A young and restive Sebastian Haffner was typical of a generation of German writers and journalists who left their homeland in the 1930s to escape Nazi rule.
Relocating to London, Haffner described the headwinds of dictatorship in his historical memoir, Defying Hitler — a book he shelved at the time, but was published to much fanfare in 2002.
That foreboding story of a young man coming-of-age in interwar Germany was preceded by a novel conceived when the writer was only 24. Titled Abschied, or Parting, the long-forgotten manuscript was discovered by the writer’s son, Oliver Pretzel, after the author’s death in 1999.
It took almost a quarter of a century to get published. But the tale of young love torn between Berlin and Paris topped the German bestseller list only a week after it was published in June.
Glimmer of light
Parting was written in a few weeks in late 1932 as a troubled Weimar Republic was being supplanted by fascism and as Hitler worked on his rise to power. The author’s name was then Raimund Pretzel; he took the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner to protect his identity after arriving in the UK in 1938.
Haffner was then a liberal trainee lawyer at a Berlin court who would witness Jewish and social-democratic judges being expelled as the Nazis took power.
But despite the novel’s pervading sense of doom, the autobiographical love story retained a sense of hope.
Florian Kessel, the book’s publisher at Hanser Verlag, called it “a wonderfully free novel, full of smoking and hanging out together and falling in love to the point of ecstasy.” Yet it is also “full of allusions to the violent history of the decade that was unfolding.”
According to author and literary critic Volker Weidermann, who contributed the novel’s epilogue, the story echoed Haffner’s own love for a woman in Berlin who left for Paris in the early 1930s before he followed.
But the love affair between Raimund and Teddy is “basically already over” when he arrives in Paris and tries to rekindle a late summer romance. She saw the writing on the wall as Germany became more nationalistic and antisemitic. He hung around in Berlin until it was too late.
Teddy’s real name was Gertrude Joseph, a Vienna-born Jewish woman who Haffner met in Berlin before she went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1930. They met again in the German capital in 1933, whence she informed him she was getting married and would never return. It was then that Haffner decided to follow her to Paris. Joseph ultimately had a family in Sweden, though the two maintained correspondence throughout their life, according to Weidermann.
Long wait
The Parting manuscript was found in a drawer next to History of a German, the non-fiction work that became Defying Hitler. Yet it was published 23 years later, partly due to “different views in the family about publishing the manuscript,” Oliver Pretzel recounted in an interview with Republik Magazin.
“He hadn’t written anything about it in his will,” said Pretzel of his father. But Haffner’s son, along with his nephew, who inherited the rights to it from his mother, finally agreed to publish the book – which Pretzel himself edited.
Haffner’s heirs were understandably “worried” that this “early, light, youthful text” might muddy the “good reputation of the serious historian,” wrote Weidermann.
But it was precisely this “rapturous” and “breathless” novel that “describes the source of the grief on which his later books rest on,” he added.
The literary critic was referring to texts like Germany: Jekyll & Hide (1940), the story of how German society embraced Nazism after it reacted to defeat in World War One with “resentment, defiance, and spite.”
Printed hastily before the Nazi invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands in the hope of influencing German readers, the New York Times in 1941 called the book an “excellent analysis of Germany’s ills,” and of a population’s willingness to “hitch its wagon to an evil star.”
In Defying Hitler, Haffner described a scene at his high court office that typified his insightful and prophetic journalistic oeuvre.
“Then, not particularly loudly, somebody else said, ‘They’re throwing out the Jews,’ and a few others laughed. At that moment this laughter alarmed me more than what was actually happening. With a start I realised there were Nazis working in this room.”
Literary rebirth
In his journalistic and historical writings, Haffner, who returned to Germany in 1954, was perceived as “a forensic scientist of the German soul [who] works with a scalpel,” according to Swiss author and literary critic Matthias Zehnder. “His novel, on the other hand, is dabbed on with impressionistic lightness.”
The publication of Parting hints at a talent for fiction that was never allowed to flourish.
“What a novelist Sebastian Haffner would have been!” wrote Weidermman, referring to the author’s “tremendous powers of observation, his enormous wit, sentence after sentence.”
Oliver Pretzel described how he discovered both Denying Hitler and Parting in the same drawer after his father’s death, but how both were very different.
“I particularly liked Parting because it has such a light tone and is basically still full of joie de vivre, which is somewhat lacking in Defying Hitler.” he said in an interview with publisher Hanser. “You get the feeling that he takes a gloomy view of the world, whereas in Parting it is a hopeful view.”
