Coffee Hero

Twenty years ago this week, East Germany opened the Berlin Wall checkpoint.  It was the literal and figurative fall of the Berlin Wall, and ultimately signified the dissolution of the Iron Curtain.  In honor of the occasion, we at Coffee Hero wondered whether you could get a decent cup of coffee behind the Iron Curtain.  We found some answers in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, in which the communists imprison founding-father revolutionary Nicholas Rubashov during the Stalin Purges.

Photo The Fall of the Berlin Wall from Wikimedia Commons.

Soviet prison officials subject Rubashov to a battery of “soft” torture methods — weeks of complete solitary confinement, severe sleep deprivation, and prolonged exposure to intense light during interrogation.  He also sees a fellow inmate who bears the markings of severe physical torture.  But even here, where they have taken away all of Rubashov’s freedoms, they don’t take away his coffee:

Rubashov had begun to write his meditations on the “swing” immediately after the first bugle blast on the morning which followed Bogrov’s execution and Ivanov’s visit.  When his breakfast was brought in, he drank a mouthful of coffee and let the rest get cold.  His handwriting, which during the last few days had borne a somewhat flabby and unsteady character, again became firm and disciplined; the letters became smaller, the swinging open loops gave way to sharp angles.  When he read it through, he noticed the change.

– Darkness at Noon, 174

Under interrogation, Rubashov is forced to account for a conversation he had while abroad, drinking coffee and brandy with Herren von Z.

Rubashov had not thought of this scene for years – or at least had not consciously recalled it.  Idle chatter over black coffee and brandy – how could one explain to Gletkin [the interrogator] its complete insignificance?

– Darkness at Noon, 221

Like many novels, Darkness at Noon is preceded with a “This book is a work of fiction” disclaimer:  “Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”  And like many novels, the disclaimer is an absolute crock.  It clashes with Koestler’s own prelude:

“The characters in this book are fictitious.  The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real.  The life of … Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials.  Several of them were personally known to the author.  This book is dedicated to their memory.”

Darkness at Noon was ranked No. 8 on the Modern Library Association’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.  It was the only one of the Top 10 that I knew absolutely nothing about, which was the primary reason I read it.  I’m glad I did.  It is my favorite kind of book — technically a work of fiction, but one that gives you rich insight into times and places that were very real.  Since reading it, I have read up on the Moscow Trials, but no matter how much historical info I encounter, I will always most vividly remember Rubashov’s struggle as he is tortured by the very government he helped found.

As a high-schooler on November 9, 1989, I just barely grasped the Cold War implications of the Berlin Wall coming down. Had I read Darkness at Noon back then, I’d have better understood why there was such joy on the faces of those who hacked away at the Wall 20 years ago.

Darkness at Noon: A Novel by Arthur Koestler

Tags: arthur koestler, berlin wall, books, brandy, caffeinated classics, communism, darkness at noon, soviet union, USSR