Finningen – Beneath the Onion Dome

Finningen is little more than a breath of a village, tiny, close to the Danube, still just within Bavaria before Württemberg begins. A threshold, a border—and yet so unmistakably itself.

At the “Hirsch,” the traveling sales staff gather, men with briefcases, women with laptops, trading business for plates. The meals are heavy on meat, but carefully crafted, steeped in the quiet assurance of tradition. Service comes from waiters and waitresses dressed in dirndl and regional garb—some local, some not—but together shaping a scene as if staged, though perfectly ordinary...