I bought this novel on a whim in the supermarket (something I hardly ever do) because I was just in the mood to buy a book. It happens. Almost all of the novels on sale were sensational crime, romances, or what was once called 'chick lit' and this was the only one that appealed to me. The unusual setting and female protagonist of Her Hidden Life convinced me to buy it.
Magda Ritter is a young Berliner who ends up working as a 'taster' for Hitler - tasting all his food before it is served to him to see if it's poisoned. Fun times. From the start she states that she is not a supporter of Hitler, and she only ends up working for him because the Reichsbund is the only place where she can get a job, as she has no skills beyond basic housekeeping. Despite not being a Party member, Magda's well-connected Nazi uncle means that she is accepted for a job, though she has no idea what it is. One day she is picked up in car, and taken to the Berghof, one of Hitler's countryside retreats.
Here she works as a taster in the kitchen with several other women doing the same job. Her life among the Nazi elite is surprisingly humdrum, despite her random yet frequent chance meetings with Eva Braun and her attraction to SS Captain Karl Weber. This is something I noticed throughout the novel - Magda describes everything rather flatly and in a matter of fact way, even when she describes her feelings of love for Karl, and her feelings of hate for Hitler. Her hatred of Hitler only develops once Karl shows her photographs of killing squads and concentration camps; up until that point she expresses little feeling either way and even states that the plight of the Jewish people does not affect her as she doesn't know anyone who's Jewish, so she has never thought about. Magda admits she is naive, but that's an understatement.
Personally I think that while Magda is genuinely horrified by what she learns, most of the impetus for her hatred of Hitler comes from the fact that Karl hates him, and she loves Karl. He is a fictional character inserted into the 20th July plot to assassinate Hitler, and is alarmingly quick to tell Magda all about it once they get together. Magda then dedicates herself to his cause and develops fantasies of killing Hitler herself, to the point of obsession. From this point on that is all Magda thinks about, in a totally unbelievable way - she doesn't seem to accept how impossible it would be to murder him without being caught, and she doesn't depict how he would have always been surrounded by security as well as his most senior ministers and officers. She makes the situation all about her and her love for Karl.
One review I came across on GoodReads made the very good point that everything seems to happen to Magda in the course of the novel, and this sometimes makes it all a bit hard to believe. I have to agree that way too much is crammed into this novel, and its only 384 pages. Not only does Magda meet Hitler on more than one occasion, she also develops a tenuous friendship with Eva Braun, and just happens to meet Claus von Stauffenberg in the woods at the Wolf's Lair headquarters., which of course would happen in real life! Magda's experiences are like if you thought of all the key things a person could have gone through in the war, and then made them all happen to one person - working with the Reich elite, meeting Hitler, living in two of his residences, experiencing bombing in Berlin, losing a parent, being sent to a concentration camp (really), being in Berlin again and being raped by Russian soldiers, oh and then ending up in Hitler's bunker in April 1945. By that point I was incredulous.
I think when I realised that Magda was being sent to a camp did I give up believing in any of it. After the 20th July plot Karl flees and Magda is suspected of being involved. An anonymous Colonel seems to hate her for some reason, and so he accuses her and gets her shipped off to Bromberg-Ost. Luckily Magda only has to endure two days of work before she gets an office to believe that she worked for Hitler, and he gets her out, and she returns to her work at the Berghof. Lucky girl! If only it was that easy!
This section of the book really got to me. By this point Magda has heard about the camps, but still has very limited knowledge and doesn't know about the gas chambers. She describes her arrival and processing, and that she is told " All work was to be completed in the name of the Reich, for 'work makes you free'. " This is of course a heavy handed reference to the infamous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' emblazoned over the gate to Auschwitz and several other camps, and I found it in very poor taste and completely inappropriate and disrespectful; even if Magda is supposed to be ignorant of the use of the slogan. I found lots of small moments like this throughout the book that were just not appropriate. Like the fact that Magda is sent to a camp, but manages to get out by dropping the fact that she works for Hitler. While there she befriends two women, one of whom disappears during her stay, and another who is Jewish. She worries about them as she leaves but doesn't think about them again. Similarly she abandons her friend and her friend's family, after they have been raped by Russian soldiers in Berlin, so that she can seek the safety of Hitler's bunker - she had been invited but up until that point refused to go. Again she briefly worries about the women she has left behind, but then they disappear from her thoughts.
After reading a bit about the author V.S. Alexander, and particularly this blog post about writing the book, I realised that while he made a point of researching the historical material, he clearly has no idea how to write about these subjects. I'm no historian but I felt like even I could write about these things with a little more sensitivity and understanding. Alexander also states that he was inspired by the story of Margot Woelk, a woman who actually was a taster for Hitler, and decided to tell her story finally in her 90s. I read this article about Margot Woelk and realised just how much of her story is used in Her Hidden Life - but also how the point was missed, and the novel is made into some kind of sweeping romance about Magda fulfilling Karl's dream and then trying to redeem herself by telling her story. In fact, the back cover copy asks the reader to "lose yourself in this sweeping, heroic love story fraught with danger." Because that was what life was like during World War II.
Perhaps worst of all is Magda's time spent in Hitler's bunker at the end of the war. This setting is unique and nuanced, and should be handled carefully, and V.S. Alexander is frankly not qualified to do this. I cringed at the scenes where Magda encounters Magda Goebbels and her children - she even goes into the room after the children are dead. I don't what the author was thinking. He even portrays Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries who has written about her experiences, and makes it seem like she is dedicated to the Fuhrer. And then misspells her name when he credits her book at the end (a book which in part inspired the incredible film , which will give you a much more accurate look at life in the bunker).
The point is that many of the events depicted in this novel happened to real people, and so you can't just write about them as if they are juicy drama. Even though Magda experiences a camp and being raped, the writing never conveys how awful things are. After the failed assassination attempt she is arrested because the Colonel has a vendetta against her - and then when this is reversed she is able to return to her work in the Berghof. But in reality, as the wife of a conspirator she would have either been sent to a camp and kept there, or would have been executed immediately. Instead, in this novel, she just carries on working for Hitler. There is only a fleeting mention of Von Stauffenberg and the other conspirators, even though they would have been imprisoned and executed. My point is that even though Magda sees the camps firsthand, and sees how people are suffering in Berlin, the cold ruthlessness of Hitler and the Nazis is never really conveyed. Their obsessive hatred of Jewish people and all the other they persecuted is never shown. Instead the author uses them as pantomime villains for his dramatic heroine to dance around.
I have had a rant at my husband about this book and I think I could probably rant here even more - but I'm going to stop there for fear of driving away any readers who are still here... I hope I have managed to convey my issues with this book without just rambling.
If you do want to read novels about World War II, there are so many others that do a much better job than Her Hidden Life - novels that respect the tragedy and the people who suffered, who appropriately explore what really happened. This is not one of those novels unfortunately.
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Published as The Taster by Kensington Publishing in the US; and by Avon, an imprint of Harper Collins, in the UK. I read the Avon paperback, pictured above.
