“Farewell” by Sebastian Haffner – yes, a love story

How about a small love story? Think about that! The book should not be expensive and I print them for the beginning of ten thousand pieces. The friendly rangers always tell me on my travels how people like to read something like that. How is it? …

With best regards

Yours (giant schnörkel) Ernst Rowohlt

Yes, a love story … the thing is not easy. You know how much it is opposed to hell the public with my personal stuff – so that continues. I also cheat every woman with my typewriter and therefore do not experience anything romantic. And should I think of the story? …

Your Tucholsky

*

The novel »Schloss Gripsholm« of the last signing begins with a fictional correspondence that is very shortened here between the publisher and his author, who is second to none on amusing lying. Even because Kurt Tucholsky chased many rock tips that came under his eyes. And because he naturally invented the “summer story” from a vacation in the Swedish castle. Because spreading “personal stuff” was actually not possible. The sophisticated journalist and writer, who relied on a grace and decency, only allowed himself to dedicate the book of Berlin’s auton number IA 47 407. Journalist Lisa Matthias, who was a lover from 1927 to 1931, drove the associated motor vehicle.

“Gripsholm Castle” was published by Rowohlt in 1931. The fact that Tucholsky spread very clearly from what was supposed to come across Germany and the world from 1933 did not prevent the audience’s success of this airy, melancholic, but also funny story about the desired performance of free love. Rowohlt even tried to continue the wave.

At least Tucholsky’s Gripsholm story is likely to have known the 24-year-old Raimund Pretzel-he was supposed to rename himself in 1940 in the England-Exil to protect relatives in Germany in Sebastian Haffner when he wrote his text under the title “Farewell” in late autumn 1932. It is the description of a few hours in which everything revolves around a great love, the love for a young woman who all call Teddy around her. She played in Paris in 1931 and is the told countdown of events to the departure of a train on the Gare du Nord. He brings Pretzel after several weeks of stay in the city on the Seine back to Berlin, while Teddy stays in Paris, where she has lived since 1930.

These last hours have been filled out with conversations, restaurant visits and a breathless hunting for Paris attractions that have not yet been sought, such as the Venus of Milo in the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. For Raimund it becomes clear that it is a farewell forever. Because Teddy is afraid of Berlin in 1931. Her life in the Latin district is preferred – without fear, as a demigod in a circle of her fascinated bohemian. Jealousy, disillusionment, the difficulty of letting go, it all occurs. And again and again the scene wraps into the smoke red gitanes.

It cannot be distinguished between the author and the first person narrator. Teddy is exactly the same as in the text, which is not a novel, but a longer narrative, also in reality. It is called Gertrude Joseph, was born in a Jewish Viennese family in 1910. All men who float them in Paris like the moths can probably be identified, even if Haffner gives them other names.

At the latest since his “comments on Hitler” from 1978: Haffner Sells. And that’s a good thing. Haffner had a unique talent, “maintained an unusually narrative writing style”, as his last publisher and first biographer Uwe Soukup calls it. Even if he shot this or that goat, for example Hitler assigned to the left: Haffner’s texts, even the serious and most complicated problems, are so tasty that you continue to drink until the bottle is empty.

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“Farewell” can now serve in every seminar for prospective writers of the manual training. Only his salary should not be estimated as high as Volker Weidermann praises him in his afterword of the edition organized by Hanser and some reviewers.

In the group around Teddy and her Berlin admirer with their tolerance, philanthropy and the effort to lead a good life, it is by no means to see the portrait of an entire generation, through which the misfortune of the Nazi rule breaks out. Those who are so bright in front of the dark clouds of the future are a tiny minority in the bourgeois youth of Germany at the time.

Haffner stated in his autobiographical educational letter “History of a German”, which was only published in 1939 and only published in 2000: “But the actual generation of Nazism were those born in the decade 1900 to 1910, who experienced the war very undisturbed as a great game.” It is the generation of Haffner who was born in 1907 as the son of a higher Prussian civil servant.

How the conditions within this cohort look can be visited at the early 1930s at the German universities. In Leipzig, for example, the Nazi Student Association, which then initiated the burns in May 1933, already won the absolute majority in the student committee in February 1931 with eight out of 15 seats. Corps students occupy six other places. Nothing helps: In the ancestral gallery of the “elites” of Germany, Himmler and Heydrich are the representatives of the not Haffner and Teddy typical of the bourgeois youth.

It would be good that the publication of “Farewell” would start for increased Haffner reading. His best book, most recently published under the name “Der Verrat”, deals with the mess of the Ebert and Noske when the Social Democratic Revolution in 1918/19 in Germany. His texts in the “Stern” and in “concrete” show him, the conservative, who is friendly with Ulrike Meinhof, as an attentive observer of the German-German conditions and supporters of a policy of relaxation and communication with the East.

We miss a realism like his, which does not ask for the moral rings underneath of political action, but of the interests that are based on this, today in the media with the higher ranges. Unfortunately, no columns for the newspaper “New Germany” belong to its oeuvre. In the early 1990s asked if he wanted to write such a letter, he said on the phone: “Oh, you know how it would look like when I still overcome you?”

Sebastian Haffner: Farewell. Hanser, 192 pages, born, 24 €.