At the Wolf’s Table

Rosella Postorino, translated by Leah Janeczko

Simon & Schuster

Otago Daily Times, March 30th 2019

In April 2014, Margot Wölk, who spent two and a half years as one of Hitler’s food tasters during WWII, spoke for the first time about her experiences. That the daughter of a man imprisoned for refusing to join the Nazi Party and who herself refused to join the League of German Girls (the female version of Hitler Youth) should spend her days protecting a man she considered a repugnant pig seems incomprehensible but, as she explained to Der Spiegel, she had no choice. Bombed out of Berlin and with her soldier husband lost and presumed dead, she lived with her mother-in-law in a village 2 miles from Hitler’s Eastern headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, and was transported to the nearby barracks every morning by SS soldiers. Here she and 14 other young women were forced to eat portions of Hitler’s every meal and closely observed for any signs of illness for a full hour before it was considered safe to serve to the Führer. It was not until the Soviet troops arrived that she was able to escape thanks to a German lieutenant who smuggled her aboard a Berlin-bound train. She later learns her fellow tasters were shot, and although she was eventually reunited with her husband, it was decades before she could bear to discuss her past.

Frau Wölk died before Italian writer and editor Rosella Postorino was able to speak to her, but At The Wolf’s Table (the first of her novels to be translated into English) is a creditable reimagining of her story. Postorino’s narrator, Rosa, is living with her missing husband’s parents in the village of Gross-Partsch after the bombing of Berlin. Food is scarce and getting scarcer, so when the SS demand her services she decides to eat and survive in the hope that eventually her husband will return. And so begins the strange and contradictory experience of the taster; every meal a feast in which a single mouthful could be lethal, a kind of torture that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of an anorexic, and which the women cope with by a variety of means, from developing a fervent passion for Hitler’s welfare to emotional disengagement to a desire for death. All the women carry their own secrets, and the strained relationships and shifting alliances add a threatening atmosphere that increases as the tide of the war turns against the German forces. For Rosa, already an outsider because of her urban upbringing and childlessness, the fact that she becomes the division’s Obersturmführer’s mistress is a source of intense guilt, not least because she takes pleasure in the physical and emotional intimacy they share. But it is a relationship that will eventually save her life.

Postorino strongly evokes the claustrophobic conditions in which the tasters must have lived, as well as the conflict between the desire for life and the cost of survival. Where it misses the mark a little is at an emotional level, particularly in relation to the food itself, although I doubt this will be noticed by anybody who has not had an eating disorder. It also takes a few liberties with the truth and elides over other details (the relationship with the SS officer is imaginary, the multiple rapes Margot endured at the hands of the Russians omitted, and her marriage endured for 34 years after the war), but these changes are perfectly reasonable in the context of the overall arc of what is, after all, a work of fiction. For anybody interested in the oft-ignored experience of women in war in general and this extraordinary moment of history in particular, I recommend reading this book and then searching out Frau Wölk’s own account online. It is truly a reminder of the endurance of the human spirit.