The actor abandons his conscience to ingratiate himself with the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), keep his job and improve his social positions.

Mephisto was first published in 1936 by an Exilliteratur firm based in Amsterdam, while the author was in self-imposed exile from the Hitler regime.

Klaus Mann fled to exile in March 1933 to avoid political persecution by Hitler's regime.

His friend and publisher Fritz Helmut Landshoff made him a "relatively generous offer", as Mann wrote to his mother on 21 July 1935.

The author Hermann Kesten suggested that he write a novel of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, with the director of the state theatre Gustaf Gründgens as a subject matter.

Gründgens and Mann had both belonged in the early 1930s to a strongly left-wing theatre group that in January 1933 was touring Spain.

When Hitler became German Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the group was in Madrid, and Mann urged Gründgens not to return to Germany.

Klaus Mann was exiled in 1934; Gründgens became a renowned theater and movie director in Nazi Germany.

Although he attacked Gründgens in newspaper articles, Mann hesitated to use homosexuality as a theme in the novel as he himself was gay and decided to use "negroid masochism" as the main character's sexual preference.

Initially, Höfgen flees to Paris on receiving news of the Nazis' rise to power because of his communist past (learning from a friend that he is on a blacklist).

A former co-actress from Hamburg, Angelika Siebert, travels to Berlin to convince Lotte von Lindenthal, the girlfriend (and later wife) of a Luftwaffe general, to have him pardoned.

On returning to Berlin he quickly manages to win over Lotte and her general, and with his support has a wonderful career.

On obtaining the role of Mephisto in Faust Part One he realizes that he actually made a pact with evil (i.e. Nazism) and lost his humane values (even denouncing his mistress as "Black Venus").

There are situations where Höfgen tries to help his friends or tell the prime minister about concentration camp hardships, but he is always concerned not to lose his Nazi patrons.

To guarantee a good consequence[clarification needed] of his appearance, the Ministerpräsident delays his arrival to the party.

Höfgen currently works there as an actor and director, and is friends with Otto Ulrichs, as they incessantly plan a "revolutionary theatre."

Theophil Marder writes Nicoletta a telegram, saying that his feelings are hurt by his marriage; a wife must belong to her husband regardless of circumstances.

He leaves the Hamburger Künstlertheater after an argument with Hans Miklas, after he called Lotte Lindenthal a blonde cow.

Once the shooting in Spain is finished, Höfgen doesn't return to Germany, instead travelling to Paris, because he had been warned that he was on the Nazi blacklist.

Thanks to his patron, he organises the release of Otto Ulrichs, whom the Nazis had imprisoned in a concentration camp for his communist beliefs.

Höfgen takes over the position of Cäsar von Muck, who is named president of the "Dichterakademie" (Poetry Academy).

After Gründgens' death, his adopted son Peter Gorski sued the Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, then the publisher of Mephisto in West Germany, and obtained the prohibition of publication, confirmed by the appeal judges of the Federal Court of Justice in 1968.

The case, in which two judges wrote dissenting opinions, is considered a milestone in Germany's juridical history.

[2] French playwright Ariane Mnouchkine adapted the story for the stage and was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre from 1985 to 1986.

[3] In 2013, Helen Edmundson wrote a stage adaptation of Mephisto, which was produced at the Altonaer Theater in Hamburg.