Professor Unrat torments his students, even follows them privately - right into a nightclub. There, however, he succumbs to the charms of a ding-a-ling singer, and the end of the tyrant is heralded. Heinrich Mann writes about the main character of his novel that she is 'a new expression of the phenomenon that has so often shaken me, power'. With the film The Blue Angel, in which Marlene Dietrich shone, Heinrich Mann's caricature of the Wilhelmine era achieved world fame.