‘Parting’ by Sebastian Haffner: A forgotten German novel of the early 1930s that became a bestseller

Abschied (Parting) by Sebastian Haffner (1907–1999) is dominating the bestseller charts in Germany. It has been published posthumously, over 25 years after his death, after the manuscript was found in a drawer.

The novel is a love story between Raimund, a young non-Jewish German student of law from Berlin, and Teddy, a young Jewish woman from Vienna. Raimund and Teddy meet on August 31, 1930, in Berlin and the novel covers the time they spend in Berlin and Paris together.

Abschied was written between October 18 and November 23, 1932, just before the Nazi takeover. It reads in the breathless, immediate manner in which it was clearly conceived. It also gives a personal insight into the zeitgeist of the final months of the Weimar Republic.

Haffner was born Raimund Pretzel in Berlin, where he trained as a lawyer. He disagreed with the Nazi regime and emigrated to London in 1938. There, in order to protect his family in Germany from potential Nazi retribution he changed his name.

It is estimated that around 80,000 German-speaking refugees from Nazism lived in the UK by September 1939. Most of these refugees were Jewish, but there was also a sizeable number who, like Haffner, had fled for political reasons. Many politically committed exiles arrived soon after 1933 but this was...

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