🔗 Share this article

A creek so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet separated a village for over four decades. By an accident of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a small village surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. United States military personnel dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their nation had unified again in 1990, a collection of local people started commemorating their heritage. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Telling the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were witnesses of an cruel division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbors into strangers.”

Historical Background

Right from its creation in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for bestowing all its male descendants the designation Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the residents gathering in the very same tavern, going to the identical church and placing their young ones to the very same learning center.

Following WWII Separation

Subsequently occurred the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russian troops installed wood stakes by the brook. For a year they seized the complete village, establishing their command in a dwelling on the western side, adorning it with a image of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans persuaded them to retreat across the stream. For a time, residents could still jump across, though as controls increased they were obliged to show identity papers, even though everyone understood who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Frontier Measures

After that, in 1952, came metal barriers and the official shutting of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a barrier was constructed, with landmines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were banned. A local woman was added to a GDR intelligence watch list for responding “likewise” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his occupational time developing it. Locals were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wanted to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian fringe, near where a local resident managed to get away in the darkest hours with a climbing device, after which the boundary was heavily reinforced.

Maintained Buildings

2 observation towers are conserved together with a set of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic dates in the community’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the restrictions: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Farmers required particular approval to care for their produce; the spouse could work the agricultural equipment but under no circumstances the two, lest they tried to flee. Armed guards were on duty.

Wider Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but over double the number persons (well over 300) lost their lives attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the metropolis. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s residents were farmers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the ambiguous area between 2 belief systems by staying low-profile and caring for their land. They neither supported the communist regime nor resisted it, Robert Lebegern states.

Visitors

For tourists, however, the settlement became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately fifteen thousand visited each year, optical devices in their hands, to look – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defence minister.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a television program about a made-up hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Modern Evolutions

The opening of the recently established museum – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and big vehicle area – is likely to