Sarah Haffner
Sarah Haffner was a German-British painter and author.
Biography
Provenance and early years
Margaret Pretzel was born in Cambridge, England. Her Berlin-born father, Raimund Pretzel had qualified as a lawyer, but abandoned the legal profession after 1933, and at the time of his daughter's birth was attempting - ultimately with considerable success - to reinvent himself as a journalist and author. He had fled from Germany with his pregnant fiancée, whom the authorities had identified as Jewish, in 1938. The couple had only received permission to remain in Britain for twelve months, but they nevertheless married in the late summer of 1938, basing themselves in Cambridge where Kurt Hirsch, his wife's brother, had recently received his doctorate in mathematics from the university. The outbreak of war in September 1939 seems to have removed the threat that the British would send the little family back to Nazi Germany, but instead Raimund Pretzel was identified as an enemy alien and in February 1940 locked away in a prison camp in Devon. It was while he was in this camp that he learned of his daughter's birth through a tannoy announcement: "A little black head girl from Mister Pretzel". Shortly afterwards he was moved to the Isle of Wight.Her mother already had one son, Peter, the elder of Sarah Haffner's two brothers, born as a result of her earlier marriage, to Harald Schmidt-Landry. Erika Schmidt-Landry, had been working as a journalist with a women's magazine till 1938.
New names
During the early part of his time as a political refugee in England, before the authorities arrested him, Raimund Pretzel completed his book, Germany. Jekyll & Hyde. It was his first "serious" book on history and politics: till now his publications had concerned fashion, music and entertainment. He used a pseudonym in order to try and protect relatives who remained in Germany against unwelcome questions from the Gestapo. He chose the name "Sebastian Haffner", explaining it as a celebration of two of Germany's great positive contributions to the world. "Sebastian" was the middle name of Johann Sebastian Bach and "Haffner" recalled Mozart's 35th Symphony. He very soon adopted the pseudonym as his regular name: his daughter's family name therefore changed from "Pretzel" to "Haffner".She would adopt the name "Sarah" only when she was a teenager, however. "Sara" was the name the Nazis had scornfully imposed on every Jewish woman, regardless of her real name. Adopting "Sarah" as her own "Christian" name after the Nazi nightmare had ended, seemingly for good, was, for Sarah Haffner an important part of discovering and asserting her own identity.
England
In May 1940 her mother was also interned by the British, both parents now identified as enemy aliens. Her parents were deported to the Isle of Man where they were held in separate camps, unable to contact each other. Their daughter was permitted to stay with her mother, however. Shortly before her mother's release, in October 1940, the child won a baby competition, officially designated as the most beautiful baby in the internment camp. The British authorities were beginning to see the irony of locking up large number of German political refugees whose only obvious crime had been to escape from Nazi Germany in order to avoid being killed. Raimund Pretzel had been among the first to be released. His recently published book Germany. Jekyll & Hyde had resonated with a number of members of the British establishment who had been unable to understand why the author had been locked away. Someone else impressed by the book had been David Astor of The Observer. Sebastian Haffner accepted an offer to write regularly for the paper, initially on a freelance basis. The family relocated to London in 1942, their financial position no longer so precarious as when they had arrived in England in 1938.Most of her childhood was spent growing up with her family in London. Sarah Haffner was very close to her father. When she was nine he took her to her first concert. The Amadeus Quartet were playing: four fellow refugees from Nazi race-hate, and one of the twentieth century's greatest string quartets. They played Schubert's String Quartet No. 13. The audience cheered and gave the players a standing ovation. Sarah Haffner felt hugely privileged to be present for that occasion, with her father behind her.
Her eldest brother, Peter, was identified as an artistic talent from a relatively early age, and it was he who drew their parents' attention to Sarah's growing artistic talent. In 1953 he recommended that they should use her oil paintings as serious Christmas presents.
Berlin
She moved to West Berlin with her parents in 1954. Both Sarah and her father would for the rest of their lives operate an Anglo-German existence, balancing the two cultures in their domestic and professional lives. Sarah's intention to make her way in life as a painter ran into parental opposition. Her father insisted that she would never be able to support herself as an artist. She should complete her school career in Germany and she might then train for work as a graphic artist, a branch in which she might find reliable employment in commerce or advertising. Or she might become a specialist restorer of "old masters". The arguments lasted for months. When she was sixteen she diverted into vocational training for a lifetime career as a serious artist.Haffner attended the "Meisterschule für das Kunsthandwerk" handcraft academy in West Berlin for a year.
Aged seventeen, on the recommendation of teachers at the handicraft academy, she moved on to the Berlin University of the Arts. After mastering the basics she was accepted into the specialist painting class taught by :de:Ernst Schumacher |Ernst Schumacher.
