Her Berlin-born father, Raimund Pretzel (Sebastian Haffner) had qualified as a lawyer, but abandoned the legal profession after 1933, and at the time of his daughter's birth was attempting – ultimately with considerable success – to reinvent himself as a journalist and author.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 seems to have removed the threat that the British would send the little family back to Nazi Germany, but instead Raimund Pretzel was identified as an enemy alien and in February 1940 locked away in a prison camp in Devon.

[6] Her mother already had one son, Peter, the elder of Sarah Haffner's two brothers, born as a result of her earlier marriage, to Harald Schmidt-Landry.

[8] During the early part of his time as a political refugee in England, before the authorities arrested him, Raimund Pretzel completed his book, Germany.

The British authorities were beginning to see the irony of locking up large numbers of German political refugees whose only obvious crime had been to escape from Nazi Germany in order to avoid being killed.

[11] As a result of editorial differences with David Astor at The Observer, in 1954 Sebastian Haffner resigned as the paper's foreign editor, and accepted a financially generous offer to be its Berlin correspondent.

She had left a "world city" (and her half brother, Erika's son Peter, already an established artist) for Berlin and West Germany which she found "incredibly" provincial ("unglaublich kleinkariert", "piefig").

[5] Her favourite author was to remain Christopher Isherwood, whose Berlin stories of the last hedonistic Weimar years recalled a city very different from the walled-in "Western Sector" in which she now found herself.

[12] She should complete her school career in Germany and she might then train for work as a graphic artist, a branch in which she might find reliable employment in commerce or advertising.

[11] Aged seventeen, on the recommendation of teachers at the handicraft academy, she moved on to the Berlin University of the Arts ("Hochschule der Künste" / HdK).

David Brandt would grow up to become a successful photographer, based in Dresden, but his birth in 1960 caused his mother to break off her studies at the HdK, from which she would graduate only in 1973.

[11] In August 1961, as he called for harder western protest against the building of the Berlin Wall, Sebastian Haffner parted ways with The Observer.

Sarah herself, was becoming politically active, engaging with a new protest generation (swollen in West Berlin by young people evading military conscription from the Federal Republic) and was later to believe that she may have helped draw her father, uncharacteristically, to the left.

[5] Along with a host of writers and intellectuals (including Ingeborg Drewitz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Günter Grass), in June 1967, Sarah was a signatory to an open letter accusing the Springer Press of "incitement" in the police shooting of the student protester Benno Ohnesorg.

[15] The Springer titles Bild and Berliner Morgenpost had been characterising left-wing students, called by Ulrike Meinhof in the journal konkret to protest a visit by the Shah of Iran, as a subversive threat.

[16][17] In February 1968, Sarah Haffner participated in the International Vietnam Conference called by the SDS (the Socialist German Student union).

With New Left luminaries Noam Chomsky, Ernest Mandel, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Paul Sartre, and with Ulrike Meinhof, Sarah signed the final declaration, defining Vietnam as "the Spain of our generation".

She also noted that whereas in Germany the tradition had endured since the nineteenth century whereby "every architect, dentist or psychologist" would invest in one or two pieces of original art - or at least a print - for the waiting room, no equivalent custom existed in England.

Staatlichen Fachschule für Erzieher" (teacher training academy) where for ten years, till 1981, she taught "Children's Play and Work" ("Kinderspiel und Arbeit").

Unlike many left-wing artists with whom, as an instinctively anti-authoritarian woman, she mixed, Sarah Haffner welcomed the fall of the wall and reunification.

The market was further depressed by uncertainty about the future, as westerners faced supplementary taxation to finance the economic regeneration of the "neuen Bundesländer" (former East Germany).

She had been prompted to produce the documentary by her own futile attempts, involving the police and other public officials, to help a neighbour in Berlin who had become a victim of domestic violence.

Until well into the second decade of the twenty-first century Sarah Haffner lived and worked in the Charlottenburg quarter of Berlin, close (on its western side) to the infamous wall.

She moved away from Berlin and spent her final months living close to her son, David Brandt, a professional photographer based in Dresden.

Images which at first glance appear intensely personal often turn out to reflect far more general experience, which Sarah Haffner uses to disclose social realities, but without venturing into overt agitation.

She lived through the "1968 events" and the manifestations of Second-wave feminism both as a youthful and very determined art student and as a slightly bemused young mother.

In one of a series of radio interviews conducted (and subsequently published in 2002) by Ute Kätzel, Sarah Haffner recalled her experiences of those events.