🔗 Share this article

A creek so narrow you barely got your feet wet split a community for over four decades. By an accident of geography, the half a hundred inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement encircled by evergreen groves, pastures and spectacular views, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to straddle the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating the Past

Months after their own division was breached, and prior to their state had unified again in 1990, a assembly of residents started memorialising their past. The effort is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the display was not entirely ready. Speaking to the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped relatives apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman division, which ripped households into pieces and turned neighbors into aliens.”

Past Background

Starting at its founding in 1810, the hamlet straddled the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male members the title Heinrich and counting them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the peculiarity was never an obstacle in the way of the locals socializing in the identical tavern, visiting the same religious building and placing their children to the identical learning center.

After the War Separation

Subsequently occurred the World War II. As soon as they arrived, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the brook. For a twelve months they took over the entire village, establishing their control center in a house on the western side, adorning it with a portrait of Stalin and a communist symbol. The Americans urged them to retreat to the other side of the brook. For a time, residents could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were required to present identity papers, even though each person knew who they were, and to go back at night.

Increase of Frontier Controls

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal closing of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a wall was erected, with explosives, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The villagers could still see each other by scaling elevations, but on the east side waving and yelling were banned. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “same to you” to a western villager who said her “good new year”.

Museum Development

I heard accounts including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his occupational time creating it. Residents were asked at an early stage about how much wall they wished to maintain. They selected a stretch on the Bavarian perimeter, adjacent to where a local resident managed to escape in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the boundary was substantially fortified.

Conserved Structures

A pair of guard towers are conserved alongside a collection of tableaux showing the most dramatic events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Lebergen details the restrictions: nobody could approach 5km of the border. Farmers had to obtain specific authorization to tend to their fields; the husband or wife could use the combine harvester but not the pair, lest they attempted to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Broader Context

The frontier between Western Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most, but more than two times more individuals (exceeding 300) died seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director tells me that almost all of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were farmers or craftsmen, who accommodated to living in the grey zone between a pair of ideological spheres by staying low-profile and caring for their farms. They nor did they backed the communist regime nor fought it, the director explains.

Visitors

For sightseers, however, the village became a type of destination. About 15,000 came to see annually, binoculars in their hands, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the American president, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty-five years after unification, the television series, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, led to fresh attention.

Current Evolutions

The opening of the new museum – with a restaurant, store, movie theater and big car park – is probable to