Memoirs

Articles in this section

• "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, 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 then (...)

• "Out of the Night" (1941) by Jan Valtin - BOOKS ONE AND TWO

  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 (...)

• "Out of the Night" (1941) by Jan Valtin - BOOK THREE

  26 April 2017 by Jan Valtin

  The third and final part of Jan Valtin’s vivid account of his activities, adventures and experiences with the German Communist Party, the Comintern and the Gestapo during the 1920s and 1930s, of which the first two sections can be seen above. The full text is available in e-book format below. (...)

• Jack London’s in-depth exploration of the (shocking) living conditions in London’s East End: "The People of the Abyss" (1902)

  2 December 2016 by Jack London

  In 1902 the 25-year-old Jack London, who was already a veteran of a year of vagrant "hobo" wanderings around the American continent when he was 17, of a year of sailing on a fishing boat in the Far Pacific when he was 18, and of a year in the Klondike gold-rush in Canada’s Far North when he was (...)