Sebastian Haffner

Sebastian Haffner
Haffner on book cover Germany: Jekyll & Hyde
Born	Raimund Pretzel (1907-12-27)27 December 1907 Berlin, German Empire
Died	2 January 1999(1999-01-02) (aged 91) Berlin, Germany
Occupation	Journalist and historian
Subject	Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, World War I, Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, World War II
Children	Oliver Pretzel; Sarah Haffner

Raimund Pretzel (27 December 1907 – 2 January 1999),^[1] better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and historian. As an émigré in Britain during World War II, Haffner argued that accommodation was impossible not only with Adolf Hitler but also with the German Reich with which Hitler had gambled. Peace could be secured only by rolling back "seventy-five years of German history" and restoring Germany to a network of smaller states.^[2]

As a journalist in West Germany, Haffner's conscious effort "to dramatize, to push differences to the top",^[3] precipitated breaks with editors both liberal and conservative. His intervention in the Spiegel affair of 1962, and his contributions to the anti-fascist rhetoric of the student New Left, sharply raised his profile.

After parting ways with Stern magazine in 1975, Haffner produced widely read studies focussed on what he saw as fateful continuities in the history of the German Reich (1871–1945). His posthumously published pre-war memoir, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 (Defying Hitler: A Memoir) (2003)^[4] (direct translation of the title: History of a German) won him new readers in Germany and abroad.