To Ruhleben – And Back

Geoffrey Pyke was one of the 20th century’s most brilliant eccentrics-mad genius, financial wizard, impoverished hermit. But in 1914, Pyke was just another Cambridge teenager. He pitched a wild notion to a London newspaper editor: Why not make him their war correspondent in Berlin? The editor called the boy’s bluff, and Pyke made his way across Europe on little more than a false passport, a pretty good German accent, and sheer chutzpah.

And so begins an odyssey into the heart of wartime Berlin, and a plunge into a harrowing year of solitary confinement and then imprisonment at Ruhleben, an internment camp that is now considered the model for Germany’s concentration camps. After an escape and a perilous dash to the Dutch border, Pyke returned home at the age of twenty to write To Rubleben – And Back.

Lost to obscurity for over eighty years, his extraordinary book is a college student’s sharp-tongued travelogue, a sober meditation on imprisonment and escape… and, as Pyke intended, a ripping yarn.

“The war will produce few books of more absorbing interest than this one.” -The New York Times

“A very fine story of a great and perilous adventure.” -The Times (London)