Thomas Mann, Germany's most successful writer of prose fiction, was born in 1875 and died in 1955. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. These two stories, from Mann's middle period, concern major problems facing Germany between the wars: the first deals with the chaos of economic, social and moral values in the early twenties, and the second with the enslavement of a society by a fanatical and hypnotic dictator. In both pieces Mann's moral values are delicately pointed by his omnipresent irony.