After her father's death, sixteen-year-old Ottilie Faber must helm her family's global empire, defying patriarchal norms while navigating a high-stakes choice between two powerful suitors.
This page opens with the synopsis supplied by the programme’s makers. Everything after it is our own.
At the end of the 19th century, the carefree young life of Ottilie von Faber comes to an abrupt end. After the sudden death of her father Wilhelm, she becomes the sole heir and her grandfather Lothar Von Faber steers her into the family business, the famous pencil manufacturing Faber Corporation in Stein near Nuremberg.
It's extremely challenging for a young woman in a society and time dominated by men. Ottilie acquiesces, is eager to learn and shows talent, despite all odds.
She is a strong woman, far ahead of her time; but soon enough, two men compete for her hand - Alexander Graf zu Castell-Rüdenhausen and Philipp von Brand zu Neidstein, leaving Ottilie torn between her own feelings and the high expectations of her family.
The series opens in a girls' boarding school with a prank going wrong. There is shouting, a mistress demanding that someone come down at once, everyone sent to the washrooms, one girl told to stay behind. Then, without ceremony: "Ottilie, get dressed. An accident has happened. Your father."
Within minutes she is at a graveside, listening to condolences and then to something else. "I know this is not the right moment to talk about it, but it is the only one." Her inheritance arrives in that sentence, offered over her father's grave.
Ottilie Faber was sixteen when she became heir to the largest pencil manufacturer in the world. The series follows what that meant in Germany in 1900. The company had factories on several continents and the family name carried a title, and the heir to both was a girl whom the law and everybody around her considered incapable of running anything.
The pressure arrives immediately, in the form everyone around her finds reasonable. She must marry, and the choice of husband is the choice of who will actually control the business. There are two suitors and two futures, and the decision is presented to her as romance while everybody in the room understands that it is a merger.
The company is real and so was she, which is what lifts this above costume drama. Faber-Castell still exists, and the pencils are probably somewhere in your house. Ottilie married Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, which is where the double-barrelled name came from, and the marriage did not go as the family planned. The series does not soften what followed.
The production is handsome without being smug about it. There are Bavarian factories and drawing rooms, and the particular tension of a household in which the servants know more about the business than the heiress is permitted to know. Claudia Garde directs and co-wrote it with Asta Scheib, whose novel it draws on, and the perspective throughout is Ottilie's rather than the company's.
It sits alongside a strong recent run of German drama about industrial dynasties, and shares their interest in the moment when the nineteenth century's certainties began to fail. Here that moment is personal: a girl at a funeral being asked to make a decision she is not allowed to make.
Directed by Claudia Garde. In German with subtitles. Set in 1900.