Raimund Pretzel, better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and historian.
23 Facts About Sebastian Haffner
2.
Sebastian Haffner was born in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel in Berlin.
3.
Sebastian Haffner was later to remark that: "My whole life has been determined by my experiences in these two schools".
4.
Doctoral research allowed Sebastian Haffner to take refuge in Paris, but unable to gain a foothold in the city he returned to Berlin in 1934.
5.
Articulating a thesis he was to defend at length in his last work, Von Bismarck zu Hitler, Sebastian Haffner maintained that "No peace is conceivable with the Prussian Reich which was born at that time, and whose last logical expression is no other than Nazi Germany".
6.
When in 1965 Churchill died, Sebastian Haffner wrote "it seemed as if not a mere mortal was buried, but English history itself".
7.
Yet Sebastian Haffner was disappointed that Churchill did not take up his ideas for a German Freedom Legion, a German academy in exile and a German committee.
8.
In 1941 David Astor invited Sebastian Haffner to join The Observer as political correspondent, while Edward Hulton recruited him as contributor to the popular Picture Post.
9.
The Observer's foreign editor and an influential opinion former in England, in 1948 Sebastian Haffner became a naturalised British citizen.
10.
In Germany, Sebastian Haffner wrote for the conservative national Die Welt, then edited by the Kapp Putsch veteran, Hans Zehrer.
11.
Sebastian Haffner joined Springer in railing against the ineffectiveness of the western allied response to the sealing of the Soviet Bloc in Germany, a stance that occasioned his final break with Astor and The Observer.
12.
Consistent with his post-Reich vision of 1940, Sebastian Haffner was not, in principle, opposed to the existence of a second German state.
13.
Together with young writers and activists of a new post-war generation, Sebastian Haffner believed that the Federal Republic was paying a price for Adenauer's pragmatic refusal to press for an accounting of Nazi-era crimes.
14.
Sebastian Haffner did not agree with the stringency of some of the security measures endorsed by the Brandt government.
15.
Sebastian Haffner objected to the 1972 Radikalenerlass that instituted a Berufsverbot barring certain public-sector occupations to persons with "extreme" political views.
16.
Not only did Sebastian Haffner refuse to join the general international condemnation, he appeared positively to defend the Spanish dictatorship.
17.
Sebastian Haffner's readership was reportedly falling: he had already dropped from the Allensbach Institute's list of leading West-German journalists.
18.
At age 68 Sebastian Haffner decided to devote himself to his popular commentaries on German history.
19.
Sebastian Haffner was unsure whether the Germans might not again be gripped by national megalomania.
20.
Christa Rotzoll, a journalist whom Sebastian Haffner had married after he had been widowed in 1969, predeceased him in 1995.
21.
Sebastian Haffner was survived by his two children with Erika Schmidt-Landry.
22.
Sarah Sebastian Haffner was a painter and a feminist documentary-film maker.
23.
Sebastian Haffner believed that her own political involvement may have played some part in her father's engagement with the student movement in the 1960s.