Description
A million seller in the USA, Out of the Night was originally published in four English editions and five other languages. Acclaimed and attacked, it was outlawed in Germany, Italy and Russia. Valtin, who is both an heroic and a tragic figure, takes the reader to the upheavals of Germany 1918-23, then to the four corners of the globe following his travels as a revolutionary sailor.
Through his eyes, it is possible to re-live the hopes and the the agonies of a whole generation of German workers as fascism crushed them in its terrible vice. Valtin’s description of the barbarous tortures of the Gestapo after his capture makes the blood run cold. Despite the persecution of the author at the hands of both the Gestapo and the Kremlin secret police, Out of the Night above all shows the power and self-sacrificing heroism possessed by workers in struggle. It is republished now in English for the first time since the 1940s.
