Heinrich Mann was one of the most outspoken and visible literary figures during the Weimar Republic. Other novelists were more popular in the twenties and early thirties, but none of them dealt with the political, social, and cultural upheavals of the new republic with more energy and courageous vision than he. Well before the First World War Mann had criticized the repressive life under Wilhelm II in both essays and fiction. His work had provoked the authorities to the point where his ninth novel, Die kleine Stadt (The Little Town), was at first denied publication in 1909. Mann had introduced the work as the song of songs of democracy, and it was feared that it might contaminate the public's faith in the authoritarian national state.

Mann's political criticism comes as a surprise if one looks at his background. Born in 1871 into the world of a well-established bourgeois family of merchants and civil servants, his literary beginnings were situated firmly in the fin-de-siècle aestheticism and political conservatism prevalent at that time. But even as a young man he began to develop a keen interest in the intellectual and artistic history of France. He studied the French philosophers of the Enlightenment, and he observed how a novelist like Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) stressed the importance of the writer as an anatomist and legislator of his time and nation. As early as 1904 Mann defined his role and that of all serious writers as moral and political educators of the people and saw himself specifically as a teacher of democracy for Germany.