Das Brot des Bäckers (1976)

The film tells of the experiences and hardships of Werner, a baker’s apprentice learning the trade at the family-run Baum bakery. The bakery soon runs into trouble when a supermarket opens nearby and draws it into a price war. The apprentice’s first experiences with the opposite sex are also portrayed with a wink. After an escapade with the saleswoman Gisela nearly ends in disaster, he patches things up with his girlfriend, Margot. After some time, the baker finally resolves to take on the challenge of the supermarket. He automates his baking processes and buys new machines on credit. The apprentice, who has by now passed his journeyman’s examination, reluctantly takes a new job at a large commercial bakery. After a while, the master baker is working alone in the bakehouse. Financial success does not follow. When he realizes that he cannot compete with the supermarket in the long run, he breaks in there at night, ransacks the bread department, and lets the police arrest him. He turns down an offer from a police officer he knows to claim that he was drunk. His career as a baker can no longer be saved. The baker’s son finds a solution together with the other journeymen: the bakery specializes in products the supermarket does not offer—for example, organic breads and wholemeal bread. This makes it possible to keep the bakery going after all, and the former apprentice, who had left, can be hired again.