Heinrich Mann has understood as a political author throughout his life, apart from his very early beginnings. He has always commented on daily questions in articles, pamphlets and essays. In the essays, which are deeply interwoven into his remaining work, he usually goes beyond the occasion of the day and formulates basic positions for himself and his audience. For the Heinrich Mann trained on the French moralists, there is no question that an artistic person has to be a reminder at the same time and warner that he is partly responsible before the spirit for the social, social and political shaping of his time. The works gathered in this volume Power and Human‹ provide information about the influences and the intellectual processing by Heinrich Mann. Above all are French writers. Because, according to Heinrich Mann: [...] they have educated democracy. This is the effect of Zola, and that is, despite his tendencies, that of Balzac. (For the novel, this revelation of the wide world, this great play of all human contexts, is equal to nature; it becomes great with the democracy in which the drama dies in its aristocratic narrowness. Balzac is the judge of combative democracy, Zola the triumphant.) Victor Hugo, who sends out of his exile his Republican fanfares, Saint Beuve, who defends dom of the press in the Senate, Flaubert with his ideal of a government of science, of the spirit itself. (From: Voltaire - Goethe‹, 1910) The essays often first appeared in magazines wir Pfemferts Aktion‹ or in the Pan ‹; subsequently, Heinrich Mann put them together into collective volumes. The present edition follows the first edition at Kurt Wolff, Leipzig 1919. Alfred Döblin wrote at that time in the Neue Rundschau‹: Heinrich Mann must be particularly praised among the poets and celebrated that he is not entrenched poetry, but becomes mediated without fear of suffering poetic losses.
