🔗 Share this article

A brook so low you hardly got your feet wet split a community for over four decades worth of time. By an accident of landscape, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by pine forests, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the center of the Cold War tensions. They had the bad luck to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a wall. US troops called it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Several months after their own division was torn down, and prior to their country had unified again in 1990, a collection of residents started memorialising their history. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th commemoration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display was not completely ready. Addressing the locals who experienced the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which pulled families into pieces and turned neighbours into aliens.”

“You were observers of an brutal separation, which tore households apart and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Origins

Even at its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a royal family most renowned for bestowing all its male descendants the title Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk was never an obstacle in the way of the locals socializing in the very same pub, visiting the very same church and placing their kids to the same educational institution.

After the War Separation

Next arrived the second world war. The moment they arrived, the Russian troops erected timber poles by the creek. For a annual period they seized the entire village, establishing their command in a house on the Bavarian territory side, adorning it with a picture of Stalin and a red star. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back back over the brook. For a while, residents could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to present identity papers, although each person knew who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Frontier Controls

Then, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and observation points. The locals could still view each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side gesturing and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was added to a Stasi surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a West German resident who greeted her “happy new year”.

Exhibition Center Development

I was told narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated much of his working life building it. Villagers were consulted early on about how much barrier they wanted to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the west fringe, adjacent to where a local resident managed to flee in the dead of night with a ladder, following which the frontier was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Structures

Two observation towers are preserved alongside a collection of tableaux showing the most dramatic moments in the village’s chronicle. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Rural residents needed specific authorization to look after their crops; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but under no circumstances the pair, lest they sought to flee. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Background

The frontier between West Germany and the East Germany stretched nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to here in the southern region. Berlin is remembered and documented the most frequently, but in excess of double the number individuals (more than 300) died seeking to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern informs me that almost all of attempts to flee did not succeed.

Hamlet Existence

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or artisans, who adjusted to residing in the uncertain territory between a pair of political systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They nor did they endorsed the socialist government nor fought it, Robert Lebegern clarifies.

Interest

For sightseers, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. Approximately 15k visited every year, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then swiftly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after merger, Tannbach, a television program about a imaginary village similar to Mödlareuth, led to fresh interest.

Current Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, store, cinema room and big parking lot – is likely to