The Manns

The Blue Angel is based on Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat. Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) was a prolific German novelist with leftist tendencies who emigrated once the Nazis came to power in Germany. His brother Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was also a novelist, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, and also fled Germany as soon as the Nazis came to power. Both of them moved to Hollywood in the 1930s, although Thomas ended up moving to Switzerland at the end of his life.

Thomas's children with his wife Katja are also quite interesting. Erika (1905-1969) and Klaus (1906-1949) were in their 20s in the 1920s and led the glorious glamorous life of the jeunesse dorée in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic.

In the 1930s, they were active against the Nazis. Both emigrated to the United States and served in the military. Klaus Mann's Mephisto, a roman à clef about the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who is portrayed as a typical artist ready to compromise with the Nazis, became a beautiful 1981 film directed by István Szabó.