W&N acquires Sebastian Haffner’s ‘lost German masterpiece’
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has acquired postwar journalist Sebastian Haffner’s novel Parting, described as a “lost masterpiece”.
Deputy publisher Lettice Franklin bought world English rights from Nina Sillem at Agency Nina Sillem. It will be translated by Michael Hofmann, whose translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (Granta Books) won the International Booker Prize in 2024.
It will be published onto the W&N Essentials list, home to authors including Helen Garner, Elspeth Barker, Vladimir Nabokov, Renata Alder and Laurie Colwin, in autumn 2026.
After fleeing from Nazi Berlin to the UK with his Jewish fiancée in 1938, Haffner was recognised as one of the commanding analysts of Nazism, the publisher said, adding that Winston Churchill is said to have instructed his entire cabinet to read Haffner’s writing to comprehend the Nazi threat. His non-fiction titles, Defying Hitler and The Meaning of Hitler, are published by W&N and will also be reissued this year.
The existence of Parting, a love story set in the final days of the Weimar Republic, was not known about until Haffner’s children discovered the handwritten manuscript in Haffner’s desk. Haffner wrote Parting when he was 24 in just a few weeks in October and November 1932, months before the Nazis came to power, and never published it. More than nine decades after it was written, it went straight to the top of the Spiegel bestseller list when it was published in Germany in 2025.
The novel’s blurb reads: “Parting takes place in Paris in 1932. Two lovers, Raimund and Teddy, have just one day and one night to spend together before Raimund must return to Berlin. A young German barrister, Raimund has followed the irresistible Teddy to Paris, where she moves effortlessly through the city’s dazzling bohemian social world, where nights dissolve into dancing, cigarettes, aperitifs and plates of pommes frites, and mornings arrive long after noon. Together they roam through the city’s cafes, restaurants and boulevards, from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower. They bicker and flirt, scold and kiss, celebrating their freedom while knowing nothing can remain as it is, as the hours slip away toward Raimund’s evening train.”
Franklin said: “This is a rare and very special publication. Sebastian Haffner’s Parting is an exquisite novel – romantic, charming, witty, heart-breaking – that captures the last fragile moments of love and freedom before exile, fascism and war. The story of its discovery and publication is extraordinary, reminiscent of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, and I am so proud that W&N Essentials will be home to this novel, which I think deserves to sit alongside Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Isherwood, in its glittering portrait of mid-war Europe.”
