🔗 Share this article

An stream so narrow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for over four decades worth of time. By an accident of topography, the fifty inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement surrounded by coniferous woods, fields and spectacular scenery, found themselves at the heart of the Cold War conflict. They had the unfortunate circumstance to cross Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a boundary that was marked first by a enclosure and then by a partition. US troops nicknamed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising History

Several months after their own barrier was breached, and before their country had unified again in 1990, a group of villagers set about commemorating their past. The effort is about to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was officially inaugurated by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite prepared. Addressing the locals who lived through the former times, Steinmeier remarked: “You were observers of an cruel division, which pulled families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an inhuman division, which tore households asunder and turned neighbors into foreigners.”

Past Origins

Right from its founding in 1810, the village cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a princely house most famous for bestowing all its men the designation Heinrich and numbering them sequentially by date of birth. As Steinmeier told the audience, the oddity did not stand in the manner of the residents socializing in the same pub, going to the identical place of worship and sending their young ones to the same learning center.

After the War Division

Then came the World War II. Immediately after they arrived, the Russians installed wood stakes by the stream. For a twelve months they seized the complete village, setting up their headquarters in a dwelling on the Bavarian side, decorating it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The US forces urged them to withdraw to the other side of the brook. For a period, villagers could continue to jump across, though as controls became stricter they were obliged to show identification, although all knew who they were, and to return at after dark.

Intensification of Frontier Controls

Subsequently, in 1952, came barbed wire and the formal sealing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin previously in 1961, a concrete structure was constructed, with mines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The locals could continue to view each other by ascending slopes, but on the east side gesturing and shouting were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a GDR intelligence monitoring list for answering “likewise” to a western resident who said her “prosperous new year”.

Heritage Site Creation

I was told accounts like these incidents by Robert Lebegern, the director of the museum, who has spent a significant portion of his occupational time creating it. Villagers were polled at an early stage about how how long a section barrier they wished to keep. They opted for a stretch on the west perimeter, close to where a villager succeeded to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, subsequently the frontier was heavily reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

Two guard towers are maintained alongside a collection of tableaux depicting the most significant moments in the hamlet’s past. As we move, the director details the rules: not a single person could come within 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers required special permission to look after their produce; the spouse could operate the combine harvester but never both, lest they sought to escape. Military personnel stood watch.

Wider Perspective

The boundary between West Germany and the East Germany stretched 1,400km, from the northern sea in the northern part to the south in the south. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but over double the number people (more than 300) were killed attempting to cross it in provincial zones than in the big city. the director reminds me that 95% of attempts to flee were unsuccessful.

Hamlet Daily Living

The majority of Mödlareuth’s villagers were rural laborers or artisans, who adapted to dwelling in the uncertain territory between two ideological spheres by keeping their heads down and looking after their farms. They did not backed the East German authorities nor fought it, the director states.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of pilgrimage. About fifteen thousand visited annually, binoculars in their hands, to gawp – and then rapidly go away. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the German defense official.

Twenty five years after unification, Tannbach, a broadcast production about a made-up community like Mödlareuth, led to renewed attention.

Present-Day Developments

The launch of the modern exhibition center – with a restaurant, boutique, movie theater and big parking lot – is expected to