An unknown novel by a post -war journalist in Europe, depicting the last days of the Weimar Republic, was published in Germany when the author’s children accidentally discovered his manuscript.

More than 90 years after his writing, -mention the Guardian- Abschied or “Farewell ‘by Sebastian Hafner It has been launched at the top of Spiegel’s book list after its release in June 2025.

Hafner, who escaped Nazi Berlin with his Jewish suitor in 1938, became famous in 1940 with the classic work of Germany: Jekyll and Hyde. Indeed, it is said that Winston Churchill asked his cabinet to read the book to understand the threat of Nazism.

The writer Hafner, changed his name in the UK from Rayd Pretsel to protect his family who stayed in Germany and worked as a journalist in London for the newspaper Observer.

He was recognized as one of the leading analysts of Nazism and the causes of Hitler’s rise. In 1954 he returned to Berlin on behalf of Observer and later became a key columnist for Stern magazine.

His son, Oliver Peschel, 86, said today that the family had been hesitant for years on whether he should publish the book after their father’s death in Berlin in 1999, at the age of 91.

They were afraid, he said, that the work, an erotic story, could look superficial and overshadow their father’s reputation as an important political commentator.

“My sister didn’t consider the novel particularly good“, Said Pretsel, a math professor in London, in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I first agreed partly. But when I read it again and started translating it into English, I realized how smartly structured it is“

In Germany they have praised 181 pages project as’literary lottery“,” An incredibly fast, light and vibrant text “, and” A beautiful book with youthful freshness and great emotional tension “.

The case of the book

He is placed on the last day of a 15 -day trip to Paris of the protagonist and his beloved, Teddy, shortly before returning to a Berlin dominated by fear and political insecurity. It reflects the same “acute historical consciousness that impressed the world” and in the other posthumous works of Hafner, such as the history of a German (History of a German).

This book was written in 1939 but was first published in German in 2000, and in English, entitled Defying Hitler, in 2002. He was praised for the purity of his gaze and rejected Hafner’s generation claims that they were ignoring the Nazi crimes.

Jekyll and Hyde was released in Germany in 1996 entitled 1939 – Deutschland von Innen Betrachtet (“1939 – Germany from inside”). Both projects reached the top.

Hafner was 24 years old when he wrote farewell, in a few weeks, in October and November 1932, shortly before the Nazi rise to power. His efforts to issue it then failed.

The narrator, Raywund, is a practitioner who smokes and reads Aldus Huxley. In Paris in the spring of 1931 he meets Teddy, who has left Berlin, describing the season as “a period when the word” crisis “had not yet been invented”.

Literary critic Falker Widerman says the family’s fears of publishing were unfounded.

“The farewell complements the historical image that Hafner has given us in his historical works, because he describes the root of the sadness on which his later books are supported – the loss of all those who represented good in Germany: cosmopolitanism, tolerance and tolerance. He repeatedly emphasized that the story unfolded through private micro -history that makes up the great world history. In farewell, he puts it exactly this basic idea. “