Stern in October 1975, Haffner maintained he had no regrets in supporting Brandt's Ostpolitik or the regime change from Christian Democrat to Social Democrat. These had been "necessary". But he confessed to some disillusionment. The relaxation of Cold-War tensions had brought little in its wake (the GDR, if anything, had hardened "since we have been nice to them") and internally the BRD, the Federal Republic, had seen better times. From Bismarck to Hitler At age 68 Haffner decided to devote himself to his popular commentaries on German history. Already some of his serialisations in Stern had been worked into best sellers. Die verratene Revolution (1968), Haffners indictment of Social Democrats in the collapse of 1918 as Reich loyalists, ran into thirteen editions. Like all his work, it remained without footnotes, written for a popular audience (Haffner claimed to hate books you couldn't take to bed). Anmerkungen zu Hitler (1978) (published in English as The Meaning of Hitler) sold a million copies. (Golo Mann called it a "witty, original and clarifying book... excellently suited for discussion in the upper classes of schools") Enlarging on his wartime "psychogram of the Führer" in Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, the book placed Hitler in the shadow of the revolution Ebert and Noske betrayed. Hitler, Haffner conceded, was no Prussian. Prussia had been "a state based on law", and its nationality policies had always "displayed noble toleration and indifference". But summarised in Haffner's final book, Von Bismarck zu Hitler (1987), the broader thesis remained. Through the "revolutions" of 1918 and of 1933, the Prussian-created Reich had endured with the same animating conviction. Born partly out of its geo-political exposure, it was that the Reich would either be a great power or collapse. Given their experience of this Reich, Haffner was confident that Germany's neighbours never would allow a successor: "alarm bells would go off if a new 80-million-strong power bloc were to rise up again at their borders.” Death and family In 1989/90, as Gorbachev scrambled his calculations and the Wall fell, Haffner reportedly feared that the Germans had been tempered less by the traumas of 1945the lessons of which he had tried to draw outthan by consequences of their country's division. He was unsure whether the Germans might not again be gripped by national megalomania. According to his daughter Sarah, the peaceful course of unification pleased him but, perhaps, made him feel more keenly that