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Although long overshadowed in critical esteem by his younger brother Thomas, Heinrich Mann was an independent, innovative writer with two major strengths: he wrote works of critical realism that attempted to re-create the essence of a whole society and satire that leaned toward the grotesque. He is thus closer to the French novel than to the German mainstream, which explains both critics’ aloofness (although even Gottfried Benn praised his technique) and his slow assimilation into the German literary canon. His artistic pedigree contains the names of Flaubert (for the concept of the outsider-artist), Balzac and Zola (for the combination of social realism with monomaniacal grotesque), and Rousseau (for the spirit of 1789 and republican democracy) rather than any German ancestors. By gradual shifts of attitude, he went from being the eldest son of a respected senator of a Hanseatic city to becoming an honored cultural figure of a communist state. Always his own man, he rarely followed a literary fashion, whereas in social satire, activist essay writing, and the historical novel, he was an innovator at different periods. He saw writing as an ethical business, a project that involved improving the world. Two of his novels are famous—Der Untertan (1918; translated as The Patrioteer, Little Superman, Man of Straw, and The Loyal Subject), for its panorama of the Wilhelminian middle class, and Professor Unrat (1905; also published as Der blaue Engel; translated as The Blue Angel), which was the basis of the film The Blue Angel.