The landlord sits alone in his bar at nine in the evening.
The light from the screens comes from the surrounding houses;
the tennis club is still celebrating in the clubhouse, with beer from the supermarket.
The landlord closes his bar, for this evening and soon forever: When in the past few years the German Hotel and Restaurant Association in Hesse, the Dehoga, gave a speech on the situation in the industry in rural areas, one could hear bitter on the one hand.
But there is no shadow without light, and so every story of Untergang contains one that deals with departure, including the one that deals with the disappearance of the village inns.
However, to be effective, there are too few who want to or are able to tell them.
The competition for the 50 best village inns in Hesse has just shown this again:
It was 2015 when Dehoga sounded the alarm.
At that time, the number of country inns in Hesse had shrunk from 4,000 to 1,600 within eight years.
Since then, there have been a few fewer, currently there are talks of 800 companies.
The decline has many reasons.
Rural exodus is one thing, changing leisure and consumer behavior is another.
The low margins in the catering industry and the fact that many entrepreneurs live from hand to mouth in this industry, often without large reserves, do the rest.
Many hosts lacked the initiative to invest in premises, culinary offerings and overall marketing, and the longer it was like that, the less chance there was of anything changing.
Because this is the vicious circle of decay:
Fortunately, movement always has counter-movements, and so there are now a number of newly flourished concepts in rural areas, often realized by young people and despite the problems that the pandemic and shortage of skilled workers have in store.
As it was, it will never be again.
But it can get better than it is.