Heinrich Mann's main character is a moral wretch and a deranged brother. The two extremes fit together in the soul of the small-town teacher. The short novel, written in 1904, sharply and with great humor presents the pettiness, the desire for revenge of the insignificant greyness, and the sensuality corrupted by its suppression. We can enjoy it in Hungarian in a very special translation by Dezső Kosztolányi. The most successful of the countless adaptations of the theme was The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich in 1930, which became a symbol of hypocritical hedonism over time.
In his moral zeal, the teacher takes the Orpheum dancer, but later uses her to unleash anarchy on the town. And the citizen, the mayor, the politician and the student fail together. It is understandable that the book was silenced in his hometown, and although it was not banned, it was hypocritically not allowed to sell it to the local bookstores.
Heinrich Mann is the brother of the equally world-famous writer, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann. Their two sisters and his wife also committed suicide, which took a toll on him. He left Germany in 1933, and after being stripped of his citizenship and his artistic positions, he emigrated to America. In 1949, a year before his death, he was reinstated.