the March Reichstag fire, their hounding of Jewish and democratic jurists from the courts. What shocked him most in these events was the complete absence of "any act of courage or spirit". In the face of Hitler's ascent it seemed as if "a million individuals simultaneously suffered a nervous collapse". There was disbelief, but no resistance. Doctoral research allowed Haffner to take refuge in Paris, but unable to gain a foothold in the city he returned to Berlin in 1934. Having already published some shorter fiction as a serial novelist for the Vossische Zeitung, he was able to make a living writing feuilletons for style magazines where "a certain cultural aesthetic exclusivity was tolerated" by the Nazis. But the tightening of political controls and, more immediately, the pregnancy of his journalist girlfriend, classed as Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws, urged emigration. In 1938 Erika Schmidt-Landry (née Hirsch) (1899-1969) was able to join a brother in England, and Haffner, on a commission from the Ullstein Press, was able to follow her. They married weeks before the birth of their son Oliver Pretzel. Britain's declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 saved Haffner from deportation. As enemy aliens Haffner and his wife were interned, but in August 1940 they were among the first to be released from camps on the Isle of Man. In June, George Orwell's publisher Fredric Warburg had released Germany, Jekyll and Hyde, Haffner's first work in English and the first for which, to protect his family in Germany, he used the names he was to retain: Sebastian (from Johann Sebastian Bach) and Haffner (from Mozart's Haffner Symphony). In the House of Commons questions had been asked as to why the author of so important a book was being detained. Lord Vansittart described Haffner's analysis of "Hitlerism and the German problem" as "the most important [...] that has yet appeared". Political émigré Germany: Jekyll and Hyde In a polemic that rehearsed the themes of his later historical work, Haffner argued that Britain was naïve in declaring its "quarrel" to be with Hitler only and not with the German people. Hitler had "gained more adherents in Germany and come nearer to absolute power than anyone before him", and had done so by "more or less normal means of persuasion and attraction." This did not mean that "Hitler is Germany", but it was rash to assume that beneath Germany's