Raimund Pretzel, better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and author. He wrote mainly about recent German history. His focus was specifically on the history of the German Reich ; his books dealt with the origins and course of the First World War, the failure of the Weimar Republic, and the subsequent rise and fall of Nazi Germany under Hitler. His most known work is The Meaning of Hitler, a short biography and analysis of Hitler.
Biography
He studied Law and finished his exams in 1934. After that he occasionally worked as a lawyer, mostly as a temporary substitute for other lawyers. His main source of income at that time was journalism. In 1938 he emigrated from Nazi Germany with his Jewish fiancée to London, where he intended to work as an author and journalist. He encountered difficulties at first since he was hardly able to speak English at the time, had no money and no financial support, and his fiancée was pregnant. He adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner so that his family, who remained in Germany, would not be endangered by his writing. It was a combination of Johann Sebastian Bach and of Mozart'sHaffner Symphony, later he used the signature of this piece on his vehicle registration plate. During the Second World War in England Haffner was interned for several months in 1940 and released only after publication of his first book in English, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde He was one of the promoters and early writers of Die Zeitung, published for German exiles by the British government 1941-45. His book Offensive against Germany was commissioned by George Orwell and T.R. Fyvel for Searchlight Books. Under the auspices of his mentor, David Astor, Haffner then wrote for the London Sunday newspaper, The Observer, and became its editor-in-chief. However, because of differences between Astor, who had become the newspaper's publisher, and the London editorship regarding a divided Germany, he became the German correspondent in Berlin in 1954, a position which he kept until the building of the Berlin Wall. He then wrote for a German newspaper, Die Welt, until 1962, and from then until 1975 was a columnist for the Stern magazine. Haffner was a frequent guest on the television show Internationaler Frühschoppen, hosted by Werner Höfer, and even had his own television program on the German channel Sender Freies Berlin. Haffner is considered one of the most successful German authors in the history of the 19th and 20th century writing for a broad, nonacademic audience. He wrote most of his works in German, some of which have been translated into English, French, Spanish, Hebrew and other languages. The manuscript of Defying Hitler, discovered posthumously by his son, Oliver Pretzel, is a memoir of the Nazis' rise to power, as witnessed by Haffner before he went into exile.
