More persistently than any other major writer of his generation, Heinrich Mann opposed social injustice and the spiritual decline of Germany's culture during the Wilhelmine era before World War I and during the Weimar Republic. He was also a vehement, prophetic enemy of National Socialism. With a satiric realism that heightens the reader's tragic awareness, his best works lay bare the ideological and societal roots of the delusions that gave to German history in his lifetime its catastrophic bent.

Luiz Heinrich Mann was born in the north German port of Lübeck in 1871, the year Bismarck unified Germany under the contradictory auspices of militaristic Prussian autocracy and laissez-faire industrial capitalism. His father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, scion of a respected mercantile dynasty, was a senator, a member of the Hanseatic city's ruling body. His mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhns Mann, had been born in Brazil to a colonial...