Jan Valtin

Who was Jan Valtin?

Jan Valtin was the alias of Richard Julius Hermann Krebs, a German writer during the interwar period. He settled to the United States in 1938, and in 1940 wrote his bestselling book Out of the Night.

Krebs became active in the Communist movement as a boy, when his father was involved in the naval mutiny that heralded the German Revolution of 1918–19. In 1923, he saw action in the failed Communist insurgency in Hamburg. Sometime after this he joined the German Communist Party, but was later expelled.

In 1926, Krebs entered the United States illegally and settled in California. He spent 38 months in San Quentin State Prison for attempting to murder a merchant navy seaman during a brawl, then was deported to Germany in 1929. He worked as a seaman until 1934, when he was arrested and tortured, and acted as a witness for persecution in a trial that brought to the conviction of a fellow German seaman accused of treason.

In 1938, the settled in the United States once again - this time under his most famous alias, Jan Valtin - where he published the highly publicized autobiography Out of the Night.