only the warmongers of the left wanted to plunge France into the abyss. They explained to them that democracy, collective security and the League of Nations represented great ideas, but that all those who wanted to fight for them were enemies of France. And the same newspapers suddenly wanted to convince them that their duty was to fight and die for things that only yesterday were not worth the trouble, and they could do so with exactly the same arguments that yesterday they had again ridiculed and distorted."

Koestler questions ordinary fascism, in a country then dominated by "laws of suspects" and an omnipotent police force. Ordinary fascism is the grimace of the petty bourgeoisie and moralistic moralism. Nevertheless, as "the Nazis taught us to console ourselves with comparisons": there are always worse things. And it is in the depths of hellish experiences that Koestler searches, like a mountaineer scrutinizes the gaps in the wall to cling to, for the suspicions of humanity: it emerges, and is guessed, in the heart of despair, in the cellars of violence, and in this matter, the reality of experience prevails over dead illusions: "But now, peering into my neighbor's blank, bestial gaze, I finally began to understand again why the working class had always been distrustful of left-wing intellectuals. You can recite Marx and Lenin by heart, but until you smell the sweat of an agent near your nose, you don't understand what it is."

Koestler's entire work is permeated by the death of illusions: "No death is so sad and so final as the death of an illusion," he tells us. Why did he leave the Party? "I stopped believing that the end justifies the means." He describes his experience of the concentration camp at Camp du Vernet thus: "I had the feeling that my brain had turned into a kind of jam that did not allow the formation of any coherent thought. The millstones of misfortune were slowly but surely crushing both our bodies and our minds." To escape the hunt, he changes his identity by becoming a legionnaire, but this new illusion does not serve its purpose: "I believed that by becoming the legionnaire Dubert and growing a moustache, I could escape the ghosts of the passage. But there is no escape, and there should not be."

The loss of illusions is inevitably accompanied by the acceptance of human tragedy: "The tragedy is that we are going round in circles: without mass education, there is no political evolution; but without political development, there is no mass education." Koestler responds with the need to humanise the few words exchanged, the silences and the glances, and to deepen the meaning of suffering and death. Suspicions of humanity... where one would not expect, in the course of an encounter, of another, often lost in functions and roles that could have been very different depending on the historical context.

In this wandering, Koestler shows us the extent of the suicides of his companions of the time, and in particular of Walter Benjamin, one of the most spiritual beings he claims to have ever met, and cousin of Günther Anders. But it was not the time for the recognition of spiritual beings... Koestler's obstinacy to live and a conjunction of circumstances allowed him to miraculously escape from the antechamber of Nazi hell. "If I have narrated my adventures to the end it is because they are typical of the species of humanity to which I belong: the exiles, the persecuted, the persecuted of Europe; the thousands and millions who, because of their race, their nationality or their beliefs, have become the scum of the earth. The thoughts, the fears, the hopes, even the contradictions and incongruities of the "I" of this story, are the thoughts, the fears, the hopes and above all the all-consuming despair of a considerable percentage of the European population. "

The scum of the earth? More like the salt of the earth.

Ariane Bilheran.