🔗 Share this article

An brook so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for more than four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by pine forests, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the bad luck to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the Soviet sector, a frontier that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

Several months after their own barrier was torn down, and before their nation had reunified in 1990, a collection of residents began commemorating their past. The project is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th annual remembrance of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially launched by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show was not entirely prepared. Addressing the villagers who experienced the old days, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped households asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

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

Historical Background

Even at its creation in 1810, the hamlet spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them sequentially by birth. As Steinmeier told the gathering, the quirk never stood in the manner of the inhabitants drinking in the same pub, attending the identical place of worship and sending their young ones to the very same school.

Post-War Split

Subsequently occurred the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Russian troops put up wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they took over the complete community, creating their headquarters in a building on the western side, decorating it with a image of Stalin and a communist symbol. The American soldiers convinced them to retreat across the stream. For a period, villagers could still hop over, though as limitations increased they were required to display identification, even though all knew who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could continue to observe each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence surveillance list for answering “same to you” to a West German resident who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Establishment

I heard narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has dedicated much of his working life developing it. Residents were consulted in the initial phases about how how long a section structure they wanted to keep. They chose a section on the west fringe, adjacent to where one of their own was able to escape in the darkest hours with a ladder, following which the frontier was significantly strengthened.

Conserved Structures

Two watchtowers are maintained together with a collection of displays illustrating the most impactful moments in the community’s past. As we move, the director details the rules: nobody could approach 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers had to obtain special permission to look after their produce; the husband or wife could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the two, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The border between Western Germany and the GDR stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and documented the most frequently, but over two times more individuals (exceeding 300) lost their lives trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern tells me that almost all of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They did not endorsed the communist regime nor opposed it, the director explains.

Visitors

For visitors, however, the village became a type of destination. Roughly fifteen thousand came to visit annually, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was given a tour by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a made-up hamlet like Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Present-Day Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and big vehicle area – is probable to