Sarah Haffner

Early years, England Émigré parents Margaret Pretzel was born in Cambridge, England. Her Berlin-born father, Raimund Pretzel (Sebastian Haffner) had qualified as a lawyer, but abandoned the legal profession after 1933, and at the time of his daughter's birth was attempting – ultimately with considerable success – to reinvent himself as a journalist and author. He had fled from Germany with his pregnant fiancée, whom the authorities had identified as Jewish, in 1938. The couple had only received permission to remain in Britain for twelve months, but they nevertheless married in the late summer of 1938, basing themselves in Cambridge where Kurt Hirsch, his wife's brother, had recently received his doctorate in mathematics from the university. The outbreak of war in September 1939 seems to have removed the threat that the British would send the little family back to Nazi Germany, but instead Raimund Pretzel was identified as an enemy alien and in February 1940 locked away in a prison camp in Devon. It was while he was in this camp that he (and the other prisoners) learned of his daughter's birth through a tannoy announcement: "A little black head girl from Mister Pretzel". Shortly afterwards he was moved to the Isle of Wight.

Her 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. Erika Schmidt-Landry (1899-1969), had been working as a journalist with a women's magazine till 1938.

New names During the early part of his time as a political refugee in England, before the authorities arrested him, Raimund Pretzel completed his book, Germany. Jekyll & Hyde. It was his first "serious" book on history and politics: till now his publications had concerned fashion, music and entertainment. He used a pseudonym in order to try and protect relatives who remained in Germany against unwelcome questions from the Gestapo. He chose the name "Sebastian Haffner", explaining it as a celebration of two of Germany's great positive contributions to the world. "Sebastian" was the middle name of Johann Sebastian Bach and "Haffner" recalled Mozart's 35th Symphony. He very soon adopted the pseudonym as his regular name: his daughter's family name therefore changed from "Pretzel" to "Haffner". When she was nine he took her to her first concert. The Amadeus Quartet were playing: four fellow refugees from Nazi race-hate, and one of the twentieth century's greatest string quartets. They played Schubert's String Quartet No. 13. The audience cheered and gave the players a standing ovation. Sarah Haffner felt hugely privileged to be present for that occasion, with her father behind her.

For the rest of their lives Sarah and her father would operate an Anglo-German existence, balancing the two cultures in their domestic and professional lives. Sarah's intention to make her way in life as a painter ran into parental opposition. Her father insisted that she would never be able to support herself as an artist. in West Berlin for a year.

Aged seventeen, on the recommendation of teachers at the handicraft academy, she moved on to the Berlin University of the Arts ("Hochschule der Künste" / HdK). After mastering the basics she was accepted into the specialist painting class taught by Ernst Schumacher. She was, in the meantime, able to support herself as a freelance artist. The Springer titles Bild and Berliner Morgenpost had been characterising left-wing students, called by Ulrike Meinhof in the journal konkret to protest a visit by the Shah of Iran, as a subversive threat. Writing himself in konkret, Sebastian Haffner described the incident as a "pogrom" with which "fascism in West Berlin had thrown off its mask".

In February 1968, Sarah Haffner participated in the International Vietnam Conference called by the SDS (the Socialist German Student union). With New Left luminaries Noam Chomsky, Ernest Mandel, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Paul Sartre, and with Ulrike Meinhof, Sarah signed the final declaration, defining Vietnam as "the Spain of our generation". Two months later SDS leader Rudi Dutschke, who had been vilified in Bild, was shot on the streets of West Berlin.

Meinhof now began considering a next step in a struggle with "fascism" and, given their public association, the result was particularly painful for the Haffners. On 19 May 1972, the Red Army Faction (the "Baader Meinhof Gang") bombed Springer's Hamburg headquarters injuring 36 people. Five days later they claimed what was to be the first of 34 victims murdered over 28 years, two American soldiers killed in an explosion at a military base in Heidelberg.

Career Teaching in Watford and Berlin Alongside her work as an artists and author, Sarah Haffner was involved as a teacher at various academies between 1969 and 1986. In 1969 she returned to England intending, as she later explained, to enhance her earnings and to get away from the increasingly fevered atmosphere among students and academics as the Paris events of May 1968 resonated with student radicals in the German cities. Her brother, Peter, had been teaching at the Watford School of Art since 1960. In England it was possible to become an art teacher without the inflexibly regulated file of qualifications and certificates that would have been needed in Germany. She 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. However, she found herself ill-suited to the "small-talk dinner party culture" which seemed to be part of the artistic milieu of the time and place. She also 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. There would be no easy path to riches as a free-lance artist in England. After fifteen months she returned to Berlin with her son.

"When I was seventeen I enrolled at the Arts Academy (HdK) where I felt appallingly uncomfortable, and although I could not have put it in to words back then, I was subconsciously aware that I was viewed in the first instance not as an artist but as a woman, and that it was as a woman that I generated interest. That created a pressure that meant that when I went to class in trousers, I knew that I would paint. But if I went in wearing a dress I knew I would hang around in the faculty waiting for people to talk to me ... I knew precisely that within me there were two separate mindsets - a form of inner schism, if you will - I was extremely ambitious, but for me it was also quite clear that you can only achieve if you constantly work at it. But it was not just me: all the girls at the academy knew that somehow they were not valued at their full worth. I certainly suffered from that: I valued myself fully, demanded much of myself, and somehow I was disappointed that my own self-assessment diverged so far from the reactions of others." From early in 1968 Haffner took to participating in meetings of the West Berlin "Action Council on Women's Liberation".

"I remember twelve or fifteen women, telling everything about themselves ... I had always thought there was something not quite right with me, but now I saw that we all had been through the same experiences ... I never felt more alive ... I identified completely with the Action Council ... this process of self-awareness building that we went through, which became a realisation among the women concerning their own oppression. I even think that women were the revolutionary part of this somewhat wider revolutionary movement, precisely because they questioned their own situations."