40 Facts About Sarah Haffner

Sarah Haffner was born on Margaret Pretzel: 27 February 1940 - 11 March 2018 and was a German-British painter, author, and active feminist.

Sarah Haffner had fled from Germany with his pregnant fiancee, whom the authorities had identified as Jewish, in 1938.

Sarah Haffner's 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.

Sarah Haffner used a pseudonym in order to try and protect relatives who remained in Germany against unwelcome questions from the Gestapo.

Sarah Haffner chose the name "Sebastian Haffner", explaining it as a celebration of two of Germany's great positive contributions to the world.

Sarah Haffner would adopt the name "Sarah" only when she was a teenager, however.

Sarah Haffner's parents were deported to the Isle of Man where they were held in separate camps, unable to contact each other.

Sebastian Sarah Haffner accepted an offer to write regularly for the paper, initially on a freelance basis.

Sarah Haffner felt hugely privileged to be present for that occasion, with her father behind her.

Sarah Haffner had left a "world city" for Berlin and West Germany which she found "incredibly" provincial.

Sarah Haffner's father insisted that she would never be able to support herself as an artist.

Sarah Haffner attended the "Meisterschule fur das Kunsthandwerk" handcraft academy in West Berlin for a year.

Sarah Haffner was married to the artist Andreas Brandt between 1960 and 1962.

Sarah Haffner was, in the meantime, able to support herself as a freelance artist.

In February 1968, Sarah Haffner participated in the International Vietnam Conference called by the SDS.

Alongside her work as an artists and author, Sarah Haffner was involved as a teacher at various academies between 1969 and 1986.

Sarah Haffner 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.

Sarah Haffner 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.

Sarah Haffner took to specialising in large oil paintings, but there were smaller more spontaneous works.

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.

For Sarah Haffner there was a spectacular rebound in 1993.

In 1993 Sarah Haffner's earned a net income of 170,000 from her art "with which I could live for several years".

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.

Sarah Haffner 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.

Sarah Haffner followed up the documentary with a book, "Gewalt in der Ehe und was Frauen dagegen tun", on the same theme.

Sarah Haffner herself worked for six months at the shelter on an unpaid basis.

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.

Sarah Haffner 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".

Sarah Haffner moved away from Berlin and spent her final months living close to her son, David Brandt, a professional photographer based in Dresden.

Sarah Haffner's tectonically structured and strongly formed shapes, and the reduced imagery leave the forms shown as coloured surfaces.

Sarah Haffner is in particular drawn to shades of blue and green.

Sarah 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.

Sarah Haffner was no stranger to the tensions between motherhood and career ambitions.

Sarah Haffner would interrogate gender stereotypes, whether they were applied by women or by men.

Sarah Haffner was indignant when the selectors of the female artists to be featured in the "Kunstlerinnen International 1877 - 1977" exhibition, held in Berlin in 1977, decided not to allow the artists Maina-Miriam Munsky and Natascha Ungeheuer to participate.

Sarah Haffner withdrew her own work from the exhibition in protest and published a statement:.

Sarah Haffner 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 Katzel, Sarah Haffner recalled her experiences of those events.

From early in 1968 Sarah Haffner took to participating in meetings of the West Berlin "Action Council on Women's Liberation".