A short life of the author
Jan Valtin was the pseudonym of Richard Julius Herman Krebs (17 December 1905 – 1 January 1951), a German-born seaman, Communist Party operative, Gestapo prisoner, and author whose autobiography Out of the Night (1941) is one of the most extraordinary, controversial, and horrifying political memoirs ever written. The book describes Krebs’s life as a Comintern agent in the international maritime trade — smuggling propaganda, organising strikes, conducting espionage across multiple continents — his arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo, his coerced work as a double agent, and his ultimate escape from both the Nazis and the Communists. Published in 1941, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and was for a time one of the most talked-about books in America. Its authenticity was contested, its political implications were explosive, and its narrative of betrayal, violence, and survival remains gripping.
Life
Krebs was born in Mainz, Germany, the son of a seaman. He went to sea as a teenager and was drawn into Communist politics through the maritime labour movement. By the early 1920s, he was working as an agent of the Comintern — the Communist International — carrying out assignments in ports across Europe, South America, the United States, and Asia. His work involved organising seamen’s strikes, smuggling subversive literature, establishing clandestine Communist cells, and conducting various forms of espionage and sabotage.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Krebs was arrested by the Gestapo. He was imprisoned in the concentration camp at Fuhlsbüttel, near Hamburg, where he was brutally tortured. His account of the torture — methodical, detailed, and written without self-pity — is among the earliest and most vivid descriptions of Nazi interrogation methods available in English. The Gestapo eventually released him on the condition that he serve as a double agent, spying on Communist networks for the Nazis while ostensibly continuing his Comintern work.
Krebs eventually fled to the United States, where he broke with both the Nazis and the Communists and, with the help of the journalist Isaac Don Levine, wrote Out of the Night.
Out of the Night (1941)
The book was a sensation. Reviewers praised its narrative power and its inside account of both Communist and Nazi methods of control. The Communist Party USA attacked it furiously, claiming Krebs was a provocateur, a liar, and a Gestapo agent. The FBI investigated him. Scholars have debated the book’s accuracy ever since — some episodes appear exaggerated or conflated, and Krebs’s own role in Communist violence remains unclear. But the broad outlines of his story have been confirmed by subsequent historical research, and the book’s depiction of the moral catastrophe of the totalitarian underground — where the line between revolutionary and criminal, agent and victim, is constantly erased — remains powerful.
The writing is vivid, fast-paced, and surprisingly literary for a man whose formal education was limited. Out of the Night reads like a thriller — port cities at dawn, clandestine meetings in waterfront bars, escapes by freighter, torture chambers, betrayals — and its appeal to American readers in 1941 was partly the appeal of adventure fiction. But the horror underneath is real.
Controversy and Aftermath
Krebs’s post-publication life was difficult. He faced deportation proceedings — as a former Communist, he was excludable under American immigration law. He was eventually allowed to remain in the United States, served briefly in the U.S. Army during World War II, and settled in Connecticut, where he attempted to write more books. None achieved the success of Out of the Night. He published Castle in the Sand (1947), a novel, and worked on other manuscripts.
He died on New Year’s Day 1951, at the age of forty-five, reportedly of a heart attack, though some accounts suggest he may have taken his own life. His death was little noted; the book that had made him famous was already fading from public memory.
Legacy
Out of the Night belongs to a small but significant genre of political conversion memoirs — alongside Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940, a novel rather than a memoir), Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952), and Wolfgang Leonhard’s Child of the Revolution (1958). It is the most visceral of these, the most physically dangerous, and the most morally ambiguous. Krebs was not an intellectual who lost his faith; he was a street-level operative who lived in the sewer of twentieth-century political violence and barely survived.
The book fell out of print for decades but has been periodically reissued. It remains an essential document for understanding the underground world of interwar Communism and fascism.
Collecting Valtin
Out of the Night (1941, Alliance Book Corporation) in first edition with dust jacket brings $80–$200. The Book-of-the-Month Club edition is common and brings $10–$20. Later reprints are inexpensive. Signed copies are very scarce — Krebs was a fugitive, a controversial figure, and died young. Castle in the Sand (1947) is uncommon and brings $30–$60.