The story of the tyrannical high school professor Raat, who falls into the clutches of the barefoot dancer Rosa Fröhlich and loses his middle-class existence through forbidden gambling, made Heinrich Mann famous overnight. However, it also brought him hatred, for: "although it may seem so, Professor Unrat is not a marginal phenomenon of bourgeois society, but rather its representative taken to the extreme." With his novel, Heinrich Mann struck a nerve with the bearers of the Wilhelminian Empire.