Sarah Haffner (born Margaret Pretzel: 27 February 1940 - 11 March 2018) 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 (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".
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 number 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 (newspaper). 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.