Objectivity and Opposition: Some Émigré Historians in the 1930s and Early 1940s

Arthur Koestler reached England in November 1940. After six weeks at Pentonville prison he was released shortly before Christmas. He then began writing his well-known memoirs ironically entitled Scum of the Earth. A quotation from Robert Neumann’s By the Waters of Babylon (1939) introduces the reader to the vicissitudes of Koestler’s political and personal life from the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact until his detention in Le Vernet and his escape from France. “Like the cameo cutter of Herculaneum, who, while the earth cracked and the lava bubbled and it rained ashes, calmly went on carving at his tiny plaque.”¹ Robert Neumann had