I WAS HITLER'S BAKER

In Peterson’s (The Girl From Copenhagen, 2018) historical novel, a childhood acquaintance of Adolf Hitler later becomes a baker with a lucrative but ultimately dangerous business strategy. 

When Josef Putkamer first meets Hitler as a child in 1900, they’re classmates in Leonding, Austria, and the latter already bears the marks of a future tyrant. He intimidates Putkamer into parting with his lunch money daily, and, eventually, Putkamer placates him with pastries purloined from his baker father’s shop. Hitler is “incredibly selfish” and “generally fearless,” Putkamer notes in the first-person narration, as well as a cruel prankster who’s incapable of empathy. He’s also a staunch admirer of former German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and already believes that he has a great destiny. The two boys eventually part ways, and Putkamer, years later, takes over his father’s bakery and opens another in Munich. There, he’s reunited with Hitler, who’s become an angry political agitator, trying to make a name for himself. Putkamer, at the request of his new pastry chef and wife, Freya Krause, caters to the growing Nazi market as a business strategy—the customers “were suckers for anything with a swastika on it,” he notes. By 1935, his business is so successful that he opens a third store in Berlin, becoming the distinguished owner of multiple “Nazi-themed bakeries.” Peterson imaginatively conjures the evolution of Hitler’s maniacal psyche, showing the lust for power that’s evident from his earliest years. But the protagonist, Putkamer, is the book’s most intriguing aspect—a man who proclaims himself apolitical yet pins his business’s hopes on the ascendancy of a murderous political party. The character also marries an unrepentant admirer of all things Nazi; after one lovemaking session, she’s thrilled that they “made love on the same bed upon which Ernst Röhm and his young men pleasured themselves.” The narrator’s indifference to the tumultuous politics of the times—artfully depicted by Peterson— rises to the level of dark absurdity. The author successfully explores what German American philosopher Hannah Arendt famously called the “banality of evil”—effectively showing how bureaucrats and businessmen can contribute, without ideological fervor, to political oppression. 

A dramatically and philosophically enthralling tale.