People didn't like to talk about old Morlok.

The sick and the lame, both human and animal, came to the Morlok, and he helped them.

They lined up in the simple room, then they were admitted to his treatment room.

There sat old Morlok, later his son, then his son again, at least five generations since the seventeenth century, and they all looked into a rock crystal, the mountain mirror, and saw in it the complaints of the patients.

The reigning Morlok would brew a concoction of meadowsweet to treat fevers and tie a live, wriggling trout to the belly of women with ailments.

Andrea Diener

Correspondent in the Main-Taunus district

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He was a faith healer, but in keeping with the Bible, for the Morlok feared god and devil and was always a member of the parish council.

"Doesn't he believe," he always said, you have to believe in God and in the success of the treatment, otherwise it won't work.

And the middle valleys believed in him, like half of the Black Forest believed in him up to Baden-Baden and even into Alsace.

No distance was too far for the desperate, day trips were made to reach the barren, rough valley on the Murg, which branches off at Baiersbronn and where the people did not live lavishly from wine and fruit growing as elsewhere, but poorly from the forest and a few trout ponds.

One wandered there, because old Morlok had a reputation like thunder.

The old junk should be demolished!

To this day, almost every Middle Valley has a story to tell about the Morlok that happened in their family.

Disappeared cows that the Morlok located, sick children that he saved, and it was always true, and they were always healed.

But you don't necessarily talk about it.

And when the last descendants died, when the farm was up for sale in 2003 and word got around that the hotelier Hermann Bareiss was going to buy it, half the village called.

What Herr Bareiss wanted with that old junk, that should be torn down, and anyway that's the Morloks' farm, it's better not to mess with them if things go well.

But then Sabine Rothfuss, architect, specialist for old farms and native of Central Valley, was also on the phone.

She knew the building

she had played with the Morloks since she was a child and had always dreamed at night of cleaning up this yard.

Now, many years later, the opportunity was there, and Bareiss couldn't resist so much predetermination.

Sabine Rothfuss, we can anticipate this much, cleaned up very thoroughly.

At that time, Hermann Bareiss was still running the day-to-day business of the Hotel Bareiss, which his mother had once founded as a spa hotel. Today he is the senior manager of the family hotel with a three-star restaurant, which belongs to the luxurious Relais & Châteaux association.

In addition, old farmsteads have always fascinated him, since his childhood.

He had some plans for the Morlokhof, another restaurant, guest rooms, for example, but he couldn't get over the monuments office and Sabine Rothfuss, who consistently restored the building to 1789.

"I lost every battle," he says, because he buried all the nice, profitable plans in the course of the construction work.

"Today I say: Thank God!"