🔗 Share this article

An brook so narrow you scarcely got your feet wet divided a community for over four decades of time. Because of a chance of topography, the half a hundred locals of Mödlareuth, a hamlet bordered by evergreen groves, pastures and breathtaking views, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in Western Germany, and the Thuringian region in the East, a border that was established first by a barrier and then by a wall. US troops dubbed it Little Berlin.

Memorialising the Past

A few months after their own wall was opened, and before their state had become one in 1990, a group of villagers started documenting their past. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall in Berlin, the Museum of German Division Mödlareuth will begin operations. It was formally inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in the first part of October, but the display wasn’t quite finished. Telling the residents who endured the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were bystanders of an inhuman separation, which ripped families into pieces and turned local residents into aliens.”

“You were bystanders of an cruel separation, which ripped relatives asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Past Context

Right from its establishment in 1810, the community spanned the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a noble lineage most renowned for assigning all its male members the name Heinrich and counting them in order by birth. As Steinmeier told the crowd, the oddity did not stand in the path of the residents gathering in the very same inn, visiting the same place of worship and enrolling their young ones to the same educational institution.

After the War Split

Next arrived the second world war. Immediately after they arrived, the Soviet forces put up wood stakes by the stream. For a annual period they took over the entire village, setting up their control center in a house on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The American soldiers persuaded them to pull back to the other side of the creek. For a while, villagers could continue to hop over, though as controls became stricter they were required to display identification, although everyone knew who they were, and to return at night.

Increase of Boundary Controls

Then, in 1952, came barbed wire and the official closing of the boundary. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a barrier was erected, with landmines, anti-tank obstacles and guard posts. The villagers could still see each other by ascending elevations, but on the east side signaling and calling out were forbidden. A local woman was placed on a East German secret police monitoring list for responding “same to you” to a West German local who greeted her “good new year”.

Heritage Site Development

I heard narratives like these by Robert Lebegern, the museum’s director, who has spent much of his working life developing it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how how long a section wall they desired to maintain. They opted for a stretch on the western edge, adjacent to where one of their own was able to get away in the middle of the night with a climbing device, following which the boundary was significantly reinforced.

Preserved Buildings

A pair of watchtowers are conserved alongside a set of tableaux depicting the most significant events in the hamlet’s chronicle. As we stroll, Robert Lebegern enumerates the rules: not a single person could approach 5km of the boundary. Agricultural workers needed special permission to tend to their crops; the spouse could use the combine harvester but not the two, in case they attempted to flee. Soldiers kept guard.

Larger Background

The frontier between Western Germany and the German Democratic Republic ran nearly 900 miles, from the Baltic Sea in the north to this location in the south. Berlin is commemorated and honored the most, but more than two times more individuals (well over 300) lost their lives seeking to cross it in countryside regions than in the big city. the director tells me that almost all of efforts to cross failed.

Hamlet Existence

The greater part of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who accommodated to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their land. They neither endorsed the East German authorities nor opposed it, Robert Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For sightseers, however, the village became a kind of destination. Approximately fifteen thousand came to visit annually, binoculars in possession, to look – and then swiftly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was shown around by the national security head.

25 years after merger, the TV show, a TV series about a imaginary community resembling Mödlareuth, led to new interest.

Present-Day Changes

The inauguration of the modern exhibition center – with a cafe, boutique, cinema room and sizable car park – is likely to