Raimund Pretzel (27 December 1907 – 2 January 1999), better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and historian. As an émigré in Britain during World War II, Haffner argued that accommodation was impossible not only with Adolf Hitler but also with the German Reich with which Hitler had gambled. Peace could be secured only by rolling back "seventy-five years of German history" and restoring Germany to a network of smaller states. As a journalist in West Germany, Haffner's conscious effort "to dramatize, to push differences to the top," precipitated breaks with editors both liberal and conservative. His intervention in the Spiegel affair of 1962, and his contributions to the "anti-fascist" rhetoric of the student New Left, sharply raised his profile. After parting ways with Stern magazine in 1975, Haffner produced widely read studies focussed on what he saw as fateful continuities in the history of the German Reich (1871–1945). His posthumously published pre-war memoir, Geschichte eines Deutschen: Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 (Defying Hitler: A Memoir) (2003) won him new readers in Germany and abroad. Early life School years Haffner was born in 1907 as Raimund Pretzel in Berlin. During war years, 1914–18, he attended the primary school (Volkschule) of which his father Carl Pretzel was the principal. Of these years he recalls not the privations, but the army bulletins read with the excitement of a football fan following match scores. Haffner believed that it was from this experience of war by a generation of schoolboys as a "game between nations", more enthralling and emotionally satisfying than anything peace could offer, that Nazism was to draw much of its "allure": "its simplicity, its appeal to the imagination, and its zest action; but also its intolerance and its cruelty towards internal opponents". After the war Haffner attended first a city-centre grammar school, the Königstädtisches Gymnasium Berlin in Alexanderplatz. Here he befriended children of the city's leading Jewish families in business and the liberal professions. They were precocious, cultivated and left-leaning. His adolescent politics, however, took a turn rightward after he moved, in 1924, to the Schillergymnasium in Lichterfelde heavily subscribed to by families in the military. Haffner was later to remark that: "My whole life has been determined by my experiences in these two schools". Hitler and exile After January 1933, Haffner witnessed as a law student the deployment of the SA's as an "auxiliary police force" and, after