Arthur Koestler was born on 5 September 1905 in Budapest, Hungary, which was then part of the Hapsburg Empire. His parents, Henrik and Adela Jeiteles Koestler, were prosperous middle-class Jews, proud of their heritage yet fully assimilated into Germanic culture. When World War I broke out, Koestler's parents moved to Vienna, where he received his early education. His elementary education completed, he decided to study science and engineering. His parents enrolled him in a Realschule, a school that specialized in science and modern languages. In 1922 he enrolled at the University of Vienna, where the climate of postwar politics quickly pushed his scientific interests into the background. Attracted to Zionism, he became involved in Zionist activities, and in 1926 he left school, with his studies incomplete, for Palestine, where he lived and worked on an Israeli kibbutz. In 1927 he went to work for the Ullstein chain of German newspapers as a Middle East correspondent. By June 1929 he had left the Middle East and was sent to work for the Ullstein News Service in Paris. He returned to Berlin in September 1930 and became science editor for Vossische Zeitung, one of the Ullstein newspapers. In 1932, disillusioned with Zionism, he secretly joined the German Communist party, but within a few months he was found out and was forced to resign his editorship.
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