In the Zeitung Max Maass wrote that Dietrich played Lola as 

a little animal full of lasciviousness, common yet in her own way charming, a whore [Dirne], who shows some heart here and there yet comes out of a somewhat coarse milieu, a hussy [Luder], who lives in the present, seeking pleasure—but always on her own terms—and wants nothing more than to be what she is. One simply cannot be angry with this little creature with such an attractive appearance: that’s just how she is.60 

For Heinz Koch, the entire story and the film’s effect turned on Lola’s sexual prowess and her ability to undermine education, sensibility, caution, and emotional distance—in short, bourgeois masculinity. He claimed that in this film, it is the “maddening aura of a little blonde beast’s sex appeal that makes the great man into a little man.” Koch used vaguely Freudian language to describe the transformative power of Lola’s sexuality: in Rath “another self grows, one that sleeps deep in his soul and is set free by the stirring eroticism of a Lulu.” The tragedy at the heart of The Blue Angel, Koch wrote, was Rath’s final realization “that he has sacrificed his life for belief in a whore.”61 Unlike the liberation he experiences in Mann’s novel, Rath’s freedom through sexuality proves to be his undoing. In this way, interpretations by Göttingen critics amplified the misogyny inherent in Sternberg’s film.