Heinrich Mann (March 27, 1871 – March 12, 1950) wrote German novels with social themes whose attacks on the authoritarian and increasingly militaristic nature of post-Weimar German society led to his exile in 1933.

Life and work

He was born in Lübeck as the oldest child of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and his wife Julia da Silva-Bruhns and was the elder brother of Thomas Mann. His father came from a patrician grain merchant family and was a Senator of the Hanseatic city. After the death of his father, his mother moved the family to Munich, where Heinrich began his career as a freier Schriftsteller.

His essay on Zola and the novel Der Untertan earned him much respect during the Weimar Republic, since it satirized German society and explained how its political system had led to the First World War. Eventually, his book Professor Unrat was turned into the successful movie Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel).Carl Zuckmayer wrote the script, Josef von Sternberg was the director. Marlene Dietrich played her first major role in it (as Lola).

Together with Albert Einstein and other celebrities, Mann was a signatory to a letter to the International League of Human Rights condemning the murder of Croatian scholar Dr Milan Sufflay on February 18, 1931. He became a persona non grata in Nazi Germany and eventually made his way to Marseille in Vichy, France. There, he was aided to escape to Spain, and eventually the United States by Varian Fry in 1940.

During the 1930s and later in American exile, his literary career went downhill, and eventually he died in Santa Monica, California, lonely and without much money, just months before he was to move to Soviet-occupied Germany to become president of the Prussian Academy of Arts. His ashes were later taken to East Germany.

Bibliography

Incomplete

• In einer Familie, 1894
• Im Schlaraffenland, 1900
• Professor Unrat, 1905
• Der Untertan (The Loyal Subject), 1919
• Das Kaiserreich (The Empire), 1925
• Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre, 1935
• Die Vollendung des Königs Heinri Quatre, 1938