Word: havemann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Chemist Robert Havemann is a tortured German intellectual who embraced Communism before 1933 as a way to oppose Nazism. Then a topflight scientist at Berlin's famed Kaiser-Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute, he was saved from a Nazi death sentence when the German army argued that he could be more useful with his head on than off. As a result, he did chemical research for the Wehrmacht during World War II while locked up in Brandenburg Prison. After the war Communist Havemann became one of East Germany's star scholars, won the Patriotic Order of Merit from...
...Louis' Washington University, he made a beeline for the newsroom of the St. Louis Star-Times, which was even then mortally ill (it died in 1951). "I picked the Star-Times because it was the lowest-paying place and seemed most likely to hire a kid," says Havemann. He was taken on as a $15-a-week baseball and football writer, two sports that he knew nothing about. Shifted to rewrite man, Havemann ground out 3,000 to 4,000 words a day. "It was great training,'' he says. "I wrote so much that going home...
...Although Havemann rose to better jobs and better publications, the conviction grew that harness was for horses and not for him. In 1956, after nine years as an articles writer for LIFE, Havemann moved off the masthead. Before leaving, he suggested that he go on producing at least four LIFE articles a year, a gentleman's agreement that has since ripened into a contract...
Improving the Breed. As a freelancer, Havemann is thoroughly atypical. His LIFE retainer, along with his articulate typewriter, shelters him from the premonitions of disaster that assail so many of his colleagues. So avid are magazine publishers for Havemann work that he does not even deal through an agent, except for his books...
Freelancers say that theirs is a spartan life. Havemann agrees. But by his own confession he spends half his life at the track, improving the breed and defending his self-endowed title of world's champion handicapper. Nor does he regard writing as a chore. "I write when I feel like it. I do a lot of gardening while thinking about the story. When I get an idea of the form or how to start, I go in the house and write." Then it comes quickly: he once produced 5,000 words for LIFE in just under seven hours...