Mann, Heinrich (Lübeck, 1871-1950, Los Angeles), in full Luiz Heinrich Mann, was the eldest son of a well-to-do corn factor of Lübeck and the elder brother of Th. Mann. He had his schooling at the Katharineum in Lübeck, and in 1869 was sent to Dresden to train for the book trade. In the following year he joined S. Fischer-Verlag, then newly founded in Berlin. The death of his father in 1891 closed the family home, and Heinrich Mann, after a short stay in Munich with his mother, moved to Italy, settling in Florence, spending some time in Palestrina, and visiting sanatoria in Switzerland and northern Italy.
Mann's first novel, In einer Familie, set in Dresden, appeared in 1894; he revised and republished it in 1924, and considered Im Schlaraffenland (1900) as his first work. His travels in southern Europe are reflected in the settings of many of his novels, but in this one he wrote a satire upon high life in Berlin.
Mann's next important publication was an exotic trilogy, Die Göttinnen oder Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy (1903). Powerfully influenced by Nietzsche and d'Annunzio, the three novels are devoted to the dynamic duchess's vain endeavour to justify her existence, first in politics in an imaginary Dalmatian state, then in art, and finally, in the sultry third book, in love. The novels of the Duchess Violante d'Assy are entitled Diana, Minerva, and Venus. The hectic and caricatured erotic element is also dominant in Mann's next novel, Die Jagd nach Liebe (also 1903), set in Munich and Berlin; it is partly a roman à clef, since two of the principal characters are modelled on the Munich connoisseur and dilettante A. W. Heymel and the poet R. A. Schröder. The now well established tendency of Mann towards caricature and sarcasm found its full expression in his novel Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen (1905), and to this his native Lübeck is central; it became years later by far the best known of his works, for in 1930 it was converted into a film under the title Der blaue Engel with Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in the principal roles. On republication in 1947 the book bore, with Mann's reluctant consent, the film title, Der blaue Engel. The next novel, Zwischen den Rassen (1907), is concerned, not with anti-Semitism, on which Mann also wrote, but with the contrast between Nordic and Latin, of which he, as the son of a Lübeck father and a Brazilian mother, was especially conscious. Lola, the actress heroine, fails in her career, but is saved from a sensual surrender to the possessive and aggressive Italian Pardi by the determined intervention of the more congenial Arnold Acton. The novel Die kleine Stadt (1909) appeared in the year in which Mann went with his brother Thomas to Italy; the work turns from private life to democratic politics in a small Italian town. In 1914 Mann married the Czech actress Maria (Mimi) Kanova. The marriage lasted until 1930. Another liaison, with Nelly Kroeger, was legalized in 1939; she took her own life in 1944. With the suicide of his actress sister in 1910 this was the second suicide in Mann's immediate family; a third was that of his nephew Klaus (in 1949, see Mann, K.).
In 1915 Heinrich Mann responded to public approval of the war expressed by his brother Thomas with an essay, Emile Zola (published in the periodical Die weißen Blätter), in which he, a pacifist, attacked misguided nationalism. The relationship between the brothers never fully recovered from this public rift. In the years preceding the 1914-18 War Mann had begun work on three satirical novels which analyse and deride the Germany of Wilhelm II. Jointly they are referred to as Die Kaiserreich-Trilogie, though the three components, Der Untertan (1918), Die Armen (1917), and Der Kopf (1925), were published as separate works. Der Untertan, instalments of which were published 1911-13, was delayed by the war. The relentlessly savage and negative tone of the trilogy gives way to a more conciliatory note in the succeeding novels Mutter Marie (1927), Die große Sache (1930), and Ein ernstes Leben (1932), which, however, aroused little response since critics held, rightly or wrongly, that they were written without full conviction. A novel of more persuasive character appeared between the first and second of these works, Eugénie oder Die Bürgerzeit (1928).
Mann, seeing clearly the dangers into which Germany was declining, was increasingly active with political speeches and essays. In 1931 he became president of the literary section of the Prussian Academy (see Akadamien). In 1933 he was promptly dismissed from this office and deprived of his German citizenship. He was granted Czech nationality in 1936. Mann took refuge in France. French intellectual life was so congenial to him that he hardly felt himself in exile. In this temporary contentment he wrote his most conciliatory work, the double historical novel on the life of King Henry IV of France, Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre (1935) and Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre (1938, see Henri Quatre-Romane), which is generally held to be the summit of his achievement.
In 1940 Mann escaped through Spain and Portugal to the USA, where he settled in Los Angeles, close to his brother. He did not feel at ease in his new environment, and this may be in part responsible for a perceptible recession in his later novels. Lidice (1943) treated an atrocity committed in 1942 on orders from Berlin (in Czechoslovakia) in a tone which seemed (and not only to the Czechs) improper for such a tragedy. Der Atem (1949) and Empfang bei der Welt (posth., 1956) are structurally weak and unnecessarily multilingual. The unfinished historical novel on Friedrich II of Prussia, Die traurige Geschichte von Friedrich dem Großen (posth., 1960), which is written in the form of a dialogue, suggests a negative counterpart to the warmth and sympathy of the novels on Henry IV. After the 1939-45 War, Mann hoped for a recall to Germany, but until the end of the 1940s only feelers without precise proposals came from East Germany. In 1949 he accepted appointment as president of the newly founded Academy of Arts of the German Democratic Republic. Mann died while preparing for the move.
Mann was an impatient writer, and his insufficient attention to precision and neatness of style, coupled with his addiction to an irony so harsh that it becomes sarcasm, accounts, at least in part, for his failure to secure instant recognition. These characteristics are also evident in his numerous Novellen, written in bursts of activity, of which Pippo Spano and Abdankung (both 1905), Die Branzilla, Das Herz, and Die arme Tonietta (all 1908), and Kobes (1925), a caricature of the industrialist Stinnes, deserve mention; they are likewise manifest in his plays, two of which are Novellen in dialogue and were subsequently performed as one-act plays (Der Tyrann, 1908, and Die Unschuldige, 1908). Of his full-length plays Schauspielerin (1911), Die große Liebe (1912), and Madame Legros (1913) are the most noteworthy. Among his numerous, often polemical, essays the collections Geist und Tat (1931) and Der Haß (1933) should be mentioned. Reminiscences and observations are included in Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt (1945).
Heinrich Mann was subject to powerful and conflicting emotions. Anger is linked with compassion, though it contrives to be more conspicuous, and both are part of his remarkable love-hate relationship with his native Germany. In many essays he expresses his democratic views, which inclined towards an idealistic communism, but he was repelled by the totalitarian aspects developed under official Communism. The high inner tension of his personality appeared to relax in Italy and France, and of this a passion for Puccini's operas is an unexpected symptom. The one work in which warmth of feeling, compassion, and good humour are fully revealed is the double novel written in France and dealing with a French theme, the life of Henry of Navarre.
Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben (14 vols.) appeared 1958 ff., and Gesammelte Werke (planned in 25 vols.), ed. S. Anger, 1965 ff. A select edition of essays, ed. H. M. Enzensberger, appeared 1968 as Politische Essays, and in the same year appeared Thomas Mann und Heinrich Mann. Briefwechsel, ed. U. Dietzel and H. Wysling.
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