🔗 Share this article

A stream so shallow you hardly got your feet wet separated a community for over four decades worth of time. Because of a chance of geography, the half a hundred residents of Mödlareuth, a tiny settlement bordered by coniferous woods, pastures and breathtaking vistas, found themselves at the core of the cold war. They had the unfortunate circumstance to straddle Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany, and Thuringia in the Eastern part, a frontier that was demarcated first by a enclosure and then by a partition. American soldiers called it Small Berlin.

Memorialising History

A few months after their own barrier was torn down, and even before their state had reunified in 1990, a collection of villagers started memorialising their heritage. The effort is close to reach completion: on 9 November, the thirty-sixth commemoration of the demolition of the Wall in Berlin, the Deutsch-Deutsches Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially opened by the national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the show wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier stated: “You were observers of an cruel division, which tore families apart and turned neighbours into foreigners.”

“You were bystanders of an brutal split, which ripped families asunder and turned local residents into aliens.”

Historical Background

Right from its founding in 1810, the hamlet cut across the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Reuss Principality, a royal family best known for bestowing all its men the name Heinrich and labeling them consecutively by birth order. As Steinmeier related to the audience, the peculiarity never stood in the way of the residents socializing in the identical tavern, going to the identical church and sending their young ones to the very same educational institution.

Following WWII Split

Then came the global conflict. Immediately after they came, the Russians put up wood stakes by the brook. For a year they took over the complete community, establishing their command in a building on the Bavarian territory side, embellishing it with a picture of Stalin and a Soviet emblem. The Americans urged them to withdraw across the stream. For a time, villagers could continue to jump across, though as limitations became stricter they were obliged to present ID, despite the fact that everyone knew who they were, and to come back at night.

Intensification of Boundary Measures

Subsequently, in 1952, came wire fencing and the legal sealing of the border. In 1966, as in Berlin five years earlier, a wall was erected, with explosives, anti-tank obstacles and watchtowers. The residents could still see each other by scaling hills, but on the Soviet side gesturing and calling out were banned. One woman was put on a East German secret police surveillance list for responding “same to you” to a western local who wished her “happy new year”.

Museum Development

It was related to me accounts such as these by Robert Lebegern, the head of the institution, who has spent a large part of his professional career building it. Residents were asked in the initial phases about how what length of structure they desired to keep. They selected a stretch on the western edge, near where a local resident was able to get away in the darkest hours with a ladder, after which the frontier was substantially fortified.

Preserved Installations

A pair of watchtowers are preserved together with a set of displays illustrating the most dramatic moments in the hamlet’s past. As we stroll, the director details the restrictions: nobody could come within 5km of the frontier. Agricultural workers needed specific authorization to look after their fields; the husband or wife could operate the harvesting machine but never the pair, in case they sought to flee. Military personnel were on duty.

Broader Background

The boundary between the Federal Republic and the GDR extended 1,400km, from the northern sea in the north to this location in the southern region. Berlin is recalled and honored the most frequently, but in excess of two times more people (well over 300) lost their lives trying to pass over it in countryside regions than in the urban center. Robert Lebegern reminds me that 95 percent of attempts to flee failed.

Hamlet Daily Living

Most of Mödlareuth’s villagers were agricultural workers or artisans, who adjusted to dwelling in the ambiguous area between a pair of ideological spheres by avoiding attention and looking after their fields. They nor did they backed the socialist government nor fought it, Lebegern explains.

Tourism

For visitors, however, the village became a kind of destination. Roughly 15,000 visited annually, viewing tools in possession, to stare – and then quickly leave. In 1983, the United States leader, George Bush, was guided by the German defence minister.

25 years after reunification, the television series, a broadcast production about a fictional hamlet resembling Mödlareuth, resulted in fresh interest.

Modern Developments

The launch of the recently established museum – with a coffee shop, shop, film screening area and large vehicle area – is probable to