Edwin Makart

Edwin Makart is a film-industry producer whose discovery of Cornelia Battenberg sets her on a new professional course while binding that opportunity to his power over her. The novel gives him no independent interior account: he emerges through Cornelia’s decisions, Fabian’s warnings, and newspaper portrayals, making him at once a concrete industry figure and the human face of a system in which access to work can come at an intimate price.

Identity and Introduction

Makart first enters Cornelia’s story through an encounter in the corridor of her film company. He is visiting a competing company over distribution negotiations when he approaches her and says she is the type he has been looking for. He invites her to visit his office the next day, where the production manager and director will also be present, and suggests that she may be tried for his company’s next film. The offer is presented as a professional opening, but from the outset Makart controls the route to it: he identifies Cornelia as a desirable type and places her under consideration by the people who will decide her prospects.

That encounter quickly acquires material consequences. Cornelia asks Fabian for one hundred marks so she can buy a new jumper and hat before pursuing the opportunity. She acknowledges that he has almost no money, yet says she cannot let the chance pass. Fabian gives her his last hundred-mark note and hopes it will bring her luck. Makart does not appear in this exchange, but his offer is already shaping the choices and sacrifice of the couple: the imagined film career requires immediate expense, and Fabian finances Cornelia’s attempt to enter it.

The Offer and Its Price

Cornelia later writes to Fabian that she is to be featured in Makart’s next film and will sign the contract the following day. Makart has rented two rooms for her. She describes his manner as if he were discussing a hundredweight of briquettes, a comparison that makes the arrangement seem both casually practical and chillingly impersonal. She is fifty years old, she writes, and likens his appearance to that of an over-dressed wrestler in retirement. Her own conclusion is more disturbing: she feels as though she has sold herself to anatomy.

The letter makes clear that Cornelia understands the opportunity as a bargain rather than a straightforward artistic vocation. She expects Makart to occupy himself with her because that is what the situation requires, and recasts the compromise in terms of getting out of the mire: one must get dirty to escape it. She insists that she is leaving Fabian in order to remain with him, asking whether he will still love and embrace her despite the other man. Makart’s offer thus reaches beyond employment. It forces Cornelia and Fabian to confront whether economic survival and professional advancement can be separated from sexual and emotional submission.

Makart as a Figure of Power

When Cornelia and Fabian meet again, Fabian predicts that her career will make further demands on her. He tells her that success and ambition will grow together, while the danger of a fall increases as she rises; Makart, he fears, will not be the last man to obstruct her way and require her submission before she can pass. In Fabian’s account, Makart is not simply an unpleasant individual but the first instance of a recurring structure: a man controls access, and a woman is made to pay personally for crossing the threshold.

Fabian also warns that Makart is dangerous because he may be testing Cornelia’s actual character through the part he assigns her. Cornelia describes a role in which she must repeatedly transform herself at the demand of a pathological male character: she is to play an inexperienced girl, a sophisticated woman, a vulgar woman, and an empty-headed elegant creature. Only later, she says, will it become clear that she is unlike the person she thinks herself to be. Through a conflict provoked by the man’s commands, she will become what she supposedly always was: base and domineering, ultimately overcoming him against his will. Fabian asks whether the idea is Makart’s and suspects that, beyond directing the performance, Makart may be wagering privately on whether Cornelia will become like the role. Cornelia answers that this would not be a disaster; such men want to be run over, and the film will serve as a private course in life.

The parallel between the film’s coercive director and Makart is suggestive but remains a warning voiced by Fabian, not a confirmed account of Makart’s private intentions. The role’s repeated transformations nevertheless sharpen the novel’s concern with who controls a woman’s public identity. Makart’s power lies not only in offering Cornelia a job, but in being able to place her within a production whose fantasies make transformation itself an imposed condition.

Public Image and Narrative Significance

Later, after Labude’s death and the collapse of his own professional and personal attachments, Fabian sees Cornelia again in newspaper coverage. One headline announces that a lawyer has become a film star; the accompanying report identifies her as Dr. Cornelia Battenberg, discovered by the well-known film producer Edwin Makart and soon to begin shooting The Masks of Woman Z. A second paper shows Cornelia in an imposing summer fur coat at the wheel of a car Fabian recognizes, with a large, heavy man beside her. Its caption confirms that the man is Makart and presents Cornelia, formerly a trainee lawyer, as a new fashionable type: the intelligent German woman.

The newspaper language converts the complicated and painful arrangement into a success story. Cornelia is at once a professional discovery, a fashionable image, and evidence of Makart’s power to identify new talent. Fabian studies the photograph as if it were a grave. His own occupation is gone, his friend is dead, and Cornelia is in another man’s hands; the photograph therefore registers not simply her rise but the final severing of his ties to Berlin. He carefully cuts both photographs from the papers, keeps them in his notebook, and throws the newspapers away before leaving for his hometown. Makart’s significance is consequently bound to the novel’s contrast between private cost and public representation: the press celebrates the producer’s discovery and the actress’s novelty, while Fabian sees in the same images the loss of a relationship and the gulf between the promise of success and the price paid to reach it.