His classroom is a safe place, he says, in which to try and fail. “What’s nice here is that in contrast to the businesses, there’s no boss yelling, no guest waiting,” Wilsch would tell me later.

The first thing you see upon entering the Hotel Bareiss is a vase filled with red roses next to a bronze bust of the founder, the late Hermine Bareiss. An oil painting of her watches over the breakfast buffet. A room is named after her husband, Jakob, who died during World War II. The widowed Hermine founded the hotel in 1951, just as tourism in the Black Forest began to swell. Special trains from the industrial Ruhr Valley would disgorge oxygen-starved workers seeking a few days away from the pollution of the coal mines and steel mills. In 1966, as the hotel was still growing, Hermine sent her son Hermann, who studied cooking and worked in restaurants and hotels from London to Paris to Cairo, an ultimatum: “Move home,” she told him, “or I’m selling.”

Hermann did, and he eventually presided over the expansion of the hotel, which today has 230 beds and 260 full-time employees, along with a spa and sports facilities. When I visited him there on a recent Sunday afternoon, he recalled interviewing a young, awe-struck Claus-Peter Lumpp, who had never been inside a swank hotel. Lumpp caught Bareiss’s attention with stories about cooking with his grandmother. “He was exceptional already as a trainee,” Bareiss said. “He took joy in his work.”

Bareiss was wearing a gray suit and a purple tie with matching handkerchief and cuff links. His white hair was combed back; you might cast Christopher Plummer to play him in “The Bareiss Story.” Hermann’s son Hannes, a former student of Wilsch’s at the Kerschensteiner School, is already helping him run the business. Though the Hotel Bareiss doesn’t churn out widgets, it fits the definition of a mittelstand firm, one of the privately owned small- and medium-size companies that employ some two out of three German workers. The archaic sense of the term dates to medieval times, and essentially means the bourgeoisie, or the middle class between the aristocracy and the peasants. Today it refers to companies with anywhere from a dozen to a few hundred employees, and it evokes certain old-fashioned business virtues: an aversion to debt, a paternalistic sense of responsibility for employees and a focus on long-term planning.

One of the Finkbeiners at the Hotel Traube Tonbach described the attitude of these family-owned enterprises as “thinking in generations rather than quarters.” That means reinvestment, but because the families lack the resources of publicly traded hotel chains or new Emirati or Russian wealth, it also means picking your battles when making business plans. Hermann Bareiss told me that his family couldn’t afford to compete on what he called “hardware” — marble floors, gold fixtures, even artificial islands. Instead, it has chosen to compete in the realm of “software,” by which he meant his workers. The waiters I overheard that morning in the breakfast common room, switching from eloquent French to German to English and back, were turned out by the Kerschensteiner School for just that purpose.

The globalization of the travel industry has made the environment much more challenging for a hotel in Baiersbronn. There are no more trainloads full of steelworkers showing up in town; they can fly cheaply to Rome or London on easyJet or Ryanair instead. “We don’t have Alps or top winter-sports areas,” Bareiss said. “There’s no sea or beaches. Just a low mountain range.” As it has been for his mittelstand counterparts who make the tiny steering device rather than the car, the elevator motor rather than the skyscraper, specialization is necessary to stay at the forefront. The specialization, born of cutthroat competition with the Hotel Traube Tonbach, was gourmet cooking. Neither Wohlfahrt nor Lumpp was, so to speak, a free-agent signing out of Paris or Geneva; each was a product of the farm team, having worked his way up from apprentice to three-star chef. Now they are teaching the others their secrets.

The Bareiss and the Traube Tonbach have been locked in competition for more than six decades, but both sides seem to realize that the relationship is increasingly symbiotic. In an age of easy travel to so many exotic, more famous places, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking the trouble to get to Stuttgart and then drive more than an hour into the deepest corners of the Black Forest to get to one three-star restaurant. But someone might make the effort to visit two. With the Hotel Sackmann and the Hotel Dollenberg, a guest could come for a weekend and have two three-star dinners and two lunches at starred restaurants. The region has entered a virtuous cycle, where little restaurants can also get fresh fish delivered twice a day. Who knows where the next star might come from?