Germany's division In 1941
David Astor invited Haffner to join
The Observer as political correspondent, while
Edward Hulton recruited him as contributor to the popular
Picture Post. ''The Observer's'' foreign editor and an influential opinion former in England, in 1948 Haffner became a naturalised British citizen. Through the so-called Shanghai Club (named after a restaurant in Soho), he associated with left-leaning and emigre journalists, among them
E. H. Carr,
George Orwell,
Isaac Deutscher,
Barbara Ward and
Jon Kimche On his return from war service, David Astor took a more active part in editorial matters, and there were clashes of opinion. Following a
McCarthy-era trip to the United States, Haffner had soured on the
North Atlantic alliance, and (with
Paul Sethe of ) he was unwilling to dismiss as bluff the March 1952
Stalin Note with its offer of Soviet withdrawal in return for German neutrality. In 1954 he accepted a financially generous offer to transfer to Berlin as ''The Observer's
German correspondent. 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
. 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, cold-blooded, planned pogrom" a police riot in
West Berlin in which a student protester,
Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead. On June 2, 1967, rallied by
Ulrike Meinhof's exposure in the
New Left journal
konkret of German complicity in the
Pahlavi dictatorship, students had demonstrated against the visit of the
Shah of Iran. When Iranian counter-demonstrators, including agents of the
Shah's intelligence service, attacked the students, the police joined the affray beating the students into side street where an officer fired his side arm. Contributing himself to
konkret (later revealed to have been subsidised by the East Germans) Haffner wrote that "with the Student pogrom of 2 June 1967 fascism in West Berlin had thrown off its mask". Increasingly focussed on the
war in Vietnam ("the Auschwitz of the young generation"), many, including Haffner's daughter
Sarah, directed their anger at his former employer,
Axel Springer. After the attempted assassination of the socialist student leader
Rudi Dutschke on April 11, 1968, Springer titles (
Bild : “Students threaten: We shoot back", "Stop the terror of the Young Reds-Now!") were again accused of incitement.
Ulrike Meinhof Haffner's contribution to this pushing of "differences to the top" ("Zuspitzung") was not appreciated by Brandt's Social Democrats or by
Stern, On 19 May 1972, the
Red Army Faction (the "Baader Meinhof Gang") bombed Springer's Hamburg headquarters injuring 17 people. A week before they had claimed their first victim, an American officer was killed by a pipe-bomb at U.S. military headquarters in
Frankfurt am Main. Like the novelists
Heinrich Böll and
Günter Grass, Haffner did not resist the temptation, in placing Meinhof's deeds in perspective, of a further swipe at Bild; "no one", he argued, had done more to plant "the seeds of violence" than Springer journalism.
Celebrating the new liberalism Haffner did not agree with the stringency of some of the security measures endorsed by the Brandt government. He objected to the 1972
Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree) that instituted a
Berufsverbot barring certain public-sector occupations to persons with "extreme" political views. Marxists, he argued, must be able to be teachers and university professors "not because they are liberals, but because we are liberals" (
Stern, 12 March 1972). However, Haffner no longer referred to police "pogroms" or to regime neo-fascism. In the 1960s the police may have beaten demonstrators on the streets, but no one, he countered, ever "heard of them having tortured them". West Germany had changed. It may not have done enough to come to terms with the history of the Reich, but it had, in Haffner's view, "distanced itself from it with a light-footedness that no one had expected". The old authoritarianism, the sense of being a "subject" of the state, was "passé". The atmosphere had become "more liberal, more tolerant". Out of a nationalist, militaristic
Volk there had emerged a comparatively modest, cosmopolitan ("weltbürgerlich") public.
"Hands off" Franco's Spain In October 1975, the editorial board of
Stern refused a submission from Haffner on the grounds that it violated the magazine's commitment to a "democratic constitutional order and to progressive-liberal principles". In what was to prove its last use of capital punishment, on 27 September 1975 (just two months before
Franco's death) Spain executed two members of the armed
Basque separatist group
ETA and three members of the
Revolutionary Antifascist Patriotic Front (FRAP) for the murder of policemen and
civil guards. Not only did Haffner refuse to join the general international condemnation, he appeared positively to defend the Spanish dictatorship. In a piece provocatively titled "Hands off Spain", he argued that Spain had not done badly in its thirty-six years under Franco. There may not have been political freedom, but there had been economic modernisation and progress. To many it appeared that Haffner had overplayed his reputation as a
provocateur, an
enfant terrible, someone who consistently sought "to dramatize, to push differences to the top".'' ==From Bismarck to Hitler==