Family matters
When she was nineteen she became pregnant. / Dummerweise bin ich mit 19 schwanger geworden ". She was married to the artist :de:Andreas Brandt |Andreas Brandt between 1960 and 1962. David Brandt would grow up to become a successful photographer, based in Dresden, but his birth in 1960 caused his mother to break off her studies at the HdK, from which she would graduate only in 1973. She was, in the meantime, able to support herself as a freelance artist.Teaching in Watford and Berlin
Alongside her work as an artists and author, Sarah Haffner was involved as a teacher at various academies between 1969 and 1986. In 1969 she returned to England intending, as she later explained, to enhance her earnings and to get away from the increasingly fevered atmosphere among students and academics as the Paris events of May 1968 resonated with student radicals in the German cities. Her brother, Peter, had been teaching at the Watford School of Art since 1960. In England it was possible to become an art teacher without the inflexibly regulated file of qualifications and certificates that would have been needed in Germany. She obtained a three term contract at the same institution as her half-brother, which provided a livelihood in the London area for the next fifteen months. However, she found herself ill-suited to the "small-talk dinner party culture" which seemed to be part of the artistic milieu of the time and place. She also noted that whereas in Germany the tradition had endured since the nineteenth century whereby "every architect, dentist or psychologist" would invest in one or two pieces of original art - or at least a print - for the waiting room, no equivalent custom existed in England. There would be no easy path to riches as a free-lance artist in England. After fifteen months she returned to Berlin with her son.Her teaching experience in England now helped her obtain a job at the "1. Staatlichen Fachschule für Erzieher" (teacher training academy
Freelance artist in Berlin
Despite her father's earlier misgivings, Sarah Haffner built a successful career as a freelance artist in Berlin. She took to specialising in large oil paintings, but there were also smaller more spontaneous works. As art became her principal source of income she reached the point of selling between eight and ten abstract landscape paintings each year. Initially she obtained a price of around 1,500 Marks per painting, but over the years she became better known and the price per painting rose to an average of around 4,000 Marks. Selling one or two of her larger paintings in a year meant she could, as she told an interviewer ruefully, "live well". She avoided working with galleries who might take commissions as high as 40% or 50%, but managed to have her work featured in perhaps four or five exhibitions each year. Positive reviews and recognition followed little by little.In commercial terms there were nevertheless also bad years. Unlike many left-wing artists with whom, as an instinctively anti-authoritarian woman, she mixed, Sarah Haffner welcomed the fall of the wall and reunification. Nevertheless, the reunification, formalised in October 1990, introduced an additional two thousand professional painters to the Berlin art market. There was, at that stage, no corresponding increase in potential buyers for contemporary art. The market was further depressed by uncertainty about the future, as westerners faced :de:Solidaritätszuschlag|supplementary taxation to finance the economic regeneration of the "neuen Bundesländer". In 1992 income from her art plunged to a net figure of 7,000 Marks. For Haffner, however, there was a spectacular rebound in 1993. Following a Berlin exhibition that included her work, the Berliner Zeitung published a particularly positive review. A Swiss collector read the review while on a flight, and purchased nine pictures. A succession of further sales followed. In 1993 Sarah Haffner's earned a
net income of 170,000 from her art "with which I could live for several years".
Feminist activism
In 1975 Sarah Haffner worked on a television documentary on violence against women, highlighting the existence in England of shelters for women escaping domestic violence. She had been prompted to produce the documentary by her own futile attempts, involving the police and other public officials, to help a neighbour in Berlin who had become a victim of domestic violence. She followed up the documentary with a book, "Gewalt in der Ehe und was Frauen dagegen tun", on the same theme. The documentary led to the funding of a shelter for women in Berlin. It was the first shelter of its kind anywhere in West Berlin or West Germany. Haffner herself worked for six months at the shelter on an unpaid basis.Death
Until well into the second decade of the twenty-first century Sarah Haffner lived and worked in the Charlottenburg quarter of Berlin, close to the infamous wall. She became aware that she was incurably ill several months before she died, and continued, as before, to insist that she had no wish whatever to be "kept alive at any price". She moved away from Berlin and spent her final months living close to her son, David Brandt, a professional photographer based in Dresden. She was 78 when she died there.Work
The painter
Sarah Haffner's artistic spectrum includes portraits, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes. After 1985 her figurative style evolved from an additive object-oriented focus towards an increasingly abstract presentational approach. Her tectonically structured and strongly formed shapes, and the reduced imagery leave the forms shown as coloured surfaces. In apparent contrast to the rigidity of the forms is the intensity of the colours she uses. Her colour selection is expressive and spatial rather than naturalistic. She is in particular drawn to shades of blue and green. Frequently the colour selection intensifies a mood of isolation and melancholy that emanates from the tranquil scenes and views.Haffner used her figurative painting style to evoke mood and atmosphere. Images which at first glance appear intensely personal often turn out to reflect far more general experience, which Sarah Haffner uses to disclose social realities, but without venturing into overt agitation.
After 2004 she took to working with a "Tempera and Pastell" mixing technique that she had developed for herself.
Reflections of a female artist
Through her writings and in interviews Sarah Haffner developed a reputation as a committed feminist. Several of the themes to which she would return are encapsulated in a lengthy interview she gave to the academic, Prof. Dr. Cäcilia Rentmeister in 1977. The interview also provides insights into Haffner's own life and career.Sarah Haffner was no stranger to the tensions between motherhood and career ambitions. Her own situation was further complicated by marriage.
Sarah Haffner would interrogate gender stereo-types, whether they were applied by women or by men. She was indignant when the selectors of the female artists to be featured in the "Künstlerinnen International 1877 - 1977" exhibition, held in Berlin in 1977, decided not to allow the artists Maina-Miriam Munsky and :de:Natascha Ungeheuer|Natascha Ungeheuer to participate. Haffner withdrew her own work from the exhibition in protest and published a statement:
Sarah Haffner celebrated her eighteenth birthday in February 1968. She lived through the "1968 events" and the manifestations of Second-wave feminism both as a youthful and very determined art student and as a slightly bemused young mother. In one of a series of radio interviews conducted by Ute Kätzel, Sarah Haffner recalled her experiences of those events. From early in 1968 Haffner took to participating in meetings of the :de:Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen|West Berlin "Action Council on Women's Liberation".