Heinrich Mann wrote about artists and poets and voluptuaries, for whom art is a "perverse debauch." His novels set in Germany are usually grotesque caricatures with political implications; those set in Italy tend to be feverish riots of experience in an amoral world. His "Professor Unrat" (1905) was made into the famous film "The Blue Angel." "The Little Town" (1909) is perhaps his most benign novel. Heinrich Mann, like his brother Thomas Mann, fled Nazi Germany and came to the United States. His literary reputation is strongest in Europe. In the United States, his reputation is clouded partly by the rancor of his brilliant, hectic prose and partly by his admiration of the former Soviet Union.
