Heinrich Mann
German writer
born March 27, 1871, Lübeck, Ger.
died March 12, 1950, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.
Main
German novelist and essayist, a socially committed writer whose
best-known works are attacks on the authoritarian social structure of
German society under Emperor William II.
Mann, the elder brother of the novelist Thomas Mann, entered
publishing, but, after the death (1891) of their father, a prosperous
grain merchant, he became financially independent and lived in Berlin,
spending long periods abroad, particularly in France. His early novels
portray the decadence of high society (Im Schlaraffenland [1900; In the
Land of Cockaigne]), and his later books deal with the greed for wealth,
position, and power in William’s Germany. Mann’s merciless portrait of a
tyrannical provincial schoolmaster, Professor Unrat (1905; Small Town
Tyrant), became widely known through its film version Der blaue Engel
(1928; The Blue Angel). His Kaiserreich trilogy—consisting of Die Armen
(1917; The Poor); Der Untertan (1918; The Patrioteer); and Der Kopf
(1925; The Chief)—carries even further his indictment of the social
types produced by the authoritarian state. These novels were accompanied
by essays attacking the arrogance of authority and the subservience of
the subjects. A lighter work of this period is Die kleine Stadt (1909;
The Little Town).
After 1918 Mann became a prominent spokesman for democracy and
published volumes of political essays, Macht und Mensch (1919; “Might
and Man”) and Geist und Tat (1931; “Spirit and Act”). He was forced into
exile in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, and he spent several years
in France before immigrating to the United States. His novel Henri
Quatre (two parts, 1935 and 1938) represents his ideal of the humane use
of power.
