Sebastian Haffner

Sebastian Haffner
Detail of 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
Nationality	Germany
Subject	Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, World War I, Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, World War II
Notable works	The Meaning of Hitler

Raimund Pretzel (27 December 1907 – 2 January 1999), 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 (1871–1945); 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 (German: Anmerkungen zu Hitler, 1978), a short biography and analysis of Hitler.

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 (but rapidly became remarkably proficient in the language), had no money and no financial support, and his fiancée (who became his wife later on) 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's Haffner Symphony, later he used the signature of this piece (KV 385) on his vehicle registration plate.

His book Offensive against Germany (1941) was commissioned by George Orwell and T.R. Fyvel for Searchlight Books.

Under the auspices of his mentor, David Astor, Haffner 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.