Memoirs

Articles in this section

• "Homage to Catalonia" (1938) by George Orwell

  10 May 2021 by George Orwell

  George Orwell, a convinced left-wing socialist, went to Barcelona in December 1936 to join the forces in Catalonia fighting against the military uprising led by the General Franco. He joined the extreme-left party P.O.U.M. there and spent six months on duty in their section of the front line (...)

• "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933) by George Orwell

  6 May 2021 by George Orwell

  George Orwell (1903-1950) was a passionate defender all his life of the underdogs in the society of his time, and in spite of his background as a member of the upper middle class — he was well educated and spoke with a „posh“ accent — spent several years in his late twenties working as a dishwasher (...)

• "Typee" (1846) by Herman Melville - a fascinating account of life in a South Sea island before the spread of Western civilization

  1 May 2019 by Herman Melville

  This account of his four-months stay among the fiercest tribe in the remote Marquesas Island of Nukuheva was Herman Melville’s first book, and its enormous success - it was the best-selling of all his books during his lifetime – was essential in deciding the future author of the monumental “Moby (...)

• "Children of Yesterday" - Jan Valtin’s dramatic eyewitness account of the Pacific War in the Philippines 1944-45

  21 November 2017 by Jan Valtin

  After the quite phenomenal success of his monumental political memoir Out of the Night in 1941 [1], Richard Krebs (nom-de-plume: Jan Valtin) was arrested and tried for an attempted (political) murder he was accused of having committed in the twenties – for which he was acquitted – in 1942, and (...)

• "Out of the Night" (1941) by Jan Valtin - an extraordinary memoir of life in the international Communist movement between the two World Wars

  26 April 2017 by Jan Valtin

  This is the memoir of a militant and full-time party worker in the German Communist Party (KPD) and in the Comintern – the international organization of all the Communist parties in the world – in the twenties and thirties, this is a first-hand account of many of the dramatic events that shaped (...)