Sebastian Haffner wrote one of the best books about Hitler. And a wonderful novel that no one knew about until now.

By the time his best book was published, Sebastian Haffner had already been dead for a year and a half. In the summer of 2000, "The Story of a German" hit bookstores. In it, Haffner recalls his childhood and youth in Berlin and on his family's estate in Western Pomerania. He describes the Roaring Twenties. And the transformation of Germany in the early 1930s, the rise of National Socialism. Precise, insightful—a masterpiece.

Haffner's son had discovered the manuscript in his father's estate. It was written in 1939, and was supposed to have been published then, in England. A contract had already been signed. But then the war began, and the publisher suddenly decided the book wasn't combative enough toward the country that had become the enemy. Time passed, and Haffner became one of Germany's most prominent political journalists. The book remained dormant for sixty years before it was published and became a bestseller.

Now another book by Sebastian Haffner is being published. This time a novel. It, too, was found in the estate. "Farewell" is the wonderfully light, fleeting story of a love that perhaps was no longer one before it could have become one: Raimund, a trainee lawyer at the Berlin Regional Court, travels to Paris. He visits Teddy, with whom he spent unforgettable days in Berlin the previous year. Teddy, with whom life was so easy that one could almost forget it.

But that was a long time ago. Teddy's admirers gather around him: Franz, Horrwitz, a Mr. Andrews, the mysterious "Old Man." With them and Teddy, Raimund wanders through the city, smoking Gitanes, drinking Chinese tea, and letting the time pass that he actually wants to slow down. They talk to each other. They talk past each other. From the very beginning, the shadow of farewell hangs over everything. The hours are numbered; on Sunday evening, the train departs that will take Raimund back to his unloved life as a lawyer. To a life without Teddy.

On a Sunday afternoon, the two spend a few blissfully dreamy hours together in cold, wet Paris. The Louvre, the Venus de Milo, the Trocadéro, the Eiffel Tower. They drink coffee, talk about trivial things, dance, and laugh. At the station, with the train already waiting, they grow closer. For a few moments. They kiss. Then the train departs: "Now the locomotive whistles. I can still hear it," the book ends.

The whole thing is told quickly. Unaffectedly, in an almost breathless style at times. Pages of dialogue dissolved into pages. Haffner wrote "Farewell" in the fall of 1932, within five weeks. He was twenty-four years old at the time, still called Raimund Pretzel, working as a court assessor in Berlin, and dissatisfied. He wanted more than to spend all day reading files and drafting judgments in stiff Prussian official German. He wanted to write. He had already recorded this in his diary as a twelve-year-old.

"I have something inside me that needs to write," he says, both decisively and confidently. He knew he wanted to be a playwright, and had already prepared a number of historical subjects to work on. He gave his father a play for his birthday, "The Horatii." As a recommendation, it seems to have had the wrong effect. The boy had talent, and his father, the principal of a Berlin school, knew this too. Nevertheless, after graduating from high school, he recommended that he study law.

The son did so, but only halfheartedly. He continued writing, in every free hour. No more dramas, but instead the novel "The Daughter," which was serialized in a Hamburg newspaper in 1929 and enjoyed some success. It was never published as a book, however, even though that had been the plan. His agent wrote to the author that he had contacted several publishers. They all recognized the book's quality. But they preferred to wait until the truly great novel by the promising young author came along.

It never came. Even though it existed. And even though this novel, now published more than ninety years late, was praised by its first readers. One editor attested that Pretzel had transformed a simple event "with the rich resources of his linguistic art into an event that would thrill every reader." Nevertheless, "Farewell" never made it to print. Several Swiss newspapers expressed interest, and it was offered to various German papers, but ultimately no takers were found.

Nevertheless, Pretzel increasingly devoted himself to writing. He wrote feature articles for Berlin newspapers, offering everyday observations on male vanity, smoking, drinking, and annoying fellow train passengers. He completed his studies and traveled to Paris in 1934 to finish his dissertation. He could have well imagined staying there, but ultimately returned to Berlin. However, he only pursued the unloved profession of law on the side, as a temporary job. He earned his living as a journalist.

Until August 1938. Raimund Pretzel left Germany to follow his fiancée Erika Schmidt, who was considered Jewish under the Nazi racial laws, into exile in England. The couple moved to London. Pretzel became a political journalist, writing for the most respected British newspapers. In a book published in 1940 under the title "Germany: Jekyll and Hyde," he explained his homeland to the British. To protect his relatives in Germany from danger, he no longer published his texts under his real name, but called himself Sebastian Haffner, after Johann Sebastian Bach's middle name and Mozart's Haffner Symphony.

He retained the name by which he had become known in England for the rest of his life, even when he returned to Germany in 1954. After the war, Haffner became a British citizen and wrote primarily for the "Observer": He wrote political analyses, reports from war-torn Europe, and portraits of people who shaped the course of history. As a confidant and advisor to David Astor, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the "Observer," he played a decisive role in shaping the newspaper's direction.

Disagreements arose in the early 1950s. Haffner advocated abandoning the paper's confrontational stance on the East-West conflict and advocating a policy of détente. Astor disagreed, and Haffner returned to Berlin as Germany correspondent, working for the "Observer." He resigned in the early 1960s. This, too, was due to political differences: after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Haffner became annoyed with his publisher. He now considered his stance toward East Germany too conciliatory. It was one of the political changes Haffner made over the course of his life.

Haffner had no need to worry about making a living. He was one of Germany's most renowned journalists, and his writing was in demand. He participated in television talk shows, commented on current events for "Die Welt," and wrote about the GDR in "Christ und Welt." In 1962, Haffner fell out with both editorial teams and became a columnist for "Stern," for which he wrote weekly columns. He was intelligent, dedicated, but sometimes with a shocking lack of perspective.

He described the actions of the Berlin police against the protesting students in June 1967 as "atrocities that, outside of the concentration camps, were exceptional even in the Third Reich." He then defended the dual status of Germany and even found sympathetic words for Walter Ulbricht. He also eventually broke off relations with "Stern" magazine when the editors refused to print an article in which Haffner spoke positively about the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

Alongside such bland gaffes, there are insightful analyses of National Socialism that are still among the best one can read today. In "Notes on Hitler," published in 1978, Haffner painted the oppressive psychological profile of a failure who lacked everything that gives a human life warmth and dignity. He was not a Machiavellian—in Haffner's view, he lacked greatness—but rather a prisoner of his resentments, who, out of personal coldness and emptiness, subordinated the fate of millions of people to his life plan.

One thing was clear to Haffner: Hitler was not a fate that would befall Germany. The fact that no one opposed him didn't mean, for Haffner, that he was unstoppable. In "The Story of a German," he described how the atmosphere in Germany gradually became poisoned and how anti-Semitism and war enthusiasm spread. So subtle that, upon the book's publication, the admittedly unfounded suspicion was expressed that it hadn't been written in 1939, but later, in retrospect.

The premonition of war is also noticeable in "Farewell." Franz, one of Teddy's admirers, longs for nothing more than war: "I'm so angry, I tell you. I want to wage war against France right now, but properly, with venom and bile." He doesn't know why. No one takes him seriously. But catastrophe is in the air. It's palpable. And no one knows when it will strike. "Farewell" is the story of a love that vanishes. And a snapshot of the interwar generation, staggering into disaster with their eyes wide open.

Sebastian Haffner: Farewell. Novel. Hanser-Verlag, Munich 2025. 192 pp., Fr. 34.90.