Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann What a downfall…or is it the reverse?

 Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann

What a downfall…or is it the reverse?

 

 

I am not sure how famous professor Unrat is. I knew about The Blue Angel, a film with Marlene Dietrich, but had never heard about the professor before this morning.

Sure, professor Rath is the lead male role in the film, but it is Dietrich who steals the show and makes everybody else in the movie forgettable.

The version I hear is an adaptation for Romanian National Radio, with George Constantin in the main role. If Marlene Dietrich captivates in the film, the opposite is true in the play- George Constantin as professor Rath is the actor who dominates the show.

The real name is Rath, but a word play makes for a rather insulting nickname: Unrat, which means something like garbage.

He is a severe teacher and doctor in sciences, at the start of the play. His involution makes the listener draw some lessons about the downfall of the strong and self-assured.

In class, the professor finds some lurid verses, addressed to a woman named Lola Lola. The mention of a breast and the provocative appearance of the material infuriate the conservative teacher.

Conservative to begin with, but rather liberal as we advance through the play.

Professor Unrat decides to find the singer Lola Lola and starts a little investigation in town. It is no easy matter, in the first stages, for people were looking down on the profession, and the shoe maker, when asked about a singer says:

-          I have nothing to do with that sort

Blue Angel is the bar where Lola Lola and some others sing. And the students that the teacher is looking for are there. They escape through a window and the Unrat, after stumbling upon tables and spilling customers ‘drinks, manages to meet the infamous Lola.

She is a success on stage and is envied by the other performers, who are rushed off stage by an audience eager to listen to Lola.

In the first place, there is a severe scolding from the professor, something like this:

-          Miss Lola, you should leave my students alone

-          I do not make them do anything

-          You have a bad influence on them

-          You think?

-          I will call the police!

After an exchange of threats and protestations, peace seems to descend. One performer says, more or less:

-          We are in the same business, professor

-          How?

-          Art and science are the same devil

The evolution may seem predictable to some readers and come as a shock to others. It reminds me of Rain, by Somerset Maugham, where a priest is moralizing a “loose woman” only to find that his distaste turns into a very different feeling.

The professor Rath drinks wine with Lola then buys champagne, at the bequest of her colleagues and becomes a frequent visitor of the very place he had despised.

The moralist thunders about values and respectability, but gradually descends on the path of perdition, as fundamentalists would see it.

He falls in love with Lola, who has a penchant for older men and is tired by young students, who try to get revenge, when she is turning them down.

Just in case you have reached so far, I will not spoil the surprises that the play has to offer. From where I stand, the finale is intriguing and thought provoking.

I liked the Professor Unrat, translated as The Blue Angel, in great part thanks to the performance of George Constantin, who transforms a play to which I would not give too much attention, into a memorable experience.