Tested by Stalin, welcomed by Einstein and Freud, hunted by the Gestapo: the life of Wolf Messing reads like fiction, yet every chapter of it was witnessed. In this, the first biography and personal memoir of Messing to appear in the West, Tatiana Lungin draws a revealing portrait of one of the greatest psychic performers of the twentieth century.
Born a Polish Jew near Warsaw, Messing ran away from home at eleven and soon discovered his uncanny gifts. Supporting himself with mind-reading acts in Berlin theatres, he was sold at fourteen to the famous Busch Circus, and before long toured the capitals of Europe as the continent’s most celebrated telepath. In Vienna he met Albert Einstein, who introduced him to Sigmund Freud. His touring days ended in 1937, when he publicly predicted the fall of the Third Reich and the Nazis put a bounty on his head.
Escaping the Gestapo, Messing fled east and rebuilt his life in the Soviet Union, a Marxist state that had officially abolished the very idea of ESP, ruled by Joseph Stalin. Stalin, intrigued, devised his own tests, and Messing passed them, eluding the leader’s personal security and, by some accounts, walking out of a bank with a fortune drawn on a blank sheet of paper. He became a rare celebrity, filling theatres while other researchers worked in secret.
As Messing’s close friend for more than thirty years, Lungin writes from personal notes, long conversations, and the accounts of those who saw him perform. The result is both an intimate memoir and an inside view of psychic research behind the Iron Curtain. This edition was translated from the Russian by Cynthia Rosenberger and John Glad, and edited by D. Scott Rogo.
