Professor Mamlock, a respected Jewish surgeon, is certain that the Weimar Republic will survive the political crisis of the early 1930s.

[4] Wolf also received the Silver Lotus Award in the II International Film Festival of India, held in New Delhi in November 1961.

[5] Daniela Berghahn considered the film as "paradigmatic" to DEFA's treatment of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis: by contrasting the apolitical, lethargic Mamlock to his son, Rolf, the passionate communist and resistance fighter, Wolf condemned the professor for failing to join the resistance and "utterly scandalously... Made him accountable for his own fate.

"[6] Anthony S. Coulson analyzed the picture as a belated metamorphosis of the title character, who ceases denying reality only when all is lost: "Mamlock's transformation is presented as a renunciation of his previous self...

But that insight comes too late to save him and his kind... His fate is attributed to his failure to fight... Wolf's film reaffirms the political pathos of his father's play.