Heinrich Mann

(1871 - 1950)

After the death of his father in 1891 left him financially independent, Heinrich Mann spent the following two decades writing novels skewering the decadence of imperial German society. He became a prominent advocate for democracy in the aftermath of World War I and in 1933 was forced into exile. That year he published Hatred, a collection of polemical essays against Nazism. “These crushingly condemnatory essays,” his younger brother, novelist Thomas Mann, wrote in a letter, “will remain forever a document of the most tremendous sort, a document of German shame and honor.”