(the "Austrian solution ") as the basis for a final German settlement, a prospect not definitively dismissed until the construction in September 1961 of the Berlin Wall. Haffner joined Springer in railing against the ineffectiveness of the western allied response to the sealing of the Soviet Bloc in Germany, a stance that occasioned his final break with Astor and The Observer. Consistent with his post-Reich vision of 1940, Haffner was not, in principle, opposed to the existence of a second German state. In 1960 he had speculated on the future of the GDR as a "Prussian Free State" giving play, perhaps, to the National Bolshevist ideas Ernst Niekisch. After the consolidation of the wall, and in a break with Axel Springer, Haffner was to see no alternative but to formally recognise a Soviet-Bloc East Germany. From 1969 he supported the Ostpolitik of the new Social-Democratic Chancellor, Willy Brandt. The Spiegel affair On 26 October 1962, the Hamburg offices of Der Spiegel were raided and closed by police. The publisher, Rudolf Augstein, along with the weekly's two editors-in-chief and a reporter were arrested. Defence minister Franz Josef Strauss levelled accusations of treason (Landesverrat) in respect of an article detailing a NATO projection of "imaginable chaos" in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike and criticising the Government's lack of preparedness. In a statement he was later obliged to recant, Strauss denied himself initiating the police action. Springer offered its presses, teletypes and office space so Der Spiegel could keep on publishing. But it was at the cost of any further access to Die Welt that Haffner, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (8 November 1962), pronounced on the violation of press freedom and constitutional norms. Invoking the spectre of the republican collapse in 1933, Haffner argued that German democracy was in the balance. Identified with what was to be seen a key turning point in the culture of the Federal Republic away from deference demanded by the old Obrigkeitsstaat (authoritarian state) Haffner found a new, and more liberal, readership with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and with the weeklies Die Zeit and Stern magazine. Student protest and anti-Springer campaign Together with young writers and activists of a new post-war generation, Haffner believed that the Federal Republic was paying a price for Adenauer's pragmatic refusal to press for an accounting of Nazi-era crimes. With implicit reference to these, in Stern Haffner denounced as "a systematic,