"I find it grotesque that I am still alive" is the true story of Richard Krebs. Under the pen name Jan Valtin he published in 1941 a hugely successful and just as controversial fictionalized autobiography. In "Out of the Night", Richard Krebs - a German by birth - recounted his years as sailor, revolutionary, inmate of San Quentin and agent of the Communist International. In 1933 he was caught in Hitler´s Germany and incarcerated in a concentration camp. From there he managed to escape - or so he claimed - on the understanding that he would henceforth be a Gestapo man although he in fact remained under Soviet orders. Furthermore "Out of The Night" described the machinations of a huge underground structure behind the facade of the Communist International, and claimed that it was this structure, and not the visible party apparatus, that really directed the worldwide Communist movement. In the course of his research Ernst von Waldenfels interviewed the last surviving witnesses, including Krebs' widow. Consulting the archives of the Gestapo and the Communist International in Berlin and Moscow, and several times visiting the National Archives in Washington, he hit upon a story that was different but no less astonishing than the one that Richard Krebs had told in "Out of The Night". Ernst von Waldenfels has used a wealth of research material to write a fast- paced but nonetheless accurate real life thriller. It is a portrait of a fraught and chaotic era, of the high hopes that the Russian Revolution inspired in the men and women to whom revolution was a calling, and of how those hopes were finally dashed in Stalin's and Hitler's concentration camps. It is the story of a worldwide underground network that has only recently come to light, but most of all it is the story of a man who, despite all his capacities, fell foul of the times. The book has been a critical success in Germany, and its author has been interviewed by television and radio. Excerpts from reviews: Die Zeit: (leading German weekly) In the matter of the double games in which Krebs was involved whilst imprisoned by the Nazis, the biography has an intense quality that is at once both accurate and intuitive. Von Waldenfels investigates the double-dealings of a player incapable of grasping that he is a pawn to be sacrificed in the long-range duel between the Stalinist and the Nazi machines.SWR Public Radio Drawing on the archives of the Gestapo, the American secret services and hitherto unknown material from the Moscow Comintern, Ernst von Waldenfels has created a biography of the adventurer, author and agent Richard Krebs. ... Ernst von Waldenfels unravels this complex tale in a very thrilling way with sympathy for his protagonist. His biography, offers an explicit and inclusive description of the political scene of the 1920's and 30's.