🔗 Share this article

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet split a settlement for more than four decades of time. Due to a quirk of geography, the fifty locals of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War tensions. They had the misfortune to span the Bavarian region, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Soviet sector, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a barricade. US troops nicknamed it Small Berlin.

Commemorating History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of residents started commemorating their heritage. The work is soon to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th annual commemoration of the fall of the German barrier, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was publicly opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition was not completely ready. Speaking to the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier said: “You were observers of an cruel division, which pulled households into pieces and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were observers of an inhuman separation, which ripped households apart and turned neighbours into strangers.”

Bygone Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Bavarian Kingdom and the Principality of Reuss, a princely house best known for giving all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the quirk did not stand in the path of the inhabitants socializing in the identical tavern, going to the identical church and placing their kids to the same educational institution.

Post-War Separation

Next arrived the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians put up wooden posts by the stream. For a annual period they took over the whole village, establishing their control center in a building on the western side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces convinced them to pull back back over the stream. For a time, villagers could still jump across, though as limitations tightened they were required to display identity papers, despite the fact that everyone understood who they were, and to return at evening.

Escalation of Frontier Restrictions

After that, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the frontier. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a wall was built, with mines, vehicle barriers and watchtowers. The residents could still observe each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side waving and shouting were banned. One woman was added to a Stasi monitoring list for responding “back at you” to a West German local who said her “good new year”.

Museum Establishment

I was told narratives like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has dedicated a large part of his occupational time developing it. Villagers were asked at an early stage about how how long a section structure they desired to preserve. They opted for a portion on the western perimeter, adjacent to where a villager was able to flee in the darkest hours with a scaling tool, following which the frontier was significantly fortified.

Conserved Buildings

2 watchtowers are conserved alongside a set of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic moments in the community’s past. As we move, Lebergen lists the rules: nobody could come within 5km of the border. Agricultural workers needed particular approval to tend to their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but under no circumstances both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Armed guards kept guard.

Wider Context

The boundary between West Germany and the German Democratic Republic extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to the south in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but over twice as many individuals (more than 300) died attempting to pass over it in provincial zones than in the big city. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95% of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their land. They neither supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director clarifies.

Tourism

For tourists, however, the hamlet became a type of pilgrimage. About 15,000 came to visit annually, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was given a tour by the national security head.

Twenty-five years after unification, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community like Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh curiosity.

Modern Changes

The opening of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, store, cinema room and large car park – is likely to