Ask the Author: Roger J. Mattson
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Roger J. Mattson
Hi Sharon,
Thanks for your question. You’re right, I recently attended a “Jan Valtin Retrospective” at the University of Poitiers in France. Jan Valtin was the pen name of Richard Krebs of whom you ask. Here is the URL for the conference program https://sha.univ-poitiers.fr/master-h....
Scholars from a half dozen countries gathered there to discuss Valtin’s role as a midlevel operative in the Comintern in the interwar years and his life after renouncing communism in 1937.
My new book will be the first biography of Krebs by an American since his best-selling 1941 autobiography “Out of the Night.” As to what’s new in my book, I would count interesting insights about the last dozen years of his private life as a best-selling anti-communist writer, revered by the House Un-American Activities Committee and snubbed by the Hollywood establishment. In addition, there is growing evidence of his dabbling in clandestine affairs before and after his service in the Pacific during World War II. I also will deal frankly with his chronic depression, which was probably associated with PTSD. And I am looking at the parallels between his life, as a spy turned writer, and the life of his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, a writer turned spy.
The book has fresh insights from two of Krebs’s sons who have been most helpful with my research. And there is new information from three families associated with Krebs’s gutsy comrade Hildegard Volkersen. She and Krebs went underground in Germany in the early days of the Third Reich, resulting in their arrest and imprisonment.
European researchers with access to the declassified files of the secret services in Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Germany have confirmed much of what Valtin described in his autobiography, which I am pleased to learn you are reading. Let me know what you think of it.
Best Regards,
Roger
Thanks for your question. You’re right, I recently attended a “Jan Valtin Retrospective” at the University of Poitiers in France. Jan Valtin was the pen name of Richard Krebs of whom you ask. Here is the URL for the conference program https://sha.univ-poitiers.fr/master-h....
Scholars from a half dozen countries gathered there to discuss Valtin’s role as a midlevel operative in the Comintern in the interwar years and his life after renouncing communism in 1937.
My new book will be the first biography of Krebs by an American since his best-selling 1941 autobiography “Out of the Night.” As to what’s new in my book, I would count interesting insights about the last dozen years of his private life as a best-selling anti-communist writer, revered by the House Un-American Activities Committee and snubbed by the Hollywood establishment. In addition, there is growing evidence of his dabbling in clandestine affairs before and after his service in the Pacific during World War II. I also will deal frankly with his chronic depression, which was probably associated with PTSD. And I am looking at the parallels between his life, as a spy turned writer, and the life of his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, a writer turned spy.
The book has fresh insights from two of Krebs’s sons who have been most helpful with my research. And there is new information from three families associated with Krebs’s gutsy comrade Hildegard Volkersen. She and Krebs went underground in Germany in the early days of the Third Reich, resulting in their arrest and imprisonment.
European researchers with access to the declassified files of the secret services in Russia, Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Germany have confirmed much of what Valtin described in his autobiography, which I am pleased to learn you are reading. Let me know what you think of it.
Best Regards,
Roger
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