Out of the Night - Jan Valtin

Since I'm in the middle of reading this book I thought it would be neighbourly to share it with others, very interesting read and quite educational. It does an excellent job of explaining the strange balancing act of the German Communists, and the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union in the 1920s-30s.

I've been verifying the personalities and events, and so far I've been able to track down corroborating information on most of them. There are historical errors, such as his summarising of the Invergordon Mutiny, though these are about events he wasn't involved in, and I've seen that some of those factual inaccuracies were what the Moscow Communist movement was saying at the time so he may have just been passing on what he heard.

The author was a German Communist and in broad strokes his life matches how he presents it in the book, at least 250 pages in, though he probably won less arguments and wasn't as cool as he presents himself.