Sarah Haffner
Sarah Haffner was a German-British painter, author, and active feminist. In West Berlin she engaged with the protest issues of the 1960s, on occasion alongside her father, the journalist and writer Sebastian Haffner. Through a television documentary and a book she was instrumental in the late 1970s in establishing the city's first women's shelter. The range of her painting included portraits, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes.
Early years, England
Émigré parents
Margaret Pretzel was born in Cambridge, England. Her Berlin-born father, Raimund Pretzel 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 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, 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".She would adopt the name "Sarah" only when she was a teenager, however. "Sara" was the name the Nazis had scornfully imposed on every Jewish woman, regardless of her real name. Adopting "Sarah" as her own "Christian" name after the Nazi nightmare had ended, seemingly for good, was, for Sarah Haffner an important part of discovering and asserting her own identity.
Childhood
In May 1940 her mother was also interned by the British, both parents now identified as enemy aliens. Her parents were deported to the Isle of Man where they were held in separate camps, unable to contact each other. Their daughter was permitted to stay with her mother, however. Shortly before her mother's release, in October 1940, the child won a baby competition, officially designated as the most beautiful baby in the internment camp. The British authorities were beginning to see the irony of locking up large numbers of German political refugees whose only obvious crime had been to escape from Nazi Germany in order to avoid being killed. Raimund Pretzel had been among the first to be released. His recently published book Germany. Jekyll & Hyde had resonated with a number of members of the British establishment who had been unable to understand why the author had been locked away. Someone else impressed by the book had been David Astor of The Observer. Sebastian Haffner accepted an offer to write regularly for the paper, initially on a freelance basis. The family relocated to London in 1942, their financial position no longer so precarious as when they had arrived in England in 1938.Most of her childhood was spent growing up with her family in London. Sarah Haffner was very close to her father. 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.
Her eldest brother, Peter, was identified as an artistic talent from a relatively early age, and it was he who drew their parents' attention to Sarah's growing artistic talent. In 1953 he recommended that they should use her oil paintings as serious Christmas presents.
Germany
1950s West Berlin
As a result of editorial differences with David Astor at The Observer, in 1954 Sebastian Haffner resigned as the paper's foreign editor, and accepted a financially generous offer to be its Berlin correspondent. For Sarah it was an unhappy move. She had left a "world city" for Berlin and West Germany which she found "incredibly" provincial. Her favourite author was to remain Christopher Isherwood, whose Berlin stories of the last hedonistic Weimar years recalled a city very different from the walled-in "Western Sector" in which she now found herself.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. She should complete her school career in Germany and she might then train for work as a graphic artist, a branch in which she might find reliable employment in commerce or advertising. Or she might become a specialist restorer of "old masters". The arguments lasted for months. When she was sixteen she diverted into vocational training for a lifetime career as a serious artist.
Haffner attended the "Meisterschule für das Kunsthandwerk" handcraft academy 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. After mastering the basics she was accepted into the specialist painting class taught by Ernst Schumacher.
Family matters
When she was nineteen she became pregnant. "Stupidly, I became pregnant when I was 19 / Dummerweise bin ich mit 19 schwanger geworden ". She was married to the artist Andreas Brandt between 1960 and 1962. David Brandt would grow up to become a successful photographer, based in Dresden, but his birth in 1960 caused his mother to break off her studies at the HdK, from which she would graduate only in 1973. She was, in the meantime, able to support herself as a freelance artist.Political engagement in the 1960s
In August 1961, as he called for harder western protest against the building of the Berlin Wall, Sebastian Haffner parted ways with The Observer. In November 1962, he also broke with the conservative Die Welt. In defiance of publisher Axel Springer, he had intervened against the government in the Spiegel affair. Sarah herself, was becoming politically active, engaging with a new protest generation and was later to believe that she may have helped draw her father, uncharacteristically, to the left.Along with a host of writers and intellectuals, in June 1967, Sarah was a signatory to an open letter accusing the Springer Press of "incitement" in the police shooting of the student protester Benno Ohnesorg. 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. 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 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.Her teaching experience in England now helped her obtain a job at the "1. Staatlichen Fachschule für Erzieher" where for ten years, till 1981, she taught "Children's Play and Work". Between 1980 and 1986 she taught at the Berlin University of the Arts.