Baroness Hayter reviews ‘The Tasters’

‘The Tasters’ | Image by: Luca Zontini /Busch Media

3 min read1 hr

As our TV screens fill with images of war, it was perhaps not the right time for me personally to preview The Tasters. Though ostensibly telling the story of seven young East Prussian women coerced into being food tasters for Adolf Hitler in 1943, it is actually a tense portrayal of the cost of war for both its victims and its perpetrators.

At one level, it’s a moving tale of love, hurt, betrayal and loss in a small, deprived landscape where the toll of war on ordinary family members is achingly deep.

On another, it’s about friendship and courage surviving amid coercion, suspicion and fear. Reminiscent of the plight of the ‘comfort women’ of Japan, these seven local women are conscripted into sampling all of the food on Hitler’s vegetarian-only menu before he eats it, to ensure he’s not poisoned. This all happens in a cauldron of supressed violence. The women begin to rely on and support each other, sharing risks and hidden secrets.

The tension holds throughout, with longing for missing husbands, food and normality, and with distrust and threat lurking in every scene

The film draws on Italian author Rosella Postorino’s 2018 novel At the Wolf’s Table – a fictionalised account based on the (unsubstantiated) claims of the late Margot Wölk – the veracity of which have been questioned by some German historians. It tells the story a group of women kept at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ (Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters), only one of whom survives the war to tell the tale.

Their story is the frame on which the Italian director Silvio Soldini tells a wider story of the struggles endured by German women as their men fight for their country. They are daughters, mothers, sisters and widows. On the one hand they represent the universal plight of women in a conflict in which they’ve had little say in its beginning, its end or how it unfolds; on the other, the film also touches on the moral ambiguity of when the struggle to survive becomes complicity.

This German language film is an Italian, Belgian and Swiss co-production, starring the scene-stealing, entrancing Elisa Schlott, with fellow German actor Max Riemelt playing the troubled SS lieutenant Albert Ziegler. The pair form an unlikely and risky alliance.

It doesn’t make for easy viewing as the tension holds throughout, with longing for missing husbands, food and normality, and with distrust and threat lurking in every scene. Its somewhat languid, sombre, atmospheric cinematography and taut dialogue are also engaging and slightly hypnotic. 

Whilst the film is a jarring personal reminder that these events took place only a short time before I was born (in Germany as it happens), it is reassuring to acknowledge that for all the awfulness of the events portrayed, Germany is now a thriving democracy, a strong ally of Britain, and a country realistic about the traumas of conflict but also the harms which can necessitate intervention. But don’t watch by yourself late at night as I did…

Baroness Hayter is a Labour peer

The Tasters

Directed by: Silvio Soldini

Venue: Selected cinemas