A young apprentice, Werner Wild, arrives in a small village in Bavaria to work in the bakery of Georg Baum.

Werner Wild becomes an apprentice to Baum, a small-town baker who maintains old-fashioned production methods to preserve quality. But the workings of competitive society and the pressures on the individual, i.e. the baker's syndicate versus Baum's traditionalist methods, proves too much for the latter, and he must conform.