History of the labor movement – Jan Valtin’s “Diary of Hell”: invented memories

“I was class -conscious because class consciousness belonged to the family with us. I was proud to be a worker and I despised the bourgeois, «writes the sailor, bestselling author and double agent Richard Krebs alias Jan Valtin. “Police officers were enemies. God was a lie, invented by the rich to reconcile the arms with their lot, only cowardly took refuge to prayer. “So it says in Valtin’s” diary of hell “, which reports on the” age of extremes “, as the British historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 20th century. It is a description of the history of the Comintern, tells of a foot soldier of the world revolution, who is unconditional obedient to its central committee and the Moscow for a long time.

Contextless authenticity

“Big battles are imminent,” says a comrade in the early 1920s. The party must prepare the armed survey. “We don’t want to lose again. Soviet Germany and Soviet Russia will be insurmountable together. ”According to the narrator, the same man will later become one of the most capable employees of the GPU abroad, the Gossudarstwennoje Politikscheskoje Uprawlenije, Stalin’s secret police. And: “He celebrated suicide in a Nazi prison in 1937.” In Valtin’s “diary”, the story of the self -destruction of the communist movement, which saw her main enemy in social democracy, was actively involved in the disassembly of the Weimar democracy and thus prepared Hitler’s rise.

Last but not least, the story of the self -destruction of the communist movement is told in Valtin’s “diary”.

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As impressive as this historical report may seem at first glance, it quickly becomes clear: The book lacks a foreword that at least tries to put the content in the right historical context and to evaluate the knowledge gain in its time. It would need an introduction that should have been written by Ernst von Waldenfels, the author who presented a biography of Richard Krebs in 2002 in the Aufbau-Verlag. Cancer published in 1941 in the USA under the pseudonym Jan Valtin “Out of the Night” – an alleged autobiography that claimed absolute authenticity on every page. In the “taz” von Waldenfels wrote about this book: “It was a report of his past as a sailor and communist official, his later detention and torture in the concentration camp and prisons of Nazi Germany. Cancer aka Valtin did not deny that he had worked for the Gestapo, but insisted that this was done at the instigation of the Soviet secret service GPU. “

Such a foreword or proömium could have helped with the question of what the book should be: not a diary before, but the plot is missing from a novel. On the other hand, Jan Valtin quickly invented the Worpswede concentration camp for 1934, in which more than half of the occupants are said to have been in favor of SA people (perhaps as a result of the so-called Röhm coup). In the new edition, the author reports bizarre encounters behind the barbed wire: »At night I spoke in a crowded barrack with some of these SA people. They represented the most radical and brutal element of the entire Hitler movement. Because of the looting of business and other violations of the discipline, the protective custody had finally been imposed on them. «

Bestseller or historical source?

“Out of the Night” kept at the top of the US bestseller lists all year round in 1941; According to the manual of the German communists, over a million copies were sold. At the end of the same year, the United States should enter Pearl Harbor after the Japanese air raid on Pearl Harbor. And obviously there was an enormous interest in stories in the States at the time and about Nazi Germany. Anna Segher’s novel “The Seventh Cross” was printed in several newspapers of the US press. The escape history of seven prisoners from the concentration camp, one of which comes through, reached 20 million readers during the war. Marcel Reich-Ranicki described the work of the communist writer as the most important German novel about life during the Nazi era. And Jan Valtin and Richard Krebs?

Invised memories are not yet a literature. Without a doubt, this author has had experiences that people know today, at least in the West, only from hearsay, thank God. Communist Richard Krebs, can be assumed, was tortured by the Gestapo in the worst way. A neck shot, he writes, would have been an unexpected paradise. “If I only held this one night, the comrades would have time to change their whereabouts, their meeting points and their custody accounts. They would change their lines of connection, their keys and even their names. “

The historian Udo Grashof sees the book an important historical source. In his study, the unscheduled professor at the University of Leipzig quotes »Danger from the inside. Betrayal in communist resistance to National Socialism “a special position from Valtins/Krebs’ book, which tells of the first days of the Nazi dictatorship, of the avalanche to denunciations. Nazi spy, who had operated on the communist ranks for years, have now been loaded into cars and have been sent out together with the Gestapo commands. “From early to late and all night through the whole night, these vehicles drove all over the city. Every time the spy saw a communist known on the street, the car stopped and the comrade was arrested. «In a city like Hamburg, which counted more than 100,000 communist supporters, this tactic has shown devastating effect. At that time, a single spy was responsible for the arrest of 800 communists and their families.

Personal panorama

But what if the narrator himself is a denuniting? Valtin partially names his staff with her real names. For example, Hans Kippenberger, head of the KPD intelligence service, had already been shot in the Soviet Union at the time of publication. Other communists lived in exile, such as Arthur Ewert (1890–1959), Thälmann’s former opponent on the KPD leadership. Jan Valtin Aka Richard Krebs seems to be irrelevant that these people may have been in illegality or in custody, whether with Hitler or Stalin. His report on the structure and work of the “secret organization of communist prisoners” in the Hamburg prison will not only have been followed in 1941, possibly also the Gestapo in Germany.

The publisher Bahoe Books, which re -relocated this “heartbreaking epic”, but in the old translation from 1957, speaks euphemistically of a story “on autobiographical features”. The image of women of the first-person narrator may be characterized by autobiographically. In this book, the women only bear almost all first names and – the author is the child of his time – mostly reduced to slippery supporting roles. Reading sample: “Then Fritz Heckert talked to his secretary Liselotte, a lean, dark -haired girl who was also his bedding …” Elsewhere, a woman is described elsewhere as “Dralle Belgian Moravia”, another “arms were extended under her heavy breasts”. Such sentences show how important the research of a Regina Scheer is, which makes the personalities of the women of the Comintern in their books: Communists like Hertha Gordon-Wallcher.

It remains to be seen whether the narrator’s encounters with the tops of the KPD and the Comintern are mentioned. Thälmann, the former transport worker, was “a plumper man with a meaty face”, with “coarse manners”, a victim of the habit of “working on table tops with his suggestions”, as Valtin writes. For Arthur Ewert, “Teddy” Thälmann was only a “wood -headed zelot” that leads the strongest communist party outside of Russia. “A sergeant who leads a party that depends on the fate of the world revolution!”

This “sergeant” paid bitterly for its errors. And when it comes to the former KPD Reichtags-Members, Arthur Ewert, his life is his own history, and also greatly told by Ronald Friedmann in »Arthur Ewert. Revolutionary on three continents from Karl-Dietz-Verlag.

The narrator is disappointed with his first encounter with Georgi Dimitroff, the later defendant in the Reichstag fire trial and even later general secretary of the Comintern. He had expected to meet a steel man and a hard veteran of many campaigns. Instead, a great gentle man with a soft face, strong and dark, dressed like a dandy and smelling of strong perfume. He was wearing a heavy ring on his left hand. ”Strictly speaking, the whole book is a settlement with the later Stasi boss Ernst Wollweber, a drinker and Prahlhans, without meaning for realities:» With the liquidation of the ›social fascists‹ we prepare the soil for the civil war. We will then give Hitler our answer to the barricades. “

However, Valtin’s memories of Etkar Andree read extremely problematic, however, slightly alienated: Edgar Andree, “A powerful, six foot high guy, with a slightly Jewish appearance”. The head of the Red Front Fighters’ Association and long-time MP of the Hamburg Citizenship was executed by the Nazis on November 4, 1936. His former comrade Richard Krebs reports that he was a fighter until the last breath. “When Andree heard the steps of the executioner of the executioner come at dawn, he asked one of the SS people to tell a joke.” The comrade wanted to laugh again. But the SS people knew no joke, »but a Nazi lawyer among those present offered to make Andree laugh. He told a joke of Jews. Andree himself was Belgian of Jewish origin … everyone laughed, Andree the loudest. ”The joy was certainly great when the author of this book finally received the US citizenship in 1947.

Jan Valtin: Hell Diary. Bahoe Books 2024, 786 pages, born, 28 €.