Portraying the hardships a Jewish doctor named Hans Mamlock experiences under the Hitler regime, it is one of the earliest works dealing with Nazi antisemitism.

Wolf wrote Professor Mamlock shortly after the Reichstag Fire forced him to leave Germany for exile in France; he intended his work to be staged by Gustav von Wangenheim's theater group Truppe 1931.

[2] The playwright later told that he conceived the play on the very day after the Fire, when many of his friends called him, blaming him of being a communist and a sympathizer of those who set the Parliament aflame.

[3] While the character of Mamlock bears resemblance to the author himself – a Jewish doctor, married to a non-Jewish wife – there was a real man named Professor Hans-Jacques Mamlok (12 April 1875, Koschmin[4] – 11 November 1940, New York)[5][6] who was a prominent dentist in Germany before the Nazi takeover.

He emigrated to the United States, arriving three days after the opening of Professor Mamlock in New York, in April 1937; although he claimed that the play was based on his life,[7] it is unknown whether Wolf was inspired by him.

While these parts remained in the English and Hebrew editions, they were removed from the German one; Wolf's biographer Henning Müller believed it was due to pressure from officials of the Communist Party of Germany: an unsigned review of the play submitted to the party's exiled leadership in Moscow criticized it for "emphasizing the race struggle, while the class struggle remains in the background.

[11] Truppe 1931 was dissolved before it could produce Professor Mamlock,[12] and Wolf's piece was first performed in Yiddish, on the stage of the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater on 19 January 1934, under the title Der Gelbe Fleck ('The Yellow Badge')[a 1] and starring Alexander Granach;[13] André van Gyseghem and Marie Seton, who traveled from Moscow after securing the rights for an English-language production from Wolf, attended the performance.

[14] The next stage adaptation – directed by Leopold Lindtberg under the title Professor Mannheim – was in Hebrew, in Tel Aviv's Habima Theatre, and premiered on 25 July 1934[13] with Shimon Finkel in the main role.

[18] In Britain, the play was approved by the Lord Chamberlain Cromer, but its planned performance in the Westminster Theatre in 1935 did not take place, apparently due to silent pressure from the Foreign Office on the background of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War.

[21] The New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson wrote the production "reminds us" the persecution of Jews in Germany "cannot be effectively represented" in theater, as it "may be too great a topic for ordinary make-believe craftsmanship... And this is a theme not for conventional playmakers.

"[22] In Sweden, which banned explicit antifascist works due its neutrality and fears from the right-wing press' reaction, Professor Mamlock was the only such play allowed to be performed.

[23] Between 1935 and 1943, it was also staged in theaters in Tokyo, Moscow, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Johannesburg, Basel, Oslo, Shanghai, Chongqing and other cities, being viewed by millions.

[27] Wolf was awarded the National Prize of East Germany 2nd degree on 25 August 1949 for writing Professor Mamlock,[28] and the play was entered into the country's schools' curriculum.

[13] In 1961, the author's son Konrad Wolf directed a second film based on the play, made in East Germany, with Wolfgang Heinz as Mamlock.

When it was taught in East German schools, the teachers were instructed to stress out "the lame resistance to the rise of Hitler by the Weimar Republic and neutral, liberal-humanist professors such as Mamlock.

Wolf himself wrote that he aimed the play at "our country's twelve million Mamlocks – the little middle-class intellectuals," and claimed that the a-political, lethargic conduct of those not only allowed the Nazis to maintain power, but led them to it in the first place.