🔗 Share this article

An creek so shallow you barely got your feet wet divided a village for in excess of four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a small village bordered by coniferous woods, meadows and spectacular views, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the misfortune to straddle the Bavarian region, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Thuringian region in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a barrier and then by a barricade. American soldiers dubbed it Little Berlin.

Commemorating History

Months after their own wall was torn down, and before their state had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The effort is close to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Speaking to the locals who endured the past era, Steinmeier remarked: “You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which ripped families asunder and turned neighbors into strangers.”

“You were witnesses of an inhuman separation, which ripped families apart and turned local residents into foreigners.”

Bygone Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Royal Bavaria and the Principality of Reuss, a noble lineage most famous for assigning all its male descendants the name Heinrich and counting them in order by birth order. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity never stood in the way of the inhabitants drinking in the identical pub, attending the same place of worship and placing their kids to the very same educational institution.

After the War Split

Subsequently occurred the World War II. The moment they appeared, the Soviet forces erected wooden posts by the creek. For a annual period they took over the whole community, setting up their headquarters in a house on the Bavarian territory side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a communist symbol. The US forces persuaded them to pull back across the stream. For a time, residents could still jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were required to display identification, even though all understood who they were, and to return at after dark.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal shutting of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was built, with explosives, tank traps and observation points. The locals could still view each other by climbing elevations, but on the eastern side waving and yelling were forbidden. A female resident was put on a East German secret police watch list for replying “likewise” to a West German local who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I heard accounts including these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has devoted a significant portion of his working life developing it. Locals were polled at an early stage about how how long a section wall they wished to keep. They selected a portion on the western fringe, close to where a villager succeeded to flee in the middle of the night with a ladder, subsequently the boundary was substantially strengthened.

Maintained Installations

Two watchtowers are preserved alongside a collection of exhibits showing the most significant moments in the village’s history. As we move, Robert Lebegern lists the restrictions: no one could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers required specific authorization to care for their fields; the husband or wife could work the harvesting machine but not the two, lest they tried to escape. Armed guards stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The border between the Federal Republic and the GDR ran 1,400 kilometers, from the northern sea in the northern part to here in the southern region. Berlin is commemorated and honored the greatest, but in excess of double the number people (exceeding 300) were killed trying to traverse it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Lebegern tells me that 95 percent of efforts to cross did not succeed.

Community Life

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s locals were rural laborers or craftsmen, who adapted to residing in the grey zone between a pair of belief systems by avoiding attention and caring for their land. They did not backed the communist regime nor resisted it, Lebegern clarifies.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the hamlet became a type of site of interest. Approximately fifteen thousand came to visit every year, optical devices in hand, to stare – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the national security head.

Twenty five years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a imaginary village resembling Mödlareuth, caused renewed interest.

Modern Changes

The launch of the new museum – with a coffee shop, shop, movie theater and big car park – is probable to