One of the many dramatic facts about Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s 1941 novel on the evils of Stalinism, is that both the original manuscript Koestler wrote in German and the carbon copy of the original went missing in the chaos of World War II. The version the world came to know was an English translation that Koestler’s 21-year-old lover, Daphne Hardy, produced almost simultaneously while the two shared a small apartment in Paris in the run-up to the war; they would pull a curtain across the middle of the apartment every day after breakfast, and Koestler would write on one side while Hardy translated on the other. They finished the book and fled, days before Nazi troops marched on Paris. Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion, and Hardy went to London, where she had mailed her translation of the novel. She got the book published and titled it Darkness at Noon, which Koestler loved. He lived the rest of his life believing the English translation was the only version to survive the war.
So when a German graduate student, Matthias Wessel, stumbled on a copy of the original manuscript in an archive in the Zurich Central Library four years ago, even Koestler scholars were stunned. Darkness at Noon had gone on to become one of the most influential political novels of the 20th century, but no one had read the words as Koestler wrote them. Even the German edition that existed for 75 years had been a translation from the English.
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