🔗 Share this article

An brook so shallow you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for in excess of four decades of time. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, fields and stunning scenery, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to span Bavaria, in West Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a boundary that was established first by a fence and then by a barricade. American soldiers dubbed it Small Berlin.

Preserving Historical Events

Months after their own division was torn down, and even before their nation had become one in 1990, a group of residents started memorialising their past. The project is soon to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will inaugurate. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition was not completely finished. Addressing the locals who experienced the past era, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which pulled relatives asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman split, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into strangers.”

Past Context

Starting at its founding in 1810, the village spanned the Bavarian Kingdom and the Reuss Principality, a royal family most famous for assigning all its male members the designation Heinrich and numbering them in order by date of birth. As Steinmeier informed the crowd, the quirk did not stand in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the very same tavern, attending the same place of worship and enrolling their kids to the very same school.

Following WWII Split

Then came the global conflict. The moment they came, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the brook. For a annual period they occupied the entire village, setting up their control center in a house on the western side, embellishing it with a portrait of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to pull back across the stream. For a while, locals could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to display ID, although all knew who they were, and to return at evening.

Intensification of Border Restrictions

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the legal closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin half a decade before, a concrete structure was erected, with landmines, vehicle barriers and guard posts. The villagers could still view each other by scaling elevations, but on the eastern side gesturing and yelling were banned. One woman was added to a GDR intelligence surveillance list for responding “back at you” to a Bavarian villager who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I was told narratives including these tales by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent much of his working life creating it. Villagers were consulted at an early stage about how what length of structure they desired to keep. They chose a section on the Bavarian fringe, adjacent to where one of their own managed to flee in the dead of night with a scaling tool, subsequently the border was substantially reinforced.

Maintained Structures

A pair of guard towers are maintained in addition to a collection of exhibits illustrating the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s history. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: not a single person could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required special permission to tend to their fields; the partner could work the harvesting machine but never both, for fear that they sought to make a run for it. Military personnel kept guard.

Broader Perspective

The boundary between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic stretched nearly 900 miles, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but more than twice as many individuals (exceeding 300) were killed trying to traverse it in provincial zones than in the urban center. Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of escape attempts did not succeed.

Community Life

Most of Mödlareuth’s locals were farmers or craftsmen, who adjusted to living in the uncertain territory between two belief systems by avoiding attention and tending to their land. They did not supported the East German authorities nor fought it, the director explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a sort of site of interest. Roughly 15k visited every year, binoculars in hand, to gawp – and then quickly go away. In 1983, the US president, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

Twenty five years after unification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet similar to Mödlareuth, caused new attention.

Modern Developments

The inauguration of the recently established museum – with a restaurant, store, film screening area and large car park – is likely